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Manufacturers are at a high risk of attack from threat actors, a BlackBerry survey found, as IT leaders are often underprepared and working with outdated infrastructure. That’s changing, though, as cybersecurity becomes more of a priority for teams across the industry.
“Across the sector, the concerns about cybersecurity were growing, leading organizations to invest more in defending themselves from threats,” Shishir Singh, EVP and CTO of BlackBerry’s cybersecurity business unit, told IT Brew in a recent interview on the survey.
Topline info. BlackBerry asked around 1,500 senior IT leaders in the manufacturing sector about their cybersecurity preparedness and fears. Respondents were from the US, UK, Germany, Japan, Australia, and Canada, representing companies varying in size from 100 to 17,500 employees with an annual revenue of nearly $277 million.
Singh, who joined BlackBerry in January 2022, told IT Brew that the findings revealed an industry with some work to do.
“Almost three-quarters of the organizations have either been targeted by a cyberattack or found themselves to be vulnerable to cybersecurity threats,” Singh said. “This includes incidents arising from employees.”
The threats include ransomware, which has continued to be a major concern for companies and organizations around the world in almost every sector and industry—and increasingly offered as something of a software-as-a-service, Singh told IT Brew.
Need for speed. Older, larger companies with outdated equipment in use on many older factory floors are at a higher risk of attack in part because they are more attractive targets to nation-state actors and affiliates who have interests in disruption tactics.
Smaller, newer companies, on the other hand, have the advantage of speed and an easier transition period for their relatively smaller infrastructure needs. Not only are they more ready to make the switch, smaller companies are less susceptible to being targeted by nation-state actors, in Singh’s opinion.
“They are a little bit more on the modern assets and modern tools and things like that, they’re a little bit more aware,” Singh said. “They’re not dealing with a lot of the legacy infrastructure support—that’s my personal read on it based on some of the survey data.”