SECURITY SYSTEMS

with modernisation ,” Singh added . “ With aged and isolated equipment , the truth is that it is difficult to put protection into these environments . But not impossible and with a lightweight footprint and OS agnostic solution , protection can be extended to every eligible endpoint to mitigate this exposure across manufacturing infrastructure .”

The survey of 250 manufacturing IT decision-makers across the UK revealed that while many ( 35 %) anticipate an elevated risk of cyberattack in 2023 , almost three-quarters of respondents ( 69 %) fear nation-state attacks on the sector and 64 % are concerned about foreign governments spying on their facilities . At the same time , 69 % say OT infrastructure is difficult to defend .

“ Global manufacturers are headed for stormy waters as nation states up the ante on surveillance and the risk of a cyber incident is high – and rising – yet the industry is hampered by a threat surface that is largely antiquated and difficult to defend ,” said Shishir Singh , Chief Technology Officer , Cybersecurity at BlackBerry . “ Over the last year , three cybersecurity trends significantly impacted OT and IoT infrastructure : ransomware attacks , phishing attacks and third-party software vulnerabilities .

“ Cybersecurity has become a significant barrier to progress and managers shackled by ageing hardware and outdated operating systems are challenged to unify security across old and new to forge ahead

Almost three-quarters of respondents ( 69 %) fear nation-state attacks on the sector .

BlackBerry ’ s research revealed that manufacturing IT decision-makers around the world – across the US , Canada , UK , Germany , Japan and Australia – are predominantly concerned with malicious malware attacks ( 56 %), followed by phishing attacks ( 49 %) and unauthorised access by non-malicious insiders ( 45 %). This may reflect that manufacturers are concerned with nation-state threats that seek to create disruption and unplanned downtime , rather than extort ransom payments .

The research also showed that 65 % of manufacturing IT decision-makers believe the cost of a cyberbreach to be US $ 250,000 or less . Almost half ( 47 %) of respondents estimate that business downtime would account for just one-tenth of that cost , while 63 % point to cyber incidents resulting in a loss of customers or impacting supplier relationships ( 59 %). With unplanned downtime costs soaring due to global inflation and production lines running at a higher capacity , this contrasts with a recent report estimating the true average cost of a data breach in the industrial sector to be more than 16x higher at US $ 4.24M .

The Tolly Group , a world-renowned independent testing lab , recently released comparative test findings verifying that BlackBerry ’ s Artificial Intelligence ( AI ) based endpoint protection platform ( EPP ), outperforms the competition . �

58 www . intelligentbuild . tech