{"id":76545,"date":"2024-03-26T03:00:19","date_gmt":"2024-03-26T10:00:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.jamasoftware.com\/?p=76545"},"modified":"2024-03-25T10:41:48","modified_gmt":"2024-03-25T17:41:48","slug":"cybersecurity-concerns-for-manufacturers-in-2024","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jamasoftware.com\/legacy\/blog\/cybersecurity-concerns-for-manufacturers-in-2024\/","title":{"rendered":"Cybersecurity Concerns for Manufacturers in 2024"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Jama Software is always looking for news that will benefit and inform our industry partners. As such, we\u2019ve curated a series of customer and industry spotlight articles that we found insightful. In this blog post, we share an article,<\/a> sourced from IndustryWeek<\/a>, titled \u201cCybersecurity Concerns for Manufacturers in 2024\u201d \u2013 written by Dennis Scimeca<\/a> and originally published on January 15, 2024.<\/p><\/div>\n

Cybersecurity Concerns for Manufacturers in 2024<\/h2>\n

The more networked and data-centric manufacturing becomes, the more manufacturing leaders ought not consider cybersecurity as something that only concerns the IT department. New SEC reporting rules<\/a> and high-profile hacks against manufacturers with multimillion-dollar price tags<\/a> last year curtly demonstrate the point.<\/p>\n

Org-wide planning provides the best defense against cyberattack. Knowing what to expect in 2024 and taking proactive steps<\/a> against threat actors may make the difference between publicly admitting your company wasn\u2019t prepared and accordingly losing money and prestige, or not.<\/p>\n

Educate Your Workforce<\/h3>\n

Human beings decidedly provide the weak links in cybersecurity hygiene. Erecting digital gates and demanding identification checks do nothing if your employees hand over virtual ID cards without realizing they\u2019ve done it.<\/p>\n

\u201cCyberattacks in 2024 will look EXACTLY as they have in the previous three-to-four decades. Most will involve social engineering. About a third will involve unpatched software or firmware. About 10-to20 percent will involve weak password issues. Those three root attack methods will make up 99% of the attacks against most people and organizations,\u201d says Roger Grimes, data-driven defense evangelist at KnowBe4.<\/p>\n

\u201cTo defend against them, aggressively focus more on preventing social engineering,\u201d he adds. \u201cThis means deploying technical cyber defenses that prevent social engineering from reaching users. Because technical defenses will never be perfect, you must train your users in how to recognize the signs of social engineering, how to defeat it, and how to appropriately report it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Recognize OT as an Attack Surface<\/h3>\n

In addition to the best practice, general cybersecurity hygiene pertinent to any business, manufacturers must contend with the vulnerability of their operational technology (OT). Every networked machine on the floor provides a possible avenue for intrusion into your larger IT system.<\/p>\n

\u201cLack of segmentation between IT and OT environments and lack of awareness into these systems provide key avenues for threat actors to cause impacts and outages. Organizations need to mitigate as much risk as possible by focusing on quality backups of not just corporate data, but OT configurations and data needed to restore systems, all with secure encryption,\u201d says Tom Marsland, VP of technology at Cloud Range.<\/p>\n

The question of whether to place responsibility for OT cybersecurity within the IT department, or instead to spin out a separate OT group, is not just organizational says Marty Edwards, Deputy CTO for OT\/IoT at Tenable.<\/p>\n

\u201cCFOs and CISOs will look at the cost-benefit analysis of investing in IT vs. OT security, and they\u2019ll see there\u2019s more benefit to investing in OT than IT in 2024 that at any point until now. For every $1 spent in OT, organizations get more than what they get with $1 in IT security investment. OT investments buy down your risk much more so than IT security,\u201d Edwards says.<\/p>\n

Amir Hirsh, head of Tenable OT Security, wants manufacturers to acknowledge how green initiatives that involve OT monitoring can increase cybersecurity risks.<\/p>\n

\u201cWith the growing attention and increase of costs and penalties around energy usage and carbon emissions, companies will turn to smarter management of their operations, which will increase OT-based sensor deployment and controls. We\u2019ll see more and more IoT and OT devices in smart buildings, factory management and building management systems. These trends will expose companies to further risk as they will expand their attack surface and often connect these environments to the internet,\u201d Hirsh says.<\/p>\n

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AI: Cybersecurity, Friend and Foe<\/h3>\n

Integrating AI into OT carries specific risks and benefits, says Chaz Lever, senior director of security research at Devo.<\/p>\n

\u201cAs we move into 2024, it\u2019s imperative for manufacturers to place a strong emphasis on the security of their AI implementations. AI represents a new attack surface, and in the case of OT, attacks on AI systems could result in impacts that cross the cyber-physical barrier. Great care needs to be undertaken to make sure AI interacting with OT systems guards against the myriad of potential AI threats (e.g., prompt injection, adversarial examples, model inversion, etc.),\u201d Lever says.<\/p>\n

AI also has the potential to help protect OT systems through its integration into security operations. AI\u2019s capability of sifting through massive quantities of security data and isolating high-priority alerts is becoming increasingly sophisticated. This enables AI to augment the capabilities of analysts in monitoring systems, conducting forensic investigations and proactive threat hunting,\u201d Lever adds.<\/p>\n

Kurt Markley, managing director for the Americas at Apricorn, points out that bad actors may also use AI to create ransomware tools, the most popular avenues for attack against manufacturers. Generative AI-powered ransomware attacks doubled against healthcare, municipalities and education orgs between August 2022 and July 2023, says Markley.<\/p>\n

Manufacturers could be next on the list. Protecting critical data mitigates the risk.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhile almost all IT leaders say they factor in data backups as part of their cyber security strategies, research we conducted [in 2023] found that only one-in-four follow a best practice called the 3-2-1 rule, in which they keep three copies of data on two different formats, one of which is stored offsite and encrypted. Furthermore, this same research found that more than half of respondents kept their backups for 120 days or less, far shorter than the average 287 days it takes to detect a breach,\u201d says Markley.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe likelihood that AI-driven ransomware will impact far-higher numbers of organizations, it will be more important than ever in 2024 that organizations have a strong cyber resiliency plan in place that relies on two things: encryption of data and storage of it for an appropriate amount of time. IT leaders need to embrace the 3-2-1 rule and must encrypt their own data before bad actors steal it and encrypt it against them,\u201d Markley adds.<\/p>\n

Beware the Cloud?<\/h3>\n

Touted for many years for scalable data architectures and cost-effectiveness compared to on-premises infrastructures, manufacturers like Nissan<\/a> have learned the cloud also carries cybersecurity risks. Don\u2019t think that offloading data to the cloud means offloading related cybersecurity concerns to your cloud technology provider.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s estimated that 30% of cloud data assets contain sensitive information. All that data makes the cloud a juicy target and we expect that 2024 will continue to show that bad actors are cunning, clever, and hard-working when it comes to pursuing data. The industry has seen triple the number of hacking groups attacking the cloud, with high-profile successes against VMware servers and the U.S. Pentagon taking place [in 2023],\u201d Markley says.<\/p>\n

As IT teams spend more on moving and storing data in the cloud, organizations must spend the next 12-to-24 months auditing, categorizing and storing it accordingly. They need to gain deeper visibility into what data they have stored in the cloud, how data relates to each other, and if it is still meaningful to the operations of the organization. In doing so, they are advised to create specific security policies about how, where and for how long they store their data. These policies, when actively enforced, will help organizations better protect their most valuable asset \u2013 their data,\u201d he adds.<\/p>\n

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Think Forward for Best Protection<\/h3>\n

Effective cybersecurity\u2019s layered, multi-faceted structure and accompanying price tag make it attractive for manufacturers to deprioritize, but the sooner they get on board with proper cybersecurity hygiene the sooner they can stop worrying about ever cutting a fat ransomware demand check\u2026or what they\u2019re going to tell the SEC in the annual 10-K filing.<\/p>\n

\u201cUltimately, it\u2019s crucial for security teams to collaborate closely with their organizational leadership to find an optimal equilibrium between security, user convenience, and technological innovation,\u201d says Lever.<\/p>\n

Grimes provides a checklist for basic, first cybersecurity steps:<\/p>\n