Ransomware attacks have increased year over year, leading to significant financial loss for several organizations worldwide. Comparitech has released a detailed report on ransomware attacks targeting the manufacturing sector and found that it suffered a loss of around $46 billion in downtime since 2018 due to ransomware attacks.
Ransomware in Manufacturing
The report was consolidated after analyzing attacks against 478 manufacturing companies between 2018 and 2023.
- These attacks compromised more than 7.5 million individual records, with attackers demanding a ransom between $5,000 and $50 million.
- Only four companies were known to have paid the ransom, with two of them confirmed paying $750,000.
- in 2022, The average downtime varied from several hours to 76 days, with the time increasing from 6.4 days in 2021 to 12.2 days.
- Egregor and Conti were the most dominant ransomware strains in 2020 and 2021, with LockBit dominating in 2022 and 2023.
2023 attack trend
- So far 56 manufacturing organizations have been targeted in ransomware attacks, this year.
- Around 5.9 million records were confirmed to have been breached in ransomware attacks between January and July 2023. A vast amount of this data was stolen by Money Message ransomware from a pharmaceutical company, PharMerica, in May.
Most impacted organizations
The transportation/automotive sector faced the highest number of attacks (92), followed by electronics/appliances manufacturers (80).
- One such attack was reported recently when Brunswick Corporation, a leading boat manufacturer, lost around $85 million in downtime that took the firm to restore its systems.
- Austria witnessed the highest number of attacks against the manufacturing sector, with a financial loss of $834.3 million.
- This was followed by organizations in Australia ($472.74 million), Belgium ($345.5 million), and Brazil ($330 million).
The bottom line
Downtime in manufacturing companies due to cyberattacks has had major consequences in the past. Therefore, it is advised to have proper backup and deploy the right defensive measures at the endpoints to nip the threat in the bud. One of these measures involves using a robust TIP to collect and enrich your threat intel data against such threats for quick analysis and accordingly prepare for remediation steps.
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