The manufacturing sector is emerging as one of the most exposed sectors to ransomware attacks, according to the report “State of Ransomware in Manufacturing and Production 2023” by Sophos.
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The report revealed that in more than two thirds, or 68%, of ransomware attacks against this sector, the attackers successfully encrypted the data.
This is the highest encryption rate reported for the sector in the past three years and is consistent with a broader, cross-sector trend where attackers are more frequently successful in encrypting data.
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However, unlike other sectors, the percentage of manufacturing organizations that used backup copies to recover data has increased. 73% of the manufacturing organizations that participated in the survey used backup copies this year, compared to 58% the previous year.
Despite this increase, the sector still has one of the lowest data recovery rates.
The “State of Ransomware 2023” survey surveyed 3,000 IT and cybersecurity leaders in organizations with 100 to 5,000 employees, including 363 organizations in the manufacturing and production sector across 14 countries in the Americas, EMEA, and Asia-Pacific.
Sophos Chief Technology Officer John Shier says that during the review period, the majority of businesses used backups as their primary recovery mechanism because it promotes faster recovery.
Furthermore, despite the increasing use of backups, construction and manufacturing reported longer recovery times this year.
In 2022, 67% of construction organizations recovered within one week, while 33% recovered in more than one week.
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Last year, only 55% of the construction organizations that participated in the survey recovered within one week.
“Longer recovery times in the construction sector are a worrying development – the construction sector consistently ranks at the top of organizations needing help recovering from attacks. This prolonged recovery is negatively impacting IT teams, where 69 percent report that dealing with security incidents consumes a lot of time and 66 percent are unable to work on other projects.”
Source information: the-star.co.ke
