Netwrix 2022 Cloud Security Report: Manufacturers Hit Harder by Account Compromise and Supply Chain Attacks
Netwrix data on manufacturing shows 51% of firms saw a cloud attack in a year, with account compromise and supply chain attacks above other sectors.
Manufacturers were more exposed to account compromise and supply chain attacks in the cloud than companies in other sectors, according to additional findings Netwrix has released from its global 2022 Cloud Security Report. The cybersecurity vendor broke out the manufacturing data from the wider survey.
Half of the manufacturing companies surveyed (51%) had their cloud infrastructure attacked during the previous 12 months. Phishing was the attack type they reported most often, cited by 73%.
Account compromise affected 38% of manufacturing respondents at least once over the year, against an average of 31% across all other industries. Supply chain compromise showed a similar gap: 19% of manufacturers had experienced it, compared with 15% of respondents in other verticals.
Dirk Schrader, VP of security research at Netwrix, linked the account compromise figures to why manufacturers move to the cloud in the first place. Supporting remote workers was the most common reason, given by 57% of respondents. In his view, business pressure to give many employees remote access quickly widens the attack surface and may be the underlying cause of the higher rate of account compromise. He advised manufacturers to focus more on identity management, particularly for privileged accounts, and singled out a zero standing privilege approach, in which accounts are created only on request and removed as soon as the task is done.
The sector is also moving to the cloud more slowly than others. On average 41% of workloads are already in the cloud, while manufacturers have shifted only 35%. Budget is the main brake, named by 45% of manufacturing respondents compared with 35% overall.
Manufacturers worry more about their own staff, too. Some 48% count employees among the biggest risks to data security in the cloud, 11% more than the average. That concern shows in their controls: 75% have multifactor authentication in place and 70% audit user activity, compared with 69% and 58% in other industries. A further 41% of manufacturing companies intend to start reviewing access rights regularly.
Schrader expects the pace to pick up. Manufacturers told the survey they expect 52% of their workloads to be in the cloud by the end of 2023, up from 35% now. He cautioned that implementing cloud computing quickly can leave security gaps, and said that attention to all three attack vectors (data, identities and infrastructure) will lower both the risk of infiltration and its consequences.