The main concern of any manufacturing company should be designing and building outstanding products - not maintaining firewalls, applying security patches or putting in the painstaking work required to detect sophisticated cyber attacks and stop them in their tracks before they wreak havoc.
That’s not to say cybersecurity isn’t a big challenge for manufacturers. A May 2021 report from manufacturers’ organisation Make UK found that almost half of the companies surveyed (47 per cent) had been the target of cyber crime during the preceding 12 months. Of those companies that experienced an attack, more than six out of ten said it cost them up to £5,000, while almost a quarter (22 per cent) placed the costs involved at between £5,000 and £25,000.
The rush to remote working triggered by the Covid-19 pandemic has only exacerbated an already worrying situation. As lockdowns were imposed, many employees went to great lengths to ensure they had copies of the sensitive...