Cybersecurity service provider Sophos has revealed that two-thirds or 68% of ransomware attacks taking place in the manufacturing sector have successfully encrypted data. The State of Ransomware in Manufacturing and Production 2023 reported that it is the highest encryption rate for the sector over the past three years and is in line with a broader cross-sector trend of attackers more frequently succeeding in encrypting data.
However, in contrast to other sectors, the percentage of manufacturing organisations that used backups to recover data has increased, with 73% of the manufacturing organisations surveyed using backups this year versus 58% in the previous year. Despite this increase, the sector still has one of the lowest data recovery rates.
“Using backups as a primary recovery mechanism is encouraging, since the use of backups promotes a faster recovery. While ransom payments cannot always be avoided, we know from our survey response data that paying a ransom doubles the costs of recovery,” said John Shier, field CTO, Sophos. “With 77% of manufacturing organisations reporting lost revenue after a ransomware attack, this added cost burden should be avoided, and priority placed on earlier detection and response,” he added.
In addition, despite the growing use of backups, manufacturing and production reported longer recovery times this year. In 2022, 67% of manufacturing organisations recovered within a week, while 33% recovered in more than a week. This past year, only 55% of manufacturing organizations surveyed recovered within a week.
“Longer recovery times in manufacturing are a concerning development. As we’ve seen in Sophos’ Active Adversary reports, based on incident response cases, the manufacturing sector is consistently at the top of organizations needing assistance recovering from attacks. This extended recovery is negatively impacting IT teams, where 69% report that addressing security incidents is consuming too much time and 66% are unable to work on other projects,” Shier added.