Spend any length of time in any particular industry and you’ll hear the same statements being made that purport to be ‘facts.’ Dig just below the surface however, and you often find out that when it comes to the security of Defense Industrial Base (DIB) these statements are more myth and legend than fact. As the National Center for Cybersecurity in Manufacturing, we felt it was important that decisions related to cybersecurity in the DIB should be based on hard data, not fairy tales.
To that end, MxD and its partner QuestionPro recently conducted a detailed study of 700 cybersecurity decision-makers in small and medium-sized manufacturing operations across the United States. These are businesses with anywhere from 2 to 499 employees who make the parts and components that go into platforms and systems. The headline number from this research should keep every business owner, procurement official, policy- and lawmaker awake at night: 68% of these businesses suffered a real, disruptive cyber incident during the previous 24 months. [CHART – Cybersecurity Incidents – Slide 13]
Let that sink in for a moment. Out of 700 surveyed firms, 479 of them experienced an attack that overcame their defenses and had a negative impact on operations. These are not theoretical vulnerabilities or a warning about a hypothetical future threat: it is a running tally of ongoing damage. Cybersecurity in manufacturing isn’t something that’s nice to have, it’s essential to the survival of individual firms, and the integrity and viability of the American manufacturing supply chain.