Manufacturing firms lost $4.99 mn due to cyber breaches in 2020

The average breach in the manufacturing sector in 2020 cost enterprises $4.99 million, while the timeframe to contain the same was at an average of 220 days, according to a report by data security company Varonis.   

The 2021 Manufacturing Data Risk report also revealed that 1 in 5 files in the organisation is accessible to all employees.  

The research was conducted using a random sample of data risk assessments for 50 companies in the area of industrial manufacturing and engineering. 

A total of 4 billion files were analysed to determine risk ratios.  The study found that every employee could access 6 million files on an average at the first day of the job, while one out 5 files were accessible to anybody in the organisation, smaller companies had unfettered access to almost 1 out of every 4 files.  

Other alarming statistics showed that 44% of companies had more than 1,000 active ‘ghost users’ that were enabled. 

Additionally, more than 50% of the companies had more than 500 accounts with passwords that can’t expire. 

 On an average, an employee in the manufacturing sector had access to 27,000 files.  

The study also showed that 10% of all sensitive files were open for every employee, and manufactures averaged 20,000 exposed folders for every terabyte of data.  

How much would it take to remove the open access? Varonis estimated that IT professionals would take close to 6-8 hours for each folder, which would put the timeline in a few years to remediate the folders manually.