In the wake of the coronavirus disease 2019 (Covid-19) pandemic, responsible businesses are retrofitting their production facilities from their original intent to now produce goods that keep the virus at bay. Thanks to connected Internet of Things (IoT) devices and applications, companies could utilize production and customer data to manage and expand complex supply networks to predict defects before these occur or even to tailor their production to individual customer needs as is happening right now in once-idled factories.
But there’s a dark side to the growing use of IoT-based applications. Many companies in the manufacturing sector have also become increasingly vulnerable to cyberattacks. The Covid-19 pandemic has only exacerbated vulnerability, making it all the more critical for business leaders to understand where their vulnerabilities lie.
According to the 2020 Global DNS Threat Report, published by EfficientIP and the International Data Corp. (IDC), 75 percent of manufacturing companies experienced at least one denial-of-service (DNS) attack last year, and the average cost of each attack hovered around $825,000. Manufacturing companies who were victims each suffered an average of 10 DNS attacks over the course of the year.
The interconnected IoT devices, through which critical production data is transmitted, present an attractive attack surface for cybercriminals. Cybercriminals aim to take advantage of the openness of DNS, the system that translates website names into numeric addresses (IP addresses), which are easier for computers to manage.
In an online interview with The Manila Times, Nick Itta, vice president of EfficientIP Asia-Pacific, said: “DNS attacks could have a significant impact on production processes and supply chain management. Imagine if a large manufacturing company loses access to a supply chain management application, a chain reaction is set into motion that could affect the entire company, its suppliers and customers. If the product is personal protective equipment or medication set to be distributed to hospitals, the repercussions could be profound.”
Some of the more common attack types in the manufacturing sector include phishing (40 percent of companies surveyed experienced phishing attacks), malware (35 percent) and DNS amplification attacks (22 percent). 60 percent of manufacturing organizations suffered app downtime as a result of a DNS attack, and 52 percent experienced cloud service downtime that could lead to significant reputational damage for enterprises.
The 2020 Threat Report also noted that DNS was at the heart of data privacy and regulatory compliance. Ddata exfiltration via DNS often goes unnoticed as the information is hidden in normal network traffic.
This is why manufacturing companies that are looking to protect data confidentiality put monitoring and analysis of DNS traffic as their top priority, ahead of adding more firewalls or securing endpoints.
When an attack occurs, there are a variety of countermeasures that organizations could take. Of the manufacturing respondents in the Threat Report, 56 percent temporarily shut down specific affected processes and connections, and 54 percent disabled some or all of the affected applications. Unfortunately, these types of countermeasures could adversely affect the operations and profitability of an entire manufacturing facility.
Itta advises: “Organizations in the industrial sector could take measures to prevent and mitigate against these types of attacks. They should accelerate threat investigation by including DNS security in a security-by-design framework and should implement purpose-built DNS security with effective auto-remediation capabilities that limit attack damage and reduce mitigation time.”
Companies should also rely more on Zero-Trust strategies, the EfficientIP executive added. He clarified: “Zero Trust helps prevent breaches by using strict access controls. Assuming that anyone on the network is not to be trusted, requiring verification before granting access to resources is a strategy that makes better use of behavioral analytics to determine who is a likely threat and who is not.”
As Covid-19 tests the strength of the manufacturing industry, digitization of manufacturing and automation of processes to meet increased and shifting supply chain demands, the potential attack surfaces would only grow. The time has never been better to strengthen DNS security in the manufacturing sector,
With Asia-Pacific headquarters in Singapore, EfficientIP is a network security and automation company, specializing in DNS-dynamic host configuration protocol-IP Address Management, promoting business continuity by making any enterprise’s IP infrastructure foundation reliable, agile and secure.
