Kaspersky: manufacturing industry sees most cyber attacks in H1 2017

Cybersecurity has been at the forefront of conversation for companies and individuals this year, especially in the wake of the Equifax hack, the Deloitte breach, and Yahoo’s big revelation yesterday.

But which industries are the most attacked? Kaspersky today issued its Threat Landscape for Industrial Automation Systems in H1 2017 report that revealed some notable worldwide internet security trends.

Based on the company’s findings, March was the most active month for cyber attacks so far. Kaspersky also claims its products blocked around 37.6% of attack attempts on ICS computers in the first half of 2017.

“This figure was almost unchanged compared to the previous period — it is 1.6 percentage points less than in the second half of 2016,” it added.

Manufacturing companies (31%) saw the most attacks with more than one in three industrial control systems in the sector enduring a cyber attack in H1 2017. Engineering (24.6%), education (24.5%) and food and beverage (9.7%), rounded out the top four.

Kaspersky: One in every three manufacturing ICS computers were the target of a cyber attack in the first half of 2017

The least susceptible was the transport, building automation and (ironically) ICS software sectors, registering just 0.3% and 0.6% of all cyber attacks respectively.

“In the first half of the year we’ve seen how weakly protected industrial systems are: pretty much all of the affected industrial computers were infected accidentally and as the result of attacks targeted initially at home users and corporate networks,” noted Kaspersky’s Evgeny Goncharov, the head of the Critical Infrastructure Defence Department.

“In this sense, the WannaCry and ExPetr destructive ransomware attacks proved indicative, leading to the disruption of enterprise production cycles around the world, as well as logistical failures, and forced downtime in the work of medical institutions.”

Kaspersky notes that 13.4% of industrial control systems were attacked by WannaCry, with the primary targets including the healthcare and government sectors. ExPetr contributed to “at least 50%” attacks of oil and gas, and manufacturing companies.

One in every 200 systems were also attacked by “encryption ransomware at least once“.