In more than two-thirds of 68% of ransomware attacks against this manufacturing sector, the cybercriminals were able to encrypt the victims’ data, according to cybersecurity solutions company Sophos.

“This is the highest reported 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,” Sophos said in a media release.

“With 77% of manufacturing organizations reporting lost revenue after a ransomware attack, this added cost burden should be avoided, and priority placed on earlier detection and response,” said John Shier, field CTO, Sophos.

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It is notable to note organizations that belong to the sector using backups have increased to 73% from 58% the previous year. However, 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,” Shier said. While ransom payments cannot always be avoided, we know from our survey response data that paying a ransom doubles the costs of recovery,” said Shier. 

Longer recovery times

In addition, despite the growing use of backups, manufacturing, and production reported longer recovery times this year. In 2022, 67% of manufacturing organizations 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.  

“Based on incident response cases, the manufacturing sector is consistently at the top of organizations needing assistance recovering from attacks,” Shier said. “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.”