Manufacturing: Ransomware Threats

Background

The client is a Tier 1 supplier of cockpit electronics for electric and automated vehicles.

The Challenge

The company’s explosive growth and rapidly expanding operations left its network vulnerable and exposed. The client was hit with ransomware that shut down their networks and production control systems. This attack led to a significant monetary loss, a major delay in delivery as the supply chain was no longer operating, and the loss of over 100GB of sensitive data. The attack crippled production lines and cost the company hundreds of thousands of dollars in losses.

In close collaboration with their security operations team, our investigation quickly uncovered that our client lacked a consistent approach to secure its Edge and IoT environments. For starters, they didn’t have visibility on their connected assets and lacked adequate methods to discover new devices or manage them.

Upon further investigation, the company found that the network was breached through an IoT device that fed into an edge server at their manufacturing plant. The unauthorized access was gained by hackers who infected an unmanaged device via a malicious email with a compromised URL.

By the time their cloud-based security solutions identified the threat, it was too late. As a result, the company began to search for the right cybersecurity partner to detect, prevent, counteract, and remediate any act of illicit or abnormal behavior in their Edge and IoT infrastructures.

The solution

After the company ran a comprehensive POC with AI EdgeLabs and conducted a thorough evaluation of Edge and IoT security solutions available, they determined that AI EdgeLabs’ AI-powered solution was the best fit because of its non-deterministic ways to detect threats.

AI EdgeLabs instantly provides our customers with real-time snapshots and actionable insights about known and unknown threats. The client now has visibility & security for their connected assets across their facilities and devices, including laptops, computers, tablets, smartphones, and IoT devices.

AI EdgeLabs helps reduce the cyber attack surface with advanced network visibility, threat intelligence software for early threat detection, and automated incident and remediation protocols in real time. Since its implementation, there have been no breaches or intrusions.

By detecting the early signs of ransomware, AI EdgeLabs delivers real-time protection, incident response, and interruption of any threat before they result in downtime or operational disruption.

Benefits of AI EdgeLabs for Manufacturing

With the implementation of AI EdgeLabs, we:

• Collect monitoring and reporting data from suspicious devices for deeper analysis.
• Kill infected device connections by updating access control lists with smart firewalling.
• Discontinue irregular or blacklisted processes on critical devices with automated incident response protocols.
• Improve security posture, network threat detection, and malware detection.
• Address the new and emerging concerns of their rapidly growing asset infrastructure.
• Alert the network and security teams with real-time information about threats and attacks.
• Set up a distributed defense infrastructure that is easy to scale.