Honda recently stopped its production at its Sayama, Japan plant due WannaCry ransomware.
The production facility manufactures 1,000 vehicles per day. The plant was started next day.
Along with Honda, Nissan and Renault also halted production at plants in Japan, Britain, France, Romania and India.
“We recommend that you revisit your security patches immediately and ensure that all of your networked computers can connect to kill switches.”Webroot senior threat research analyst Tyler Moffitt said.
Tripwire senior systems engineer Paul Norris mentioned that companies need to take steps to protect themselves.”Effective measures in defeating these sorts of attacks include implementing an effective email filtering solution that is capable of scanning content on emails, hazardous attachments and general content for untrusted URLs,” he said. “Another option would be to better educate the workforce on how to recognize a suspicious email from unknown senders, knowing not to click an untrusted URL, as well as not opening an unexpected attachment.”
RiskVision CEO Joe Fantuzzi mentioned that the Honda plant shutdown shows growing risks in the manufacturing industry. “While manufacturing hasn’t experienced the same attention as other sectors in regards to emerging ransomware trends, it’s now clear that WannaCry and other advanced threats pose severe and crippling risks to this sector, which among other things can halt production, expose blueprints and intellectual property, aid competitors and decimate profit margins, while taking weeks or months to be fully remediated,” he said.
“What’s more, manufacturing isn’t beholden to the same security and compliance standards as healthcare, financial services and other market verticals, making enforcement of consistent security standards even more difficult,” Fantuzzi added. “Consequently, it’s imperative that manufacturers categorize assets in terms of business criticality to see where their most important vulnerabilities reside because taking the initiative to find and prioritize critical vulnerabilities is a small investment in comparison to the long-term damage that could result if these vulnerabilities are ever found by cyber criminals and exploited.”
“Warding off cyber threats, including cyber espionage, is a top corporate priority across industries, but manufacturers and distributors need to do much more to protect their patents, designs and formulas, as well as their private company and employee information,” Jim Wagner, partner-in-charge of Sikich’s manufacturing and distribution practice, said in a statement.
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