Cybersecurity is important for maintaining the integrity of all businesses. But it can be tailored to match your business and the specific needs of the industry or industries you serve. We are in the age of digital transformation, and that means things are shifting to online solutions at an accelerated rate.
In 2020, a study by Verizon showed that the following industries were breached most often: healthcare, finance, manufacturing, and education. Since those are the areas we at CyberFort serve most, we wanted to discuss what cybersecurity looks like for these sectors.
Let’s talk about industry-based cybersecurity in the manufacturing, government, financial services, and education fields.
Industry-Based Cybersecurity: Manufacturing
The manufacturing industry is vast and diverse. IT includes textiles, pharmaceutical, automotive, aerospace, electronics, and more.
When analyzing cybersecurity across industries, those in the automotive and chemical sectors are the most targeted in the manufacturing industry.
But unlike with healthcare or finance, manufacturing isn’t as tied down by regulations that stem from technology compliance. That means your cybersecurity measures need to take these gaps into account when you are building the best protection plan.
Much of the value of a manufacturer and its business lies in its intellectual property. Intellectual property includes pivotal inventions, patents, trade secrets, technical expertise, and data. Many of the threats against this industry cybersecurity come from those wishing to profit financially by stealing these ideas or holding them for ransom.
Lately, ransomware has become a preferred tool for many hackers, with national and international reports on the rise since the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Government
With the recent crisis unfolding between Russia and Ukraine, many are concerned about the possibility of wider Russian-based cyberattacks. Russia has a long history of circulating devastating cyberattacks and breaches aimed against government and public sector assets.
Governments and public sector industry-based cybersecurity are crucial to maintaining the integrity of infrastructure from the municipal level to the national level.
Governments house extremely sensitive data, and that means industry cybersecurity here is likely to evolve more quickly to keep up with changing threat levels. Areas of interest could include:
- Datacenter locations
- migrations to third-party cloud providers
- internal versus IT responsibilities, including access permissions, protocols, and more
Human error is one of the most common ways data breaches occur. For vast organizations like governments and related entities, the response times to proven and potential threats has to be much shorter. It’s important to mitigate damage that could affect thousands, if not millions of people.
Since the data is housed on government data devices, the safeguards have to be updated and audited often to ensure the cloud-based and other data solutions are operating at maximum levels of efficiency.
Financial Services
The financial sector is one that needs industry-based cybersecurity that is targeted to stop financially motivated attacks.
More than 90% of all cyberattacks are done with the expectation of financial gain on the criminal’s part. A financial services business is a prime target for the majority of attacks being carried out today.
Since 2020, there are now more Americans doing their banking online than ever before. This creates easy targets for hackers. With so many new customers to choose from, it’s easy to send a malicious email that spoofs your financial institution’s information. Attackers can then convince you to click on an erroneous link or download malware onto your computer or mobile device unknowingly.
Most cyberattacks in the financial industry come from insiders and stolen devices. This creates a difficult problem to solve when the wrong people have access to your networks and files.
Education
Malware and ransomware lead the charge in most industry-based cyberattacks that are leveraged against education institutions. While schools may seem like innocuous targets – what value is there in attacking a school’s IT program? – there is a lot of sensitive data stored in education servers.
The data ranges from financial information like credit and debit card details to government IDs, private contact information, and more. Schools also are built on exorbitant amounts of online activity. And this activity is often carried out by hundreds of new users to the system each year.
CyberFort Advisors is Here to Meet Your Industry Cybersecurity Needs
Cyber risks are growing, and you need a cybersecurity partner that can help your business as it is. Whether you run a multi-national corporation or a small business, CyberFort Advisors offers a tailored approach to cybersecurity. Our goal is to meet your needs and ensure your digital assets are protected and compliant with all regulations.
Our team of experts can help you whether you are in manufacturing, government, public sector, utilities, energy, financial services, education, or other fields. Our industry-based cybersecurity is optimized to protect the exact assets you have and nothing less.
Contact us today to get a network threat assessment that will meet your industry cybersecurity needs.