If you run a plant, you already know what an hour of downtime costs. You can feel it in the missed shipments, the idle crews, the expediting fees, and the phone calls from customers asking where their parts are. Ransomware groups know it too. That is exactly why manufacturing keeps showing up at the top of their list.

Look at the numbers. In IBM’s 2026 X‑Force Threat Intelligence Index, manufacturing topped the target list for the fifth year in a row. The sector accounted for 27.7% of incidents observed by X‑Force, with data theft being the most common. The same report found that North America became the most attacked region for the first time in six years, accounting for 29% of cases.

In other words, a North American manufacturer sits in the most attacked industry in the most attacked region. That is not a reason to panic. It is a reason to understand why attackers keep coming back, and what makes some manufacturers much harder targets than others.

Reason One: Production Downtime Creates Pressure to Pay

Ransomware is a business, and attackers think like businesspeople. They look for victims who will feel the most pain the fastest because pain shortens negotiations.

Manufacturing fits that profile perfectly. When ERP goes down, nobody can see open orders, print travelers, receive material, or ship product. When scheduling systems are locked, the floor loses its plan. Lean, just in time operations are efficient, but they carry very little buffer. A few days without systems can ripple into weeks of recovery and lost revenue.

Compare that with an industry where an outage is mostly an inconvenience. If a business can work on paper for a week, the attacker has little leverage. If every hour of downtime costs tens of thousands of dollars and puts major customer contracts at risk, the attacker has a lot of leverage. Criminals know which kind of victim pays faster.

Many groups now add a second layer of pressure. They steal data before they encrypt it, then threaten to publish engineering drawings, pricing, customer lists, or employee records unless they are paid. Even a manufacturer with good backups can face that extortion.

Reason Two: Operational Technology Expands the Attack Surface

A modern plant runs on far more than office computers. PLCs, HMIs, SCADA systems, CNC machines, robotics, vision systems, and industrial sensors all keep production moving. This world of operational technology, or OT, was built for reliability and uptime, not for defending against internet threats. That creates several challenges.

• Legacy systems stay in service for decades. A machine controller might run on an operating system that stopped receiving security updates years ago. Replacing it can mean replacing the machine, so it stays.
• Patching is hard. You cannot reboot a production line on a Tuesday afternoon to install updates. Maintenance windows are rare, and every change carries the risk of disrupting a validated process.
• IT and OT have grown together. Years ago, plant floor systems sat on isolated networks. Today they connect to ERP, MES, quality systems, and cloud dashboards so leaders can see what is happening in real time. That visibility is valuable, but if the networks are flat, an attacker who gets into an office laptop through a phishing email may be able to move straight onto the plant floor.
• Remote access adds risk. Equipment vendors and integrators often need remote access to support their machines. Every remote connection that is always on, shares a password or skips multifactor authentication is a door an attacker can try.

Ransomware does not need to touch a PLC directly to stop production. Often the attackers encrypt the Windows systems that run HMIs, historians or engineering workstations, and the line stops anyway. Sometimes a manufacturer shuts down production deliberately because nobody can be sure how far the attack has spread.

Reason Three: The Supply Chain Multiplies the Impact

Manufacturers do not operate alone. You depend on suppliers for material, and your customers depend on you to deliver on time. That interconnection makes each manufacturer a valuable target in two ways.

First, an attack on you hurts your customers. If you supply critical components to a larger manufacturer, your outage can stop their line too. Attackers understand that pressure. Your customers will be calling, and every day of delay puts the relationship at risk.

Second, your partners can become the way in. Attackers increasingly go after the connections between companies: shared portals, EDI links, vendor remote access, and software provider. IBM reports that large-scale supply chain and third-party breaches have increased nearly fourfold since 2020. A smaller supplier with weaker security can become a steppingstone into a larger organization.

This is also why customers are asking harder security questions. Large manufacturers, defense primes, and regulated industries now routinely send security questionnaires, require compliance with frameworks such as CMMC, or ask for proof of controls before they will sign or renew a contract. Strong security is quickly becoming a requirement for doing business, not an extra.

Why the Gaps Persist

Most manufacturers that get hit are not careless. They are busy. Common patterns include:

• Small IT teams covering big environments. One or two people may be responsible for ERP, the network, the plant floor, and the help desk all at once.
• Unpatched public systems. IBM reported that vulnerability exploitation became the leading cause of attacks, accounting for 40% of incidents it observed in 2025. Firewalls, VPN appliances, file storage devices, and remote access tools that face the internet are prime targets.
• Shared and reused credentials. Shared accounts on the plant floor, old vendor logins that were never disabled and missing multifactor authentication make it easy for attackers to look like legitimate users.
• Backups that are not truly separate. If your backups sit on the same network and use the same credentials as production, ransomware can encrypt or delete them too.

How Manufacturers Become Harder Targets

The good news is that attackers usually choose the easiest door. You do not need perfect security. You need to be meaningfully harder to break into than the next company. These steps make the biggest difference:

1. Segment IT from OT. Separate the office network from the plant floor, and tightly control what can cross between them. A compromised laptop should not have a path to your production systems.
2. Lock down identity. Require multifactor authentication everywhere you can, especially for email, remote access, and administrator accounts. Eliminate shared logins wherever practical.
3. Control vendor access. Give equipment vendors access only when they need it, through monitored connections, and remove access when the work is done.
4. Patch what faces the internet first. Keep firewalls, VPNs, remote access tools, and storage devices current. For OT systems you cannot patch, use segmentation and monitoring to protect them.
5. Monitor around the clock. Attackers often spend days inside a network before they launch ransomware. Continuous detection and response can catch them during that window.
6. Protect your backups. Keep at least one immutable or offline copy that ransomware cannot reach, and test full restores of critical systems such as ERP regularly.
7. Plan and practice your response. Know who makes decisions, how you will keep shipping and how you will talk to customers and suppliers. Run a tabletop exercise before you ever need the plan.
8. Train your people. Phishing is still a common way in. Short, regular training helps everyone from the front office to the shop floor spot suspicious messages.

Turning a Target into a Tough Target

Manufacturing will probably stay near the top of attacker target lists for years. The same things that make the industry valuable, its tight schedules, connected machines and essential place in the supply chain, also make it attractive to criminals. What you can control is how well prepared you are.

2W Tech has spent more than three decades working inside manufacturing and distribution operations. We help organizations secure the full environment, from Epicor ERP and Microsoft 365 to networks, endpoints, and backups. That includes security assessments, managed detection and response, network segmentation, identity protection, and backup and recovery built to keep production running when something goes wrong.

If you are not sure how your organization would hold up against a ransomware attack, let us help you find out before an attacker does.

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