Over the last several years, the manufacturing industry has consistently fallen victim to the attacks of increasingly sophisticated cybercriminals. Recent reports indicate that:

In order for manufacturers to stay economically viable and protect brand reputation and worker safety, it's critical that cybersecurity remain a top priority.

In our most recent#CiscoChat, I joined Marc Blackmer (@marcblackmer), Eric Ehlers (@egehlers), and Gregory Wilcox (@gswilcox_ohio) of Rockwell Automation to discuss security risks and data protection in the manufacturing industry. We've aggregated some of their thoughts below and the full chat is available here.

Attacks aimed at the manufacturing industry have been on the rise in recent years:

That prompted us to set up a poll to see how security-saavy our audience was:

The correct answer was 91. Then we asked:

Where should manufacturing companies place their security investments?

A lively discussion was sparked when we asked:

What data do you think is most critical to protect?

We asked a few questions about standards organizations like ISA before our final question:

What are the risks of industrial PCs that require security patches & system updates?

To our participants, thank you for making this chat fun and informative! For more information on increasing security in the manufacturing industry, check out our:

Industrial Control System Cybersecurity Guide