Cybersecurity Action Steps and the Dilemma of Guarding Private Data

Kiteworks CISO Frank Balonis, a 20-year veteran of IT support and protecting manufacturing data, joins Smart Industry’s Scott Achelpohl as a follow-up to an April article he wrote for SI in which he riffs off cyber threats that threaten the factory floor—both industrial OT and IT—and which methods of data intrusion require the most urgent action. The proof is in numbers from Kiteworks: The average cost of a data breach in manufacturing has reached a staggering $4.47 million per occurrence. Much has been said about OT and IT defenses in manufacturing environments, which often are at the very least fragmented to combat the threat, so these companies are vulnerable to this kind of financial loss should they suffer an attack. Frank discusses for how stealing private data is the objective for a majority of the malicious cyberattacks in manufacturing, with the latest Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report indicating private data is compromised 58% of the time in cyberattacks in the manufacturing sector.