Mr. Sonit Jain, CEO of GajShield Infotech was in conversation with team IT-Voice recently where he answered questions related to Cybersecurity and the need of Cybersecurity Insurance for manufacturing industries.
Prateek: Why is cybersecurity so indispensable for the manufacturing sector?
Sonit Jain: It is not uncommon for business owners to believe that cyber insurance is not a necessity for them. This line of thinking could not be further off the truth. As per a recent study, businesses in the manufacturing sector saw a 300% increase in the number of cyber-attacks faced over the last year. Organizations in this sector have a lot to lose — manufacturing license details, product plans, confidential marketing strategies, among others — if they do not incorporate the requisite cybersecurity infrastructure against data security threats. Cyber insurance, as the name implies, covers the losses caused by such attacks partially or totally for manufacturing-based businesses.
Prateek: How is the Cyber Insurance sector unfolding in India after the newly adapted work culture?
Sonit Jain: Manufacturing-based organizations may not face conventional types of cyber-attacks faced by typical IT companies. Instead, such businesses face critical data breaches and data manipulation. Such types of threats have a debilitative effect on data records such as procurement details, employee information, supplier billing and shift payroll details. Manufacturers generally may have certain data security protocols to prevent such threats. However, the cost of premium data security threat response tools and applications will be high, directly affecting a manufacturer’s bottom line and expenses. To make things worse, if data security attacks are successfully carried out by cybercriminals despite all the preventive effort and investment, manufacturers will have to spend more on reputational damage, production downtime, litigation costs from suppliers and end customers and other costs. Cyber insurance helps manufacturers be at ease regarding such massive expenses and keep their mission-critical operations running continuously.
Insurance providers try to force the banning of cyber coverage under commercial general liability (CGL) in a courtroom. This helps beleaguered manufacturers as they generally rely on their respective CGL policies to provide coverage for cyber threats. Additionally, insurance providers also take into account the policies and amendments made by the respective insurance services office during litigations.
All in all, cyber insurance providers open avenues to cover the damage caused to manufacturing businesses because of data breaches or other types of cyber-attacks.
Cyber insurance is needed for the following liability coverage in case a cyber-attack hits a manufacturing company’s business architecture. Firstly, cyber insurance policies provide cover for first-party liabilities such as credit monitoring, identity theft, procurement data restoration, contact centre set up, direct ransomware attacks and similar others. Secondly, data security insurance provides cover for third-party liabilities such as lawsuits, regulatory investigations and electronic and social media liability. This is more vital than first-party liability coverage as manufacturers would have to bear such costs in case of a data security attack without this.
Additionally, the reputational costs will have to be borne by businesses too. SME manufacturers will find that these coverage areas are more than sufficient to resolve several problems associated with cyber threats. And thirdly, Manufacturers may depend heavily on cloud service providers for computing power or virtual storage space for their production, procurement, packaging and delivery-related data. Generally, manufacturers may believe that their cloud-based databases and computing architecture are super-secure. Unfortunately, that is not true. Moreover, a manufacturer is still legally accountable to keep cloud-based data safe from leaking or manipulation. Apart from having impenetrable cyber security tools to safeguard the cloud-based data and operations, your cyber insurance provider will provide cover if a manufacturer’s third-party host suffers debilitative losses.
Prateek: What kind of cyber threats manufacturing industries face and what should the organizations do to avoid them?
Sonit Jain: The Top 7 Cyber Threats for Manufacturing Companies
- Phishing attacks
- Ransomware
- Internal breaches
- Equipment sabotage
- IP Theft
- Supply chain attacks
- Nation -state attacks
Protecting Your Manufacturing Company Against Cyberattacks
The dangers of cyberattacks for manufacturing companies are clear. Unfortunately, protecting organizations against such threats isn’t quite as transparent. Certain companies are subject to CMMC guidelines and the regulations imposed by IoT Cybersecurity while others are not. Yet, all manufacturing companies need high levels of cybersecurity to protect against the same threats. Luckily, there are things you can do to guard your company against increased threats.
Steps to Improve Cybersecurity Awareness within Manufacturing Companies
While you may not have a comprehensive security plan in place or an in-house cybersecurity plan, there are ways you can protect against cyber threats for manufacturing companies. These steps can help you build awareness of potential threats and recognize any potentially dangerous activity.
- Educate all levels of employees about the dangers of cybercrime and how to recognize potential threats
- Enforce password rules requiring strong passwords and two-factor authentication when available
- Always apply all updates and patches for relevant software immediately
- Eliminate personal tasks within your business network
- Educate employees on the dangers of opening attachments from an unidentified source
Prateek: What are some of the features of the cyber insurance solution by Gajshield?
Sonit Jain: Advance data protection: The Advanced Data Protection provides protection from threats involving internal intentional & unintentional attempts along with protection from external threats to critical data using a multi staged security approach.
Contextual intelligence engine: The Contextual Intelligence Engine is a technology that allows to gain advanced visibility of data transaction over applications that uses network. Using deep inspection at Different Levels for advanced security, Contextual Intelligence Engine understands the application and its data context. It allows to create context of applications and understand its usage, much deeper than just the application.
Data leak prevention: The Data Leak Prevention solution identifies, monitors, and protects the data in motion on your network through deep content inspection and a contextual security analysis of transactions. DLP protects against mistakes that lead to data leaks and intentional misuse by insiders.
Enterprise cloud: GajShield Enterprise Cloud Solution enforces routing of all traffic through the HO’s Data Security Firewall(Public or Private) and applies all the data security and global security policies to all the browsing and network activity. This allows the organizations to gain complete visibility on all the network traffic of the roaming user for monitoring along with the greatest of security solutions to ensure maximum Security and prevent data leak.
