What types of data loss keep industrial IT managers awake at night

BANGALORE, INDIA: The adage that “no two businesses are alike” is especially true when comparing businesses in corporate and services sectors (e.g., Education, E-Commerce, Healthcare) to industrial businesses. Kaspersky Lab’s survey classified respondents across 17 different business sectors, including the Manufacturing and Utilities & Energies sectors. These two industrial sectors stand apart from the others based on the designs of their IT networks – industrial machines managed by highly-specialized industrial software – and how these businesses have vastly different priorities for securing these networks.

• Intellectual Property: 21 percent of Manufacturers reported losing Intellectual Property in the past 12 months (the fifth-highest rate), which seems to justify the sector giving Intellectual Property the highest “importance rating” (17 percent) of all 17 business sectors. Utilities & Energy suffered the lowest rate of stolen Intellectual Property, and assigned it the lowest rating of importance out of all 17 business sectors.
• Market Intelligence/Competitive Intel: The Manufacturing sector viewed Market Intelligence/Competitive Intel of just average importance, whereas Utilities & Energy ranked it the highest of all business sectors. Both sectors suffered from relatively high rates of Market Intelligence data theft.
• Customer Information: In short, neither the Manufacturing nor Utilities & Energy sectors are concerned about losing customer information…and with good reason, since they reported the third-lowest and lowest rates, respectively, of stolen customer information across all business sectors.
• Internal Operational Information: On the other hand, both Manufacturing and Utilities & Energy are highly concerned about losing Internal Operational Information (e.g., details of business processes). Almost half of all companies in both sectors reported losing some of this information to a data breach incident within the previous 12 months.

Industrial Security Challenges – Unlike Other Businesses

What this data illustrates is the fundamentally different approaches to IT security found in corporate environments and industrial environments. Corporate IT security is focused on data protection, but industrial IT security focuses on process protection. The data shows how highly these industrial businesses value the security of their internal processes, and also shows how securing customer data is a non-factor for these companies.

But this data also shows that the top concern of one industrial business might be a minimal consideration for another (e.g., importance of Intellectual Property). For example, Kaspersky Lab’s survey found 31 percent of businesses in the Manufacturing sector believe they are being specifically targeted by cyber-attacks. This was the second-highest rating across all sectors (behind Financial Services), but this high-level of concern was not reported in the Utilities & Energy sector, which had a below-average response to this question.