UK manufacturers under cyber fire with 80% reporting attacks

Nearly 80 percent of British manufacturers say they’ve been hit by a cyber incident in the past year, as new research suggests disruption on the factory floor is no longer an exception but business as usual.

[M]any organizations still treat cybersecurity as an IT issue… When it sits outside the boardroom, it’s harder to prioritize appropriately

According to security outfit ESET, 78 percent of UK manufacturers admit to suffering at least one cyber incident in the last 12 months, with more than half reporting lost revenue as a result. These aren’t minor hiccups either. In more than half of the worst incidents, losses surpassed £250,000, because when something breaks digitally, the production line usually follows suit.

The sector got a high-profile reminder of the stakes last year when Jaguar Land Rover was forced to halt production following a cyberattack that rippled across its supply chain. The disruption dragged on for weeks, with estimates putting the wider economic hit at around £1.9 billion once suppliers, delays, and lost output were factored in.

ESET’s numbers suggest this kind of fallout is increasingly common. Almost all respondents said incidents had a direct operational impact, with supply chain disruption and missed commitments near the top of the list. And when things do go down, they don’t bounce back quickly. Most outages stretch into days, sometimes close to a week, with the knock-on effects lingering well after systems are back up and running.

Despite that, visibility into risk remains patchy. One in five manufacturers said they have limited or no insight into the cybersecurity threats that could knock production offline, a blind spot that’s increasingly hard to justify as attacks evolve. Nearly half of respondents now see AI-assisted attacks as the top threats over the next year, ahead of phishing and ransomware – a sign that the tooling on both sides of the fence is getting more sophisticated.

“If the JLR attack showed us anything, it’s how quickly a cyber incident can shut down production at scale and have major consequences for the business and the wider economy,” said Matt Knell, UK country manager at ESET. “The real challenge is that many organizations still treat cybersecurity as an IT issue rather than a strategic business decision. When it sits outside the boardroom, it’s harder to prioritize appropriately.”

Cyber incidents might be a production problem now, but ownership still mostly sits in IT. Only 22 percent of firms put it at the executive level, even though the damage is clearly big enough to warrant board attention. Despite that, more than a fifth still lean toward reacting after the fact rather than trying to stop incidents in the first place. ®

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