Industrials
Figure 9: Total Industrials Victims Month-by-Month 2022 vs 2023
As mentioned above, ransomware cases in the Industrials sector almost doubled from 2022- 2023 from 804 to 1484, but despite that the total ransomware cases shot up by 84% over the two years, the sector remained at 32% overall weighting of attacks. This notably contrasts with Consumer Cyclicals and Technology which, although experienced increases in total figures, exhibited 5% and 6% relative decreases respectively. This alone goes to show the attractiveness of the Industrials sector, and Figure 9 highlights that year- on-year there has been a consistently sustained interest, dwarfing its 2022 totals. When we compare Figure 9 with Figure 7, it is possible to observe a striking similarity between the two graphs, especially, where 2023 is concerned. This highlights the correlation between the overall total of ransomware attacks and the number of cases within Industrials, which brings us to our next point that was mentioned in our 2022 Threat Monitor.
As the Industrials sector is so heavily targeted within the ransomware threat landscape, the frequency of cases within is highly reactive to overall threat actor activity for that month, once more illustrating the significance of this sector. This sector is often the most targeted for a number of reasons. Firstly, industries within, such as Professional & Commercial Services are likely an attractive target to TA’s due to the vast quantities of PII that they store. Firms that operate on a consultancy basis tend to serve a vast number of clients yearly, and thus have consistent access to huge amounts of client data making them both an attractive and lucrative target from a TA’s perspective. Other industries within the sector share some commonalities which make them attractive to TA’s. One example is the cost of operational disruption (especially for those organisations that have tight production lines), another being the expanded attack surface due to sector-wide issues like IT/OT convergence.
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