By Sam Heiney
With costs soaring into the millions, the recent breaches of casino companies MGM Resorts International and Caesars Entertainment are an unfortunate reminder that no company is truly safe from increasingly sophisticated, aggressive and frequent cyber attacks by malicious actors. According to reports, the same hackers that breached these two casino giants – known as “Scattered Spider,” part of the larger “ALPHV” ransomware group – have also been responsible for several other recent cyber attacks on companies in the manufacturing, retail and technology space.
For both MGM and Caesars, it has been reported that hackers made use of social engineering to get into the systems – first impersonating an employee on LinkedIn and then contacting the help desk (a vendor shared by both companies) and pretending to have lost their password to get into the account, claim additional credentials and gain increasing control.
How To Prevent The Three Most Common Cyber Threats To Building Systems
Botnets, cryptojacking, and backdoors create major cybersecurity risks for FMs. Read more…
Smart Factories At Risk For Cyber Attacks
Regardless of the industry, all it takes for the hackers to win is for one link in the larger cybersecurity fence to be compromised, and the whole wall will come tumbling down. It’s a tall order for any industry, but manufacturing has, comparatively, a lot to consider. That’s chiefly because of the massive implications and potential of Industry 4.0, which is already establishing itself across the space. Industry 4.0 – and the smart factories that emblemize it – has already demonstrated the ability to increase overall production by as much as seven times, but those gains come with equal risks for those who neglect cybersecurity…
Sam Heiney is VP of Products, Impero Software, a Portland, OR-based provider of cybersecurity to Fortune 100 and companies in the manufacturing and retail spaces.
