Manufacturing has been the most ransomware-targeted industry for four consecutive years. Attacks rose 61% in 2025. The average cost of unplanned downtime is $260,000 per hour.
None of that is hypothetical. It happened to manufacturers who thought their IT was handled.
If you run a manufacturing operation, this checklist is the fastest way to find out where your gaps are before an attacker does.
1. Do You Know Everything That Is Connected to Your Network?
Most manufacturers cannot answer this confidently, and that is the first problem. You cannot protect what you do not know you have. A complete asset inventory should include:
- Every laptop, desktop, and mobile device on the network
- PLCs, sensors, and IIoT devices on the production floor
- Remote access tools and vendor connections
- Any equipment that has ever been connected, even temporarily
If that list does not exist or has not been updated recently, that is where to start. You cannot secure what you cannot see.
2. Is Your Production Floor Separated from Your Office Network?
This is called network segmentation and it is one of the highest-impact things a manufacturer can do. If a phishing email on someone’s work laptop can reach your production systems, you have a problem.
A proper segmentation setup separates:
- Office IT from production OT systems
- Vendor and contractor access from internal systems
- Critical control equipment from general network traffic
3. Who Has Access to Your Systems Right Now?
Over a third of manufacturing breaches start with a third party. A vendor or contractor with more access than they need is an open door. Access reviews should confirm:
- Former employees have been removed from all systems
- Vendor and contractor access is limited to what they actually need
- Remote access tools set up years ago are still necessary and still secure (spoiler: they usually are not)
4. When Did You Last Test Your Backups?
Having backups is not the same as having working backups (a distinction most businesses discover at the worst possible time). If your team has never run a recovery drill, you do not actually know how long getting back online would take. A tested backup plan should cover:
- How long a full restoration actually takes
- Which systems come back online first
- Whether production can resume before everything is fully restored
In manufacturing, every hour that question goes unanswered costs real money.
5. Is MFA Turned On Everywhere?
Only 46% of middle market manufacturers use a centralized identity system with multifactor authentication. That means more than half are relying on passwords alone to protect systems that control physical production equipment (which is a sentence that should make any plant manager uncomfortable). MFA should be enabled on:
- Email and Microsoft 365 accounts
- Remote access and VPN connections
- ERP, accounting, and production management platforms
- Any vendor portal with access to your environment
6. Do You Have a Written Incident Response Plan?
Not a general IT plan. A manufacturing-specific one. Who gets called first? Which systems get isolated? Who has the authority to take a production line offline? The plan should answer:
- Immediate steps when something suspicious is detected
- Who owns each decision during an active incident
- How to communicate with customers and vendors during downtime
- What the recovery sequence looks like for production systems specifically
If your team would be figuring that out in real time during an active attack, the plan does not exist yet.
7. Are Your Compliance Requirements Actually Met?
Contracts, insurance renewals, and customer trust increasingly depend on demonstrated cybersecurity. If you are in the defense supply chain, CMMC 2.0 is no longer a wait-and-see. The final rule is in effect and the era of informal self-assertions is over. Outside defense, regulators, and insurers are tightening expectations across the board. Compliance is becoming a condition of doing business, not just a checkbox, and the DoJ has already fined companies for overstating it.
The Bottom Line
Most manufacturing IT gaps are not exotic. They are the basics that never got done because production always came first, and attackers know exactly which ones to look for. Running this checklist takes less time than a single hour of unplanned downtime costs. If any answer is uncertain, that is where to start.
At GiaSpace, we work with manufacturers to close these gaps before they become incidents, with proactive monitoring, access controls, and IT systems built around how production environments actually operate.
→ Schedule Your Free IT Assessment with Rob
→ Learn More About Our Manufacturing IT Solutions
Published: May 19, 2026
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