Why Is Manufacturing the Most Targeted Sector for OT Cyber Attacks?

Manufacturing is the most targeted industrial sector for cyber attacks, with ransomware and OT-focused actors causing significant operational impact: Dragos tracked 119 ransomware groups affecting over 3,300 organizations and identified AZURITE collecting OT intelligence from engineering workstations. The report highlights persistent intrusion pathways (stolen credentials, compromised remote access, shared IT/OT domains), frequent misclassification of OT impacts as IT incidents, and prescribes prioritized controls—OT/ICS incident response, defensible segmentation, ICS-aware visibility, secure remote access, and risk-based vulnerability management—to reduce operational risk.