The Cyber Threat in Manufacturing

A friend of mine asked me the other day if the cyber-risk threat was a bit of flimflam designed to sell more insurance policies. When I asked him to expand on that most interesting comment he proceeded to compare cyber-risk to the Red Scare of the 1950s when families scrambled to build bomb shelters to protect them from a war that never came. The only ones who got rich back then were the contractors, he proudly concluded.
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​I found his question incredulous given the world we live in, not to mention his peculiar analogy. But realizing he didn’t work in the commerce stream, per se, quelled my impulse to slap him around.
So I shared with him some statistics that sobered him up quickly. I explained that cyber-crime costs the global economy over $400 billion per year, according to estimates by the Center for Strategic and International Studies; and each year over 3,000 companies in the U.S. have their systems compromised by criminals. IBM reports more than 91 million security events per year. Worse yet,

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