AI and Automation: Protecting Manufacturing Operations from Cybercrime

Digital technologies like AI and automation offer huge benefits across the supply chain, from suppliers to manufacturers to customers. But along with those benefits come added risks in the form of cybersecurity threats.

According to McKinsey, the costs to businesses from cybercrime more than doubled from 2015 to 2023. Generative AI has many uses in manufacturing and supply chain operations — but, unfortunately, it also accounts for a significant portion of the uptick in cybercrime.

Criminals have found GenAI just as useful as legitimate businesses, employing it to create better social engineering strategies, such as more realistic phishing emails and deepfakes.

The answer to this challenge isn’t just throwing out AI and automation tools. Instead, organizations using these tools need to add the same level of automation to their security suite. Tools like AI-driven real-time threat detection and automated response mechanisms can help mitigate risks while enabling manufacturers to stay competitive.

Cybersecurity: A Growing Challenge

Secureframe reports that from 2023 to 2024, the average cost of a data breach rose 10% to $4.88 million. By 2025, the projected global cost of cybercrime is $10.5 trillion. With no effective incident response plan — and without practicing that plan on an ongoing basis — manufacturers open themselves up to major risk.

Manufacturing leaders are taking the threat seriously. In a survey of midmarket manufacturers from Eide Bailly and Manufacturing Dive’s studioID, nearly a quarter of respondents reported that cybersecurity and data privacy were some of the top trends impacting their businesses in 2024. Additionally, 25% of respondents plan to invest in new or better cybersecurity solutions over the next three years.

This push for better data security comes as more businesses incorporate AI tools into their operations. Our report found that 65% of manufacturers have either already implemented AI or plan to do so. Another 6% have integrated AI into their operations, and 24% plan to expand its use.

With more AI in the tech stack comes a greater need to secure the data those AI tools gather and analyze. A few essential security measures include:

Multi-factor Authorization (MFA)

Microsoft estimates that MFA could prevent 99.9% of attacks, making it a crucial first line of defense.

Employee education

Social engineering, malware, phishing, and other kinds of attacks can help hackers access sensitive information. The risk drops dramatically when employees are equipped to spot these efforts. Make sure your team understands and knows how to spot:

• Social engineering techniques such as phishing emails and spoofed email addresses that look legitimate. These can bait employees into clicking on content that contains malware-laden ads and messages. These common tactics can be especially dangerous if high-level employees with access to particularly sensitive data fall victim to the scam.
• AI-enabled attacks that use more sophisticated phishing tactics, such as personalized content tailored to specific employees or dynamic content based on previous interactions.
• Third-party exposure, which occurs when criminals breach external, less secure systems connected to the target system. This is why manufacturers must assess the security risk of each of their suppliers and partner networks, as well as their own.

Stricter access configurations

Periodically review which users have access to sensitive parts of your tech stack and remove or reduce access to areas they don’t need to do their jobs.

With these essentials in place, manufacturers can use AI-enabled security automation to further harden their systems against breach attempts.

Reduce Your Cybercrime Risk with Automation and AI

Criminals may use AI to perform faster and trickier data breaches, but you can also use it to thwart those attempts. It starts with performing a security threat assessment on the current system. Manufacturers should look for:

• Completion of cybersecurity training by employees
• The number of threats detected and the response time to them
• The number of unsuccessful login attempts (a sharp spike in this number may indicate an attempted breach)

From there, AI-enabled security tools help close any gaps and secure the system against attacks. The best framework for implementing cybersecurity measures is SOAR (Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response), which gathers security-related information from various sources in the organization, analyzes the data, and implements automated responses to potential threats.

For example, if a suspicious email makes it through filters, an AI-enabled tool can spot and report a potential phishing attempt. It then automatically performs checks, such as comparing the sender to known malicious domains, analyzes contents and attachments for potential threats, determines whether the email is malicious or requires human approval, and decides on the disposition of the email — such as deletion and domain blocking.

By automating this process, manufacturers can speed threat detection and blocking as well as reduce the time staff spend dealing with security-related questions, which improves data quality across their organization.

Cybercrime tends to keep up with current technology trends, giving bad actors more efficient ways to access sensitive information. The good news is that the same technology that enables criminals also offers businesses the tools to stop them.

Learn more about how manufacturers are enabling more resilient operations with AI and automation in the 2025 Mid-Market Manufacturing Outlook report.