Ransomware paused Honda’s factories
A cyberattack hit Honda’s internal network and stopped production at some plants. Factories need network separation.
Yesterday Honda confirmed a cyberattack on its internal network. Some factories outside Japan stopped production and customer service was affected. Researchers link it to a ransomware family designed to stop industrial processes.
Factories increasingly depend on office IT: schedules, orders, quality data. When IT goes down, production often follows, even if the machines themselves are fine.
For any company that makes things:
- Separate the plant network from the office network, with a controlled zone in between.
- Know which plant systems depend on IT, and what happens when they can’t reach it.
- Keep offline copies of the configurations and programs that run your machines.
- Practise running a shift without office systems.
Security in factories is about keeping production running, and that’s how to explain it to management.