Dive Brief:
- Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) has become increasingly vulnerable to security attacks in recent years, Dark Reading reported.
- In 2016, threats to ERPs moved from possibility to reality when US-CERT issued a report that included a warning about 36 international organizations who were compromised due to attacks that exploited a weakness in SAP's Invoker Servlet.
- Though a growing awareness of a need for increased security exists, and a recent report issued by Crowd Research Partners found that 89% of security experts anticipate more attacks, a significant number of enterprises confessed in a study conducted by Ponemon Institute that they might not detect the breach for a year or longer.
Dive Insight:
The digitizing of supply chains creates a more effective process, one better able to absorb and process changes and disruptions. Companies relying on connectedness are able to achieve more rapid fulfillment speed and demand, as access to data improves forecasts and reveals inefficiencies. Yet, with the improvements that digital connections bring comes risk, as in 2016 alone, 40% of manufacturing companies surveyed on the subject admitted to being affected by cyber attacks. And of that 40%, 38% incurred more than $1 million dollars in damages.
With so much vulnerability, those hoping to maximize a connected supply chain must include cyber security plans to safeguard their data. Identifying proprietary information and creating a hacker-proof environment that prevents access and incursion cannot be a reactionary plan any longer.
