Ransomware attacks against manufacturers surged 56% in 2025. IBM ranked manufacturing the most-targeted sector three years running. Yet most plant floors still lack the basic asset visibility needed to detect or recover from an attack.
Request a 30-minute demo. We'll walk through how Industrial Defender builds a complete OT asset inventory for your environment, active and passive, compliant and operational.
Across the largest U.S. manufacturers, cybersecurity risk is now a standard material disclosure in annual 10-K filings. But disclosure is not protection. The gap between what leadership reports to shareholders and what security teams can actually see on the plant floor is where attackers live.
Confirmed incidents include:
36% of all cyberattacks globally targeted the manufacturing sector in 2024
Average ransomeware demand: $1.16M - double the prior year.
The majority of manufacturing firms still carry critical vulnerabilities in legacy OT systems
$329.5B in industrial losses modeled in a single quarter of OT attack scenarios
A ransomware attack on leading publicly traded manufacturer grounded flights across Europe.
A large toy manufacturer disclosed a cyberattack that may cause product delays for several weeks
A leading British car maker suffered a devastating cyberattack, costing the UK economy an estimated £1.9 billion
Many post-incident investigations in industrial environments reach the same conclusion: the breach exploited assets that security teams didn't know existed, configurations that had drifted from baseline, or changes that were never documented.
The problem isn't detection; it's the absence of a complete, current picture of what's on the plant floor and what state it's in.
Passive-only OT monitoring tools — the category dominated by point solutions — capture what they can observe on the network. They miss devices that aren't communicating.
They miss configuration details that don't transmit across the network. They miss the changes that happened between scans.
And they produce asset inventories that look comprehensive but fail when an auditor or an incident responder needs to know the firmware version on a specific PLC, the firewall rules on a particular workstation, or when a software package was last modified.
This is the gap that Industrial Defender was built to address—and it has battle-tested solutions to address this challenge.
Trusted by manufacturers and critical infrastructure operators across aerospace, chemicals, defense, food & beverage, and industrial machinery since 2006.
Industrial Defender combines active data collection (via SSH and native OT protocols at Purdue Level 1 and above) with passive network monitoring to deliver the most complete OT asset inventory available.
Where passive-only tools see traffic, Industrial Defender also queries devices directly — capturing OS details, installed software, patch levels, firmware versions, firewall rules, user accounts, and network interface configurations that passive monitoring simply cannot reach.
The result is an asset inventory that doesn't just list devices—it documents their state, tracks changes against baseline, and generates the audit-ready evidence your compliance and security teams need.
Complete hardware and software inventory across all OT endpoints. Active + passive collection. No gaps from non-communicating devices.
Firmware and software version tracking. Baseline configuration monitoring. Change detection with authorization workflow. CVE cross-reference.
Pre-built reports for IEC 62443, NIST CSF, NERC CIP, CMMC, CFATS, TSA Security Directives, and more. Audit-ready evidence collection.
Learn how Industrial Defender secured an advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) project for a large power company.
Case study
Depending on your industry, OT cybersecurity is no longer optional.
Manufacturers operating across defense, chemical, pharmaceutical, rail, or food sectors face specific regulatory mandates that benefit from documented OT asset visibility, configuration change control, and audit-ready evidence.
Defense contractors: CMMC Level 2/3—OT asset inventory and configuration management are evidence requirements
Chemical facilities: CFATS (DHS) – cyber controls required for high-consequence facilities
Rail operators: TSA Security Directive SD-1580 – OT asset discovery and network segmentation verification mandated
Food manufacturers: FDA FSMA 204 – supply chain traceability starts with knowing what OT systems exist
Industrial Defender ships pre-built compliance reports for all of these frameworks—reducing audit preparation time by up to 80%.
Similar but not identical passive monitoring tools give you what's on the wire.
They don't inform you of what's on the device—firmware versions, installed software, firewall rules, user accounts, and inactive credentials.
That distinction matters for compliance frameworks like NERC CIP, CMMC, and IEC 62443 that require endpoint-level evidence, not just network traffic analysis.
Industrial Defender has been safely using active OT device communication—via SSH and native industrial protocols at Purdue Level 1 and above—since 2006.
Where others see the network, we see the endpoint.
And we do it without disrupting your operations.
80% reduction in compliance documentation prep time — Midwest utility operator
$3M in avoided upgrade costs; deployed in under 4 weeks at less than 50% of competitor cost — Clean Power Generation customer
"Your solution just paid for itself" — European multi-national gas and electric operator, after ID detected USB-delivered malware in a substation control network
Actively monitoring ICS/SCADA systems with OEM equipment from GE, Honeywell, ABB, Siemens, Schneider Electric, and Yokogawa
Request a 30-minute demo. We'll walk through how Industrial Defender builds a complete OT asset inventory for your environment, active and passive, compliant and operational.
