Do You Understand the Cybersecurity Risks to Your Manufacturing Business?

In manufacturing, especially in industries built on complex supply chains, precision equipment, and decades of operational expertise, risk is nothing new. Forestry and wood product businesses are used to thinking about risks like equipment failure, market volatility, or raw material shortages. But cybersecurity? Too often, it’s still seen as “an IT problem” rather than a business risk.

The reality is that cyber threats can cut into your operations just as quickly, and sometimes more permanently than any physical disruption. A ransomware attack can idle production lines. A breach in your supply chain can halt shipments. And the theft of proprietary data whether that’s your customer contracts, your product specs, or your mill automation settings can undermine competitive advantage overnight.

Visibility Is the First Step

Before you can address a risk, you need to see it. That means mapping your critical assets, from your ERP system to the control systems running your sawmills and pulp processing lines and understanding how they’re connected. It’s not only about identifying the obvious points of failure, but also the hidden dependencies that could bring production to a halt if compromised.

Understanding the Likelihood of Exploit

Not all risks are equal. The chance of a cyber exploit varies depending on factors like outdated systems, remote access configurations, or lack of proper authentication controls. Without accurate risk visibility, leadership can end up either overestimating the wrong threats or underestimating the ones most likely to be exploited.

Why a Top Down Approach Matters

Cybersecurity cannot be effective if it’s siloed in the IT department. From the boardroom down to the plant floor, every leader needs to understand how their part of the operation connects to the overall security posture. Without executive sponsorship, gaps are left unaddressed, sometimes in the very systems that keep your business running.

In forestry, we know that a single weak tree in a load can compromise an entire shipment. Cybersecurity works the same way, one vulnerable link can undermine everything.

The question for C-suite leaders is this, ‘Do you have clear, measurable visibility of your cyber risks, the likelihood of exploit, and a coordinated, top down plan to close those gaps?’

If the answer is anything less than a confident “yes,” the time to act is now, before the threat finds you first.

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