Apple’s key manufacturing partner Foxconn has confirmed its US factories suffered a ransomware attack in recent days after the gang responsible claimed to have stolen 8TB of data from the company — including confidential Apple information.
This isn’t the first attack to hit Foxconn, and such is the scale and value of the company that it is unlikely to be the last. Criminals understand the value of the information it has and see it as a prime target. That it is an industrial company actively deploying smart factory infrastructure across its premises just makes it an even more interesting challenge; what happens if the machinery itself is attacked?
In practice, most large industrial facilities are moving to secure their own internal factory networks using technologies such as SD-WAN, private 5G networks, network segregation, isolation of production environments from the corporate network, and active monitoring against threats to factory machinery. All the same, attackers always hope that complex, well-planned combination exploits will find some way into even those most private and secure portions of corporate systems.
In this particular case, it doesn’t look as if the attack was made against connected industrial equipment at Foxconn. Wired reports a little of the events that took place:
