Bangalore July 28, 2026 — SonicWall today released its 2026 Manufacturing Protect Brief, a vertical specific companion to the SonicWall 2026 Cyber Protect Report. The findings show that factories are increasingly opening up critical new entry points for hackers. Consequently, while the total volume of cyberattacks on the manufacturing sector has actually decreased, hackers are executing much more precise, highly targeted strikes on these digital gaps. Manufacturing recorded a 56.2% year-over-year decline in intrusion prevention (IPS) volume in the first half of 2026, the steepest drop of any tracked vertical. But the decline does not reflect reduced risk. Absolute volume remains significant at 474 million events, and as more operational technology connects to IT infrastructure, the attack surface is expanding even as attackers grow more selective about where they strike. “Manufacturing’s attack surface looks nothing like it did even five years ago, and the security model hasn’t caught up,” said Michael Crean, SonicWall SVP of Managed Services. “Every connection added for operational convenience, remote monitoring, predictive maintenance, vendor access to production systems, is also a connection an attacker can walk through. A stolen credential shouldn’t be able to reach the production floor, but in most manufacturing environments today, it can.” SonicWall’s Manufacturing Protect Brief draws on data from SonicWall’s global network of more than one million security sensors to document the specific attack patterns, legacy vulnerabilities and ransomware campaigns defining the manufacturing threat landscape in the first half of 2026. Key Findings from the 2026 SonicWall Manufacturing Protect Brief - The Hikvision IP Camera Command Injection vulnerability (CVE-2021-36260), disclosed in 2021, continued to generate 43 million hits in H1 2026, the single largest IoT attack signature across any industry SonicWall tracks. - IoT attacks were manufacturing’s second-largest attack category by volume, generating 46.2 million hits, with more than half of