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Verizon Business has released the 2026 edition of its annual Data Breach Investigations Report (DBIR). Now in its 19th year, the DBIR is one of the industry's most authoritative annual analyses of the cybersecurity threat landscape.
For manufacturing, this year's findings reflect a sector under sustained attack – where operational disruptions, IP exposure, and ransomware recovery costs are increasingly becoming a cost of doing business. Key findings include:
- Three patterns account for 91 percent of manufacturing breaches: System Intrusion, Social Engineering, and Basic Web Application Attacks.
- Malware is pervasive – and ransomware is the primary driver – present in 75 percent of manufacturing breaches, and ransomware accounting for 61 percent. For operational environments where uptime is critical, ransomware recovery is especially disruptive.
- Internal data is #1 target, appearing in 80 percent of reported manufacturing breaches. Credentials were compromised in 26 percent of incidents, and personally identifiable information (PII) theft accounted for 17 percent.
- Remote Monitoring and Management (RMM) tools used widely in manufacturing environments have grown 240 percent in prevalence as an attacker tool over the last year – offering attackers persistent, legitimate-looking access.
The full report is available here.
