Ransomware Targets Manufacturers in Canada

Manufacturing isn’t an occasional ransomware target anymore. It’s the main one. Black Kite’s 2026 Manufacturing and Distribution Ransomware Report found manufacturing was the most-hit sector, with 22% of all ransomware victims between April 2025 and March 2026, and 1,183 manufacturing victims in the first seven months of 2026 alone.

This guide is for owners, plant managers, and operations leads at Ontario manufacturers who know the risk is real but aren’t sure where their own plant is exposed. It explains why attackers pick manufacturers, how they get in, and which controls actually reduce the damage. ACT360’s cybersecurity services are built around those same controls, across both the office and the production floor.

Manufacturers are targeted because a stopped production line creates pressure to pay fast. Downtime costs money by the hour, older plant equipment is hard or impossible to patch, and vendor connections add more ways in. Attackers are financially motivated, and plants give them leverage that most office businesses don’t.

The numbers back this up across several independent trackers. Breachsense’s January 2026 leak-site report counted 57 manufacturing victims claimed by ransomware groups that month, more than any other sector. Dragos’s industrial ransomware analysis for Q2 2026 recorded 1,140 ransomware incidents against industrial organizations, a 12% increase over the 1,020 in Q1, and 747 of them, about 65%, hit manufacturing.

The damage is operational, not just digital. In the ransomware cases Dragos observed in 2024, 75% disrupted operations to some degree and 25% caused a full shutdown of an operational technology site, according to the Dragos 2025 OT Cybersecurity Year in Review. A delayed email server is an inconvenience. A halted line means idle operators, missed shipments, and a customer who starts calling your competitor.

Aging operational technology (OT) compounds the problem. OT means the equipment and control systems that run the plant, such as PLCs, HMIs, and the PCs attached to machines. It often runs for a decade or more, and patching it isn’t like pushing a Windows update to an office laptop. Sometimes it can’t be patched at all without replacing the machine, which leaves part of the environment frozen in time from a security standpoint.

Mid-sized manufacturers are most at risk, not just large enterprises. Black Kite found 70.2% of 2026 manufacturing ransomware victims with known revenue earned between $10 million and $100 million a year. That’s big enough to pay a ransom, and often too small to have a dedicated security team watching the network.

Canada is part of that trend. Black Kite’s report tracked Canadian mid-market ransomware victims rising from 11 in 2023 to 71 in 2025. The 2025 CIRA Cybersecurity Survey of 500 Canadian cybersecurity decision-makers found 24% of organizations had been hit by ransomware in the previous 12 months, and 74% of those paid the ransom.

The Canadian Centre for Cyber Security’s Ransomware Threat Outlook 2025 to 2027 is blunt about who should worry, stating that all Canadian organizations, regardless of size or sector, are at risk. It names manufacturing among the industries affected in Canada, and notes that small and medium businesses are attractive because of limited IT infrastructure and minimal security staff. Attackers are opportunistic. They scan broadly for the easiest way in, so the plant that assumes it’s too small to matter is often the one with the least in place.

Most ransomware gets into manufacturing networks through stolen or purchased credentials, phishing, and exposed remote access, not a sophisticated technical breach. Once inside, attackers disable security tools, collect more passwords, and spread across the network before encrypting anything. The encryption is usually the last step, not the first.

Dragos’s Q1 2026 analysis lists credential theft, abuse of valid accounts, and exploitation of remote access services among the dominant techniques. Its Q2 2026 report adds exploited internet-facing firewalls and edge devices, fake IT support contacts over Microsoft Teams, and voice phishing. After getting in, disabling endpoint security and harvesting passwords saved in browsers was routine.

The table below maps the 6 most common entry points to where they show up in a plant and what closes them.

Attack vectors drawn from Dragos Q1 and Q2 2026 analysis and the Canadian Centre for Cyber Security’s Ransomware Threat Outlook. Defenses align with the Cyber Centre’s ransomware playbook and CISA’s #StopRansomware Guide.

Manufacturers reduce ransomware risk most by separating office and plant networks, enforcing phishing-resistant MFA, locking down vendor access, monitoring endpoints around the clock, and keeping offline backups that have actually been restored in a test. None of it requires replacing production equipment.

These controls match what the Canadian Centre for Cyber Security’s Ransomware Playbook and CISA’s #StopRansomware Guide both recommend, including separating IT and OT networks and keeping backups offline where ransomware can’t find them.

• Segment IT and OT. Keep factory-floor systems on a separate network from office systems, with firewall rules that only allow approved traffic between them. It limits how far an attacker can move after getting in.
• Phishing-resistant MFA on email, VPN, cloud consoles, and administrative accounts, since stolen credentials are the most common starting point. It’s also one of the first things insurers check, as our guide to cybersecurity insurance requirements in Ontario for 2026 explains.
• One controlled path for vendors. Replace standing vendor connections with a single logged, MFA-protected access route, and review who still has access every quarter.
• Endpoint detection and response (EDR) with 24/7 monitoring. Microsoft 365’s built-in tools don’t actively hunt for an attacker already inside, which is why Office 365 security on its own isn’t enough.
• Immutable, tested backups kept offline or out of reach of ransomware that targets connected backup systems. Rehearsing a ransomware recovery before it’s needed is the job of disaster recovery testing.
• Patch what you can, isolate what you can’t. Patch office systems and edge devices quickly, and schedule plant updates outside production hours. Equipment that can’t be patched goes on its own segment with tighter monitoring.

ACT360 protects manufacturers by treating the office network and the production floor as one security problem. That means monitored endpoints, identity protection for Microsoft 365, segmented networks, and patching scheduled around shifts, not during them. The goal is to stop an attacker before a stolen password turns into a stopped line.

ACT360 works with manufacturers across Central and Southern Ontario, and exhibited at ADM Toronto 2025, Ontario’s largest manufacturing and technology trade show, to talk with plant managers about exactly these problems. On the ground, the work looks like this.

• Huntress EDR backed by a 24/7 ThreatOps team watches every managed device and can isolate a compromised machine before the attacker moves further.
• Identity threat detection for Microsoft 365 flags unusual logins, impossible travel, and suspicious access patterns, the early signs of a stolen credential.
• SIEM log collection from SonicWall firewalls and Windows event logs supports threat hunting, even when an attacker wipes local logs.
• Security awareness training with simulated phishing for office and shop floor staff alike.
• Patch management scheduled outside production hours, as described on ACT360’s manufacturing IT services page.

For Airdex, a manufacturer of fans, blowers, and custom HVAC components, ACT360 rebuilt the server room and replaced the network switch with a new Meraki switch to improve performance and security, work documented in the Airdex server room case study. Network changes like that are the foundation that segmentation is built on.

Jeffrey Bowles, Partner and Director of IT Services at ACT360, frames the goal this way.

“I’d rather we catch this now, in a review, than have it show up as an incident in six months.”

Jeffrey Bowles, Partner & Director of IT Services, ACT360

Manufacturing sits at the top of ransomware data for a reason. Production downtime is expensive, and much of the equipment running the line was never designed with modern security in mind. Closing that gap doesn’t mean replacing the equipment. It means 3 things.

1. Know where your plant is exposed, including every vendor connection and every account without MFA.
2. Separate the office network from the production floor so one stolen password can’t stop the line.
3. Prove you can recover by restoring from offline backups in a test, before an attacker forces the question.

If you can’t say with confidence where your plant stands on those 3, that’s the place to start. ACT360’s IT Readiness Assessment is a free, no-obligation review that looks at the security of your office systems and your production floor together, and shows you which gaps matter most for your plant.

Call 705-739-2281 or email [email protected]