Cybersecurity for Manufacturing in Ontario, Built Around a Plant That Can’t Stop

Because downtime is expensive, and attackers know it. A plant that loses its ERP or its line for a week faces missed shipments and angry customers, which makes it more likely to pay. Manufacturing is now one of the sectors ransomware groups hit most often.

• Manufacturing accounted for 22% of ransomware victims from April 2025 to March 2026, and Canadian mid-market victims rose from 11 in 2023 to 71 in 2025, according to Black Kite’s 2026 manufacturing and distribution report.
• About 65% of the 1,140 industrial ransomware incidents Dragos tracked in Q2 2026 hit manufacturing.
• 24% of Canadian organizations were hit by ransomware in the previous 12 months, and 74% of those paid, according to CIRA’s 2025 Cybersecurity Survey.

The pattern behind those numbers matters more than the numbers. Dragos found no case in Q2 2026 of attackers directly manipulating a control system. The line stopped because the office side was compromised: email, passwords, servers and the ERP. That’s where most of the protection has to go. The full threat picture is in why ransomware targets manufacturers in Canada.

Around-the-clock monitoring, endpoint and identity protection, log analysis, email protection, staff training, network hardening, tested backups and patching, all planned around your production schedule.

• 24/7 monitoring and endpoint detection and response (EDR) on office PCs, servers and the workstations on the floor that can run it.
• Identity threat detection for Microsoft 365, watching sign-ins for impossible travel and unusual access.
• Log analysis (SIEM) from firewalls, Windows events and syslog, filtered for real threats rather than noise.
• Email protection against spam, phishing and malicious attachments.
• Security awareness training with simulated phishing campaigns, for the office and the people on the floor who use email.
• MFA, firewall and network hardening, including segmentation between office and production systems.
• Backup and disaster recovery planning for your ERP, drawings and production data, tested rather than assumed.
• Patching outside production hours, plus vendor management and configuration reviews.

For what an assessment covers before any of this is put in place, read what a cybersecurity assessment actually covers.

Proof. OEM and enterprise customers send security questionnaires, and insurers ask for MFA, endpoint protection and tested backups before they’ll quote or renew. A plant that can’t answer either risks losing a contract or its coverage.

The questions overlap more than most owners expect: who has admin access, how backups are protected, how quickly an incident would be found, and how staff are trained. ACT360 builds security assessments for OEM and enterprise vendor questionnaires into its manufacturing work, so the evidence exists before the request arrives. On the insurance side, cybersecurity insurance requirements in Ontario lists what carriers typically ask for, and what a data breach really costs mid-sized businesses shows why the premium is the cheaper number.

A six-figure payment redirect. A convincing email used a real employee’s name and an active payment conversation to ask a business partner to change banking details for an EFT payment worth over six figures.

The partner paused and asked for confirmation. ACT360 reviewed the Microsoft 365 environment, confirmed there was no breach, and traced the email to a newly registered lookalike domain one letter off from the real one. The payment was protected, and the client added phone verification and dual approval for payment changes. As ACT360 partner Jeffrey Bowles put it, “one pause saved a six-figure loss.” The full story is in the fraud investigation case study.

Plants that buy steel, resin or parts on payment terms see the same kind of attempt. The controls are cheap; the loss isn’t.

It depends on users, devices, protection layers and compliance needs, so ACT360 prices it after an assessment instead of quoting from a headcount.

For most plants, security sits inside a broader managed IT arrangement, which is where the numbers make the most sense to compare. Our guide to what managed IT costs a manufacturing business in Ontario breaks that down by plant size. When security is delivered as part of an ACT360 Managed IT agreement, that agreement includes a 90-day exit clause. For a plant also looking at AI, the same groundwork supports both; see AI automation for manufacturing in Ontario.