How Gloucestershire manufacturers can reduce cyber risk and production line downtime

UK manufacturing faces increasing cyber threats causing costly production downtime. This guide details how Gloucestershire manufacturers can mitigate these risks and protect business continuity.

Gloucestershire manufacturers are experiencing an increase in cyber risk.

UK manufacturing as a whole is becoming more exposed to disruption caused by cyber-attacks as factories rely on connected systems, industrial software, cloud platforms, and third-party suppliers. 

Ransomware and denial-of-service attacks are among the most damaging threats. They can stop production, delay shipments, disrupt supply chains, and create direct financial losses. 

For manufacturers, cyber risk now reaches far beyond IT systems. It affects uptime, safety, fulfilment, customer commitments, and business continuity. In this guide Nick Rowntree highlights what Gloucestershire manufacturers can do to reduce their risk.  

Reduce cyber risk, reduce downtime

For any manufacturer, downtime is the enemy of a profitable business, long before cyber security becomes a topic of conversation.  
 
A stopped line means missed orders, penalty clauses, and a phone that won’t stop ringing. Nothing new for manufacturers but what has changed in the last few years is what is increasingly causing this downtime. With improvements in plant machinery, it’s not a worn-out motor or a supply delay, but a cyber-attack that never touched a single machine directly. 

It’s worth highlighting that manufacturing is now the most targeted sector for ransomware in the UK, ahead of even healthcare and financial services. Attackers understand the sector’s reliance on technology, and that production lines have very little tolerance for downtime. Typically, this greatly shortens the time between a cyber breach and a ransom payment. 
 
In plain terms, attackers know that every hour a line stands still is an hour that costs real money and real relationships. It means manufacturers are more likely to pay, and to pay quickly.

When it goes wrong, it goes wrong publicly 

The clearest illustration of the impact of a cyber attack was in September 2025, when Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) was forced to halt production across its UK plants in Halewood in Merseyside.

At the height of the disruption, the company was reportedly losing tens of millions of pounds a day, with roughly a thousand fewer vehicles rolling off the line daily. In total, production was halted for around five weeks.

The Cyber Monitoring Centre later classified it as a systemic event, estimating the total UK economic impact at £1.9 billion and noting effects across more than 5,000 connected organisations in JLR’s supply chain. A stark reminder that an incident experienced by a single manufacturer rarely stays contained in that one business. 

When hearing about JLR, it’s tempting to assume that cyber-attacks like this target global brands and enormous supply chains, with attackers deploying large resources to plan a sophisticated campaign.

But the reality is far different and closer to home. Of the ransomware cases reported to UK authorities over the past year, manufacturing accounted for more reports than any other named sector, and the majority of victims across all sectors were small and mid-sized businesses.

Three quarters of maufacturers report a cyber attack

A 2026 ESET survey of UK manufacturing decision-makers found that 78% of U.K. manufacturers had experienced a cyber incident in the past year. Of those affected, 95% reported a direct business impact, 53% suffered a financial loss, 44% faced supply chain disruption, and 39% missed a customer or supplier commitment as a direct result.  
 
In addition, over half reported costs relating to a breach reached more than £250,000, with three-quarters facing between one and seven days of lost production.

For context, the government’s own Cyber Security Breaches Survey found that 43% of UK businesses overall reported a breach in the past year, rising to 67% for medium-sized businesses and 74% for large ones.  

These figures demonstrate that manufacturing is running well ahead of the national trend, with all sizes of businesses affected. JLR is just the headline.  

The stark reality is that there is a high chance that an SME manufacturer, somewhere in Gloucestershire, is currently losing several days of output to a problem that started with one compromised login or a misplaced click on an unexpected link. 

Ransomware attacks on manufacturers increase

Ransomware is no longer a fringe threat either. The National Crime Agency (NCA) describes ransomware as the UK’s greatest serious and organised cyber-crime threat. The implications of which extend to critical national infrastructure and national security. Not language regulators use lightly.  
 
Denial-of-service attacks, which flood a system with traffic until it can no longer function, are a related and less-discussed risk. Government data shows they affected 15% of large businesses that experienced a breach, against 5% of businesses overall. For a manufacturer, that risk isn’t limited to a public website. It extends to customer portals, supplier platforms, remote access tools and cloud dashboards. Any of these going dark can bring planning and order processing to a halt just as effectively as a factory-floor incident. 

Why manufacturing is a soft cyber-crime target  

Part of the reason that manufacturing businesses in Gloucestershire and across the UK are such a popular target is structural. Modern factories increasingly connect operational technology; the PLCs, SCADA systems and industrial controllers, to the same networks used for their email, finance, and general office IT.  That integration is usually driven by good intentions: remote monitoring, predictive maintenance, and easier diagnostics. But it also means that a vulnerability on the office side of the network no longer remains there in silo.

Without proper segregation, an attacker that gets a foothold into a standard laptop can, in principle, find a route through to the systems controlling the line – and the business-itself.

Legacy equipment compounds the problem. Machinery bought and installed years ago often runs on operating systems that are no longer supported or can’t be patched without risking a production stoppage of their own. Or they were never designed with today’s threat landscape in mind. Upgrading it isn’t always simple or affordable, so it tends to stay in place; connected, ageing, and quietly exposed. 

Then there’s the supply chain itself. Most manufacturers sit somewhere in a longer chain of suppliers and customers. Increasingly, that’s exactly where attackers look. A breach doesn’t need to originate inside your own network to affect you; a compromised supplier with access to your systems, or a shared software platform, can just as easily be the entry point.

The JLR incident illustrated how the disruption didn’t stop at the door of JLR’s own facilities; it cascased out to thousands of businesses that were linked and co-dependent on it.

The hourly costs of cyber crime

It’s worth being transparent about the numbers that are widely accepted to sit behind the general disruption caused by a cyber-attack.

Manufacturing downtime in the UK is estimated to cost on average somewhere in the region of £22,000 per hour, and considerably more for larger or more complex operations.  

That figure makes the potential financial impact of any cyber-attack very different from a typical office-based business. A phishing email that might cost a professional service firm a difficult afternoon can cost a manufacturer several days of stalled output, leading to contractual penalties, and a damaged relationship with a key customer, all before recovery and remediation costs are even added up. 

This is also why traditional, reactive IT support struggles to keep up in a manufacturing environment. A pay-as-you-go model is built around responding once something has already gone wrong. On a production line, ‘already gone wrong’ can mean that the output from an eight-hour shift is lost before anyone even picks up the phone.

Read why pay-as-you-go IT support isn’t always cheaper than a managed service contract

How Gloucestershire manufacturers can reduce the risk of cyber attacks 

We know manufacturers typically want solutions that don’t impact production. 
 
On a positive note, reducing the risk of cyber-crime doesn’t necessarily mean ripping out and replacing existing machinery or infrastructure. The more realistic starting point is visibility and separation. It’s important to know what’s connected to what, and making sure operational systems sit separately from general office IT rather than sharing a flat, open network.  

Next, the priorities for manufacturers are really the same ones that apply to other sectors, but perhaps matter more acutely here. They include regular patch management, which should be scheduled around production windows rather than disrupting them, testing backups that specifically cover production and control systems and not just office files, and a documented recovery plan that’s been rehearsed rather than assumed to work. 

Staff awareness matters too, and it’s often overlooked on the production side. Office-based cyber training tends to focus on email and admin staff, while production staff, who may have their own logins to machinery interfaces or shared systems, are left out of the loop, despite having access that’s just as valuable to an attacker. 

Despite the incresed risk and impact, current research demonstrates that this holistic approach to preparation and prevention of a cyber-attack is still the exception rather than the rule.

The government’s Cyber Security Breaches Survey found that only 32% of UK businesses have a business continuity plan that covers cyber security, falling to just 27% among the smallest firms.  

In other words, anything from two-thirds to three-quarters of Gloucestershire manufacturers currently have no documented response to a cyber-attack and no immediate process that determines whether a single compromised login stays as a minor IT ticket or becomes a week of lost production. 

How we can help

None of the steps outlined above need to happen overnight, and they don’t need to impair production time. But they do need to start somewhere, and that usually begins with an honest picture of where the security gaps actually are.  

A short IT and cyber risk review, focused specifically on how your office and production systems are connected, is a less disruptive way to find out whether your line is as protected as you think it is, before an attacker establishes it for you. 

Get in touch to find out more