The resilience of a manufacturing firm is defined by the integrity of its data and the uptime of its machinery. A single digital or physical vulnerability is a direct threat to your physical output.
Manufacturing remains one of the most targeted sectors for ransomware, industrial espionage, and increasingly, direct physical activism. Whether it is the theft of proprietary designs (IP), a digital attack on your production systems, or physical sabotage by activist groups, the impact is catastrophic: lost contracts, reputational damage, and total operational shutdown.
At Mongoose, we provide the specialist adversarial testing required to ensure your production never stops. We validate your security from the head-office network to the factory floor.
Adversarial Risks to the Manufacturing Sector
We focus on the specific technical and physical vectors that threaten modern industrial firms:
IT/OT Convergence Risks:
Identifying the pathways an attacker could use to pivot from a compromised office workstation into the sensitive systems controlling your production line.
Intellectual Property & Design Theft:
Securing the CAD files, proprietary recipes, and manufacturing processes that constitute your firm’s competitive advantage.
High-Risk Physical Sabotage:
Addressing the threat of ideologically motivated groups (activists) who seek to gain entry to your facility to damage equipment or disrupt operations.
Supply Chain & Third-Party Risk:
Testing the security of remote maintenance portals and vendor accounts, which are often the primary gateway for unauthorised network entry.
Our Specialist Services for Manufacturing Firms
Corporate & Production Network Audits
We perform deep-dive penetration testing on your corporate networks, cloud environments, and remote-access infrastructure. Our testing focuses on the Lateral Movement risk, ensuring that a compromise in your administrative office cannot be leveraged to gain control over your manufacturing execution systems or sensitive project data.
Manufacturing Site Resilience (Physical)
Delivered by our in-house team of former UK Special Forces (Special Reconnaissance Regiment) personnel, we conduct high-stakes physical audits. This is critical for firms in sensitive industries (Defence, Aerospace, or Pharmaceuticals) that face a credible threat of physical infiltration or sabotage from activist groups. We test the reality of your perimeter, your challenge culture, and the security of your critical production assets.
Industrial IoT (IIoT) & Smart Facility Testing
If your facility utilises IIoT or automated robotics, we test the security of these connected devices as part of our engagement. We identify misconfigurations that could allow an attacker to intercept machine data or manipulate the logic of your production environment, ensuring your smart infrastructure remains an asset, not a liability.
Objective:
A UK-based engineering firm required a penetration test to verify the resilience of their network following a recent upgrade.
The Operation:
Our digital team conducted an Internal Network Penetration Test. We identified a service account with weak permissions that allowed us to escalate our privileges to Domain Administrator. Simultaneously, we discovered an internal "admin portal" used for managing shop-floor machinery that had been left with default manufacturer credentials.
Outcome:
By combining the compromised AD credentials with the default portal access, we gained full administrative control over the entire production line & office workstations. We demonstrated that a single compromised office laptop could have led to a factory-wide shutdown. Our findings resulted in the immediate implementation of robust network VLAN segmentation and a total overhaul of the firm’s internal password and identity management policies.
Why is physical penetration testing vital for defence and sensitive manufacturers?
Can you test our systems without causing a production shutdown?
What is the risk of poor network segmentation in a factory?
Ready to see the gaps others are missing?
Don't wait for a real adversary to find the pathway. Contact our team today to discuss a tailored manual assessment for your organisation.
