Leading global manufacturer of precision plastic components, Sunningdale Tech Ltd, has chosen BlackBerry Limited’s AI-driven autonomous prevention and always-on cybersecurity expertise to safeguard its manufacturing environment and reduce cyber-risk. The deployment of BlackBerry’s CylanceGUARD®, the Managed Detection and Response (MDR) solution, aims to ensure continuous protection against online, offline, and air-gapped environment attacks, given that the manufacturing industry and its supply chains are vulnerable to threat actors.

According to Anthony Pua, Chief Information Officer (Global IT) at Sunningdale Tech Ltd, as cyber-attacks against the manufacturing industry increase, they opted for a prevention-first approach to cybersecurity. He believes that CylanceGUARD has revolutionized their company by providing protection for their factory floor using a lightweight agent and expert external threat hunters that eliminate alert noise and stop threats, allowing their IT teams to concentrate on other essential matters.

BlackBerry’s Cylance® AI can function offline and with minimal human intervention, reducing the company’s daily security alerts from 20,000 to fewer than ten. Pua added that BlackBerry allows their team to focus on their core competencies while keeping an eye out for potential cyber threats. By leveraging BlackBerry’s expert analysts’ services, Sunningdale Tech can correlate telemetry across devices and receive actionable intelligence to prevent threats in their mixed environments. Pua believes that the deployment of CylanceGUARD is future-proofing their organization, given that he anticipates the eventual merging of IT and OT into a single ecosystem as manufacturers embrace Industry 4.0 and tear down the wall between the two.

BlackBerry reported in its recent Quarterly Threat Report on the types and scale of IT supply chain cyber-attacks that have been targeting the manufacturing industry, including the BlackCat cybercrime group. The group targets small and medium-sized businesses along the supply chain using ransomware to infiltrate the environment, exfiltrate valuable data, and encrypt connected systems, with manufacturers being their primary target.

Tash Stamatelos, Vice President, BlackBerry Cybersecurity APAC, noted that manufacturing has become one of the most attacked industries globally because traditional antivirus software and scarce IT teams cannot protect complex and connected supply chains. As a leader in intelligent cybersecurity, BlackBerry is helping organizations, such as Sunningdale Tech, with mixed OT and IT environments, to use Cylance AI and trained cyber experts to prevent attacks and enable a self-defending manufacturing floor.

CylanceGUARD is a 24×7 managed MDR service that provides Sunningdale Tech with access to trained threat prevention experts through a subscription-based model. The solution also includes CylancePROTECT® for endpoint protection (EPP) and CylanceOPTICS® for endpoint detection and response (EDR), which use the seventh-generation Cylance AI engine from BlackBerry. These prevention-first solutions offer enhanced visibility and always-on protection against current and future cyber threats in OT environments, ranging from ransomware to device-based attacks, with lightweight clients capable of operating entirely offline.