THREAT-WATCHMANUFACTURING & INDUSTRIAL
Cybersecurity for Manufacturing
OT/ICS environments and NIS2's manufacturing-sector obligations both demand a different approach than standard office IT security.
Why this sector is different
NIS2 explicitly covers certain categories of manufacturing as an important-entity sector, alongside broader critical-infrastructure obligations that increasingly touch industrial supply chains. On top of the regulatory angle, manufacturing environments mix IT and OT (operational technology). A compromised office laptop can end up affecting production-line systems that were never designed with modern security in mind. Our office is in Thessaloniki, close to the Sindos industrial zone, one of the largest concentrations of manufacturing and logistics businesses in Northern Greece. This is genuinely our backyard.
More on our Thessaloniki & Sindos presence →Where NIS2 actually lands for manufacturers
NIS2 does not cover all manufacturing. Annex II lists specific categories as important entities: manufacture of medical devices, computer/electronic and optical products, electrical equipment, machinery, motor vehicles and other transport equipment. If you fall in one of those and meet the medium-enterprise threshold (50+ staff, or both annual turnover and balance sheet above €10M), you are in scope and the Article 21 measures apply. If you do not, NIS2 can still reach you through the back door: Article 21 makes supply-chain security the obligation of the entities you supply, so an in-scope customer will increasingly push evidence requirements down to you contractually. In practice, Greek manufacturers are more often pulled into NIS2 as a supplier than named directly, and that is the case worth checking first.
What coverage looks like in a plant
An industrial site is two networks with different rules. The office side takes standard endpoint coverage. The production side usually cannot: PLCs and HMIs often run unsupported operating systems, vendor warranties forbid installing agents, and a reboot is a production stoppage, not an inconvenience. So OT is monitored passively from network traffic instead, which identifies the devices and protocols actually running without touching the equipment. The highest-value control is usually neither of those: it is the IT/OT boundary, because that is where almost every real incident crosses. Segmentation that is actually enforced, monitored jump hosts, and detection tuned to that crossing point tend to matter more than anything deployed deeper in the plant.
IT/OT convergence risk
Attacks that start on standard office IT can pivot into production or logistics systems that lack modern endpoint protection.
Ransomware against production
Manufacturers are frequent ransomware targets specifically because downtime is expensive, which pressures faster ransom payment.
Supply chain exposure
Compromise of a supplier or logistics partner can become your incident, even when your own systems weren't the entry point.
Legacy equipment that cannot be patched
Industrial equipment often runs for fifteen years on an OS that stopped receiving updates a decade ago. Patching is not the answer because there is nothing to patch; compensating controls are. Segmentation, strict access control at the boundary, and monitoring are what reduce risk on kit that cannot be changed.
Talk to a local team about industrial security
We're based in Thessaloniki and understand the manufacturing and logistics environment around Sindos directly.