Engineering firm IMI hit with cyber attack just days after Smiths Group incident
Birmingham-based engineering firm IMI has revealed that it has been hit by a cyber attack.
The FTSE-100 firm said the incident involved unauthorised access to its systems, but gave no further details.
“As soon as IMI became aware of the unauthorised access, the company engaged external cybersecurity experts to investigate and contain the incident. In parallel, the company is taking the necessary steps to comply with our regulatory obligations,” it said.
The company said that customers and staff had been informed about the incident.
The attack is believed to have affected the company’s systems globally – IMI currently operates in 50 countries across the US, Europe and Asia. It specializes in designing, building, and servicing fluid and motion control applications.
This marks the second cyber attack on an engineering firm in the space of a week, with Smiths Group having also fallen prey to cyber criminals.
“The proliferation of cyber attacks in 2024 shows that hackers are willing to target anything and everything, from major retailers to hospitals and crucially, key infrastructure,” said Spencer Starkey, executive VP of EMEA at cybersecurity firm SonicWall.
“As businesses and governments struggle with macroeconomic factors, hackers are going all in with a range of state-of-the-art tactics to confuse and paralyze businesses.”
2024 was the worst year on record for attacks on UK commercial organizations, according to a recent analysis by specialist internet business ISP Beaming.
The most frequent targets were remotely-controlled IoT devices, with more than 161 daily attacks targeting applications such as building control systems, security cameras, networked printers, remote monitoring software, and industrial automation systems.
Overall, UK firms experienced an average of more than 753,341 malicious attempts to breach their online and IT systems – a little up on 2023, which was itself a record year. Businesses were encountering a new online threat every 42 seconds on average.
Late last year, the new head of the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) warned that organizations were underestimating the risks from cyber criminals and hostile states.
Organizations were urged to do more to implement NCSC advice, guidance, and frameworks.
“Businesses today must prepare for the worst. It’s vital every single business has a robust roadmap in place to deploy if and when an attack happens. The preparation always begins with prevention: layered security systems and updated employee training are basic principles in today’s risky environment,” advised Starkey.
“The roadmap must be built around proper procedures to identify and contain security incidents, as well as notifying stakeholders and conducting a ‘No-Blame post-mortem’ analysis to identify what went wrong and how to fix it.”
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