Manufacturing has been the #1 most-attacked industry for years. The vector hasn’t changed.
It’s email. Vendor-impersonation invoice fraud. CAD-file extraction disguised as RFQ replies. Ransomware notes that ride a fake DHL update onto a corporate laptop and pivot toward the OT network. StrongestLayer reasons about each one before it reaches engineering, finance, or the shop floor.
The patterns getting past Microsoft and Proofpoint.
Each is sophisticated enough to clear a legacy gateway. Each is reasoning-detectable in seconds.
A real supplier (or a compromised one) sends an updated wire instruction. The email is from their actual domain. The legacy SEG sees a known-good sender. AP sees a familiar name and pays.
An attacker poses as a vendor engineer and asks a perfectly reasonable question that needs a CAD file or process doc as a reply. Polite, specific, in context — AI-drafted to match how your real vendor writes.
A fake DHL or FedEx update lands in a corporate inbox — purchasing, receiving, an EA. The lure is plausible. The link drops a stealer. From a corporate laptop, lateral movement to a bridged OT network is two hops.
We don’t touch your shop floor. We protect the bridge to it.
StrongestLayer integrates with corporate email APIs only. The OT side stays untouched.
Your OT network
No SCADA agents. No PLC instrumentation. No shop-floor devices. No traffic mirroring on the OT side.
- No agents on operator HMIs
- No traffic mirroring on the plant network
- No changes to MES, historian, or DCS
The corporate email side of the bridge
Email is the most common entry path for ransomware that ultimately disrupts production. Stop it on the IT side and the OT bridge isn’t crossed.
- Reasoning over inbound and outbound corporate mail
- Vendor-impersonation, CAD-extraction, and ransomware-lure detection
- SIEM forwarding (Microsoft Sentinel, Splunk, Radiant Security)
Aligned with the frameworks your auditors actually care about.
Documentation packs available under NDA for each.
CMMC 2.0
SI, SC, AC, IR families — email-borne threat protection mappings.
NIST 800-171
3.13.x communications protection and 3.14.x system integrity.
ITAR
Outbound DLP for export-controlled technical data.
ISO 27001
A.13 communications and A.14 acquisition controls.
Quick answers on manufacturing deployments.
Why is manufacturing the most-attacked industry?
IBM X-Force has ranked manufacturing the #1 most-attacked industry for several consecutive years. Supply chains create thousands of legitimate external contacts — vendors, distributors, freight forwarders, contract manufacturers — making sender spoofing easy and verification hard. IP moves over email. IT and OT networks are increasingly bridged.
Does StrongestLayer affect OT or shop-floor systems?
No. We integrate with corporate email (Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace) via API. We do not touch OT networks, SCADA systems, or shop-floor devices. The intent is to stop email-borne attacks before they reach IT users who could be the bridge into OT.
Does StrongestLayer help with CMMC, NIST 800-171, or ITAR compliance?
Yes. StrongestLayer satisfies the email-borne threat protection and continuous monitoring requirements. Compliance documentation pack is available under NDA.
What about contract manufacturers and supplier networks we don’t control?
You can’t secure their email — but you can reason about their email when it lands in yours. A “known good” sender doesn’t matter if the intent and behavioral pattern don’t fit.
Email is the manufacturing attack vector. Let us close it.
15-minute API deploy. No MX changes. No OT impact.
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Tomorrow's Threats. Stopped Today.
