Warehouses are a critical part of global supply chains. As such, their operators must always pay strict attention to multiple aspects of their operations. Obviously, maintaining adequate security is a significant part of that. However, if you're running a warehouse, it's easy to forget that physical security isn't your only concern. Your warehouse likely depends on various digital technologies to facilitate its operations. Those technologies represent a potential vulnerability you can't afford to ignore. Here's a look at the digital threats warehouses face and the warehouse cybersecurity best practices you can use to defend yours.
The Warehouse Cybersecurity Threat Environment
Warehouses' pivotal role in modern supply chains makes them an appealing target for hackers and cybercriminals. It also makes them a target of state-sanctioned threat actors, who view economic disruption as fair game in any 21st-century war. Unfortunately, the average warehouse — yours included — likely has countless digital vulnerabilities to exploit.
Those digital vulnerabilities have been on full display in the past few years. Consider, for example, the recent ransomware attack on logistics SaaS provider Blue Yonder. It resulted in the disruption of countless warehouses and businesses that depended on the company's software. Or consider the news of hackers actively exploiting zero-day vulnerabilities in the VeraCore platform, one of the world's most popular warehouse management systems. Those were software flaws that even VeraCore wasn't aware of, leaving users defenseless against the attacks.
Worse still, those are just examples from the last few months. There were countless prior cyber-attacks affecting warehouses before them. And there will likely be many more security breaches ahead.
What's At Stake
It's important to recognize that the cyber threats to your warehouse could be existential. To understand why, consider the cascading effects a successful cyberattack might have on your own operation. For example, an attack on your inventory management system could lead to misrouted shipments, missing pallets, and severe shipping delays.
A successful cybersecurity breach could even be paralyzing if you depend heavily on automation for your palletized shipping operation. Imagine having to replace your automated systems with human workers while working to blunt a cyberattack. You likely lack the manpower to do so, so your warehouse would be out of commission. And if your inventory includes perishable goods, even a brief pause in shipment processing could be catastrophic and costly.
You should also know that your warehouse operates in a unique threat environment. Here in Southeast Florida, semi-frequent hurricanes pose their own cybersecurity challenges. Hackers frequently exploit the chaos surrounding natural disasters to strike. So, without adequate preparation, you could get stuck with simultaneous damage to your physical facilities and digital systems — making an already bad situation worse.
Protecting Food Safety from Cyber Threats
For foodservice distributors, cybersecurity isn't just about data protection—it’s critical to maintaining food safety compliance. A targeted cyberattack could disrupt refrigeration monitoring systems, leading to undetected temperature fluctuations that compromise perishable goods. Worse, hackers could manipulate inventory data, mislabeling expiration dates or shipment details, resulting in costly recalls or regulatory violations. Implementing strong cybersecurity measures ensures that food products remain safe, shipments stay accurate, and customers receive fresh, uncompromised goods.
Best Practices for Preventing Successful Cyberattacks
Most large-scale logistics operations, like Amazon warehouse logistics, rely on a layered defense to keep their palletized shipping operations safe from cyberattacks. Their strategies include adhering to the following warehouse cybersecurity best practices, which you can easily adopt.
Establish a Secure Digital Perimeter
Establishing a defensible perimeter is the first step in defending your warehouse from cyber threats. It is the digital equivalent of the hardened locks and alarms you've installed on your warehouse's entrances and exits. Establishing one requires a modern, updated hardware firewall between your warehouse's networks and the internet. A firewall creates a choke point for you to exert control over data transmission and connections to your network.
Next, you should deploy a modern VPN solution to facilitate secure access to your network from the outside. Where practical, you should insist that outside vendors, partners, and employees use your VPN to access your systems. That allows you to easily revoke access if your vendors suffer an attack, preventing their breach from affecting your systems. It can also prevent company-owned hardware like laptops from becoming security risks when lost or stolen.
Deploy Real-Time Traffic Monitoring and Analysis
One of the reasons that network security breaches are so tricky to detect is that they typically look like any other type of legitimate traffic. However, real-time network traffic monitoring and analysis solutions can help. They look for unusual activity within your warehouse's network that may indicate an attack in progress. One example would be an attempted connection to your inventory database from an unknown device. Or if a sensor on a conveyor line suddenly began communicating with an unknown address on the public internet. Many traffic monitoring solutions can trigger predetermined defensive measures to protect sensitive data and systems upon threat detection. It's an automated way of responding to security threats that buys you time for a more detailed analysis of and reaction to the situation.
Invest in Employee Training
It's also critical to understand that most data breaches and other cybersecurity incidents will stem from your employees' actions — or inaction. A recent study found that social engineering is an entry point for warehouse cyberattacks up to 32% of the time. In those cases, unauthorized individuals gain access to protected systems by duping authorized users into divulging their access credentials. The antidote to that is an investment in employee cybersecurity awareness training. Multiple companies offer a-la-carte cybersecurity training programs you can purchase for employees. You can even use free resources from the Federal Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Agency (CISA).
Use Hardware Security Tokens Where Possible
Even after you invest in employee training, you should proceed under the assumption that your employees remain a weak link in your cybersecurity chain. As a second layer of defense, you can reduce the threat of stolen credentials by using hardware security tokens where possible. They're a type of encrypted device used as a secure key to grant access to protected systems. Issuing them in place of passwords to your employees makes inadvertent credential disclosures impossible. And even if an employee loses their security key, there's no way for an attacker to know what systems it can access, making it useless to them.
Maintain Adequate Backups
Finally, in recognition that even the strictest cybersecurity measures may still fail, you'll need a way to ensure business continuity after any security incident. That effort should begin with daily backups of your warehouse's digital systems. Ideally, you want your backups to include all the data needed to perform from-scratch restorations of every critical system. Plus, you want to have multiple updated copies of those backups, including:
- Daily changes for a five-day rolling period
- Weekly full-system backups
- Monthly snapshots representing at least the two prior months
- Base installation images of every critical system
For several reasons, it's essential to keep historical backups, as described above. The first is to guard against time-delayed attacks. Frequently, hackers gain access to protected systems weeks or months before initiating a visible attack. Having historic backups allows restoration to a point before the intrusion. It also provides forensic data to identify what the hacker altered within your systems. And if all else fails, your base installation images allow for quick resets of critical systems to known good configurations.
Additionally, it is crucial to store all your data and system backups offline, preferably offsite storage. As a warehouse operator on Florida's Treasure Coast, offsite backups also provide disaster recovery capabilities in the aftermath of hurricanes. You can do it using inexpensive connected devices like portable hard drives and storing them offsite. You can also use cloud storage if you don't allow persistent connections or store access credentials within your network.
Operating a Digitally-Secure Warehouse
The foregoing warehouse cybersecurity best practices should protect your operation from the most common security risks and more sophisticated attacks. They also include recovery options if all other security systems fail.
A cyberattack can disrupt your entire supply chain—delaying shipments, misplacing inventory, and impacting customer trust. Ensuring a stable operation means having both strong cybersecurity and a reliable pallet supply. Order new pallets for shipping to keep your logistics running smoothly, even in the face of cyber threats.
