Cybersecurity in automotive manufacturing: protecting smart factories and supplier networks from cyber attacks
Publish Date: 2026-05-12 05:11:00
Source Domain: www.automotivemanufacturingsolutions.com
The production line has long been a place of optimised precision, where every millisecond of downtime carries a measurable cost. But as automotive manufacturers wire their plants deeper into cloud infrastructure, connect hundreds of supplier systems, and layer artificial intelligence across manufacturing execution, a new kind of vulnerability is taking root on the shop floor.
Bodo Philipp, Chief Executive of MHP Consulting UK, a subsidiary of Porsche AG within the Volkswagen Group, has watched this transformation with the trained eye of someone who advises some of the world’s most complex manufacturing operations. His assessment is simultaneously clear-eyed and sobering.
The first and most structurally stubborn problem in automotive manufacturing cybersecurity is the machinery itself. Modern production lines are not clean, homogeneous computing environments – they are layered accumulations of industrial equipment from different vendors, running proprietary operating systems that in some cases predate the smartphone.
Bodo Philipp, CEO, MHP Consulting UK, outlines how legacy machinery and connected suppliers expose automotive factories to cyber threats.
MHP Consulting
Carmaking machines built for another era
“In automotive manufacturing, one of the biggest cybersecurity challenges is the extremely heterogeneous and long-lived machinery landscape,” says Philipp. “Production lines rely on industrial equipment from many different vendors, often running proprietary operating systems or legacy software that has been in service for 10, 15, or even 20 years. These machines are highly reliable from an operational perspective, but they were never designed with modern cybersecurity threats in mind.”
The problem is not merely…
