Cyber Security Coventry

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Engineering environments and the limits of central IT

Coventry’s automotive and advanced engineering businesses tend to run two estates that only pretend to be one. There is the corporate network, managed properly and patched on a schedule, and there is everything attached to the engineering function: test rigs, measurement equipment, controllers, machines with a vendor support contract that forbids changing anything.

Keeping that second estate outside central IT control is a defensible engineering decision. The problem is that it is rarely written down as a decision, so nobody owns it, and the segregation that everybody assumes exists usually turns out to be a shared switch and some optimism.

Testing that properly means agreeing in advance what must not be touched. We scope around production rather than through it, and where something genuinely cannot be tested live, we say so and look at it another way instead of pretending the result covers it.

Prototype data is the asset nobody classifies

In an engineering business the crown jewels are frequently a CAD directory, a test dataset or a tooling drawing, and they are almost never classified as sensitive in any policy. They sit on a share that half the organisation can reach because somebody needed access to one file in 2019.

Before buying anything, it is worth answering two questions. Which directories would genuinely damage the business if a competitor had them, and who can currently open them. The answer to the second is usually larger than anybody expects, and narrowing it costs nothing.

Flow-down from the automotive tier structure

Automotive supply is layered, and security requirements travel down the layers with a lag. A tier one supplier that accepted a reputation and a handshake five years ago now has an assurance process, and it applies to tier two, which applies it to tier three.

What arrives at the bottom of that chain is often a questionnaire written for an organisation ten times the size, and the honest answer to several questions is that the control does not apply. Saying so clearly, with a sentence explaining why, lands better than leaving boxes blank or inventing a policy document. We can read one of these with you and work out which answers need actual work and which need a sentence.

Coventry’s universities and the organisations that come out of them

Two universities and a substantial research and development presence mean a steady flow of small, technically capable organisations with valuable intellectual property and no security function. The pattern is consistent: strong engineering, weak account hygiene, and a cloud estate that grew by whoever needed what.

For an organisation at that stage, a penetration test is usually premature. Getting multi-factor authentication enforced everywhere, administrative rights separated from day-to-day accounts, and a backup that has actually been restored from will do more for the risk than a report will.

Distance and how we work

Coventry is under an hour from Albrighton, which means on-site attendance is practical when it earns its place. Most testing runs remotely because remote testing is not a compromise for the majority of scopes, and we do not add travel to a quote for anywhere in the West Midlands.

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