For manufacturers of enterprise connected devices (ECDs) - VoIP phones, office printers, video conferencing systems, access control hardware - the era of “not caring about security” is over.

You don’t need to assume an immediate, catastrophic breach to see this. The odds are already stacked against you. Attack frequency is increasing, attacker sophistication is improving, and regulatory tolerance for insecure products has collapsed.

What used to be dismissed as “edge cases” are now systemic risks.

Insecure Devices Are No Longer an Outlier Problem

The primary risk is not a single vulnerability, but the sheer volume and persistence of them across IoT and embedded ecosystems.

In my experience, common failures still include:

  • Hardcoded or default credentials
  • Unauthenticated or weakly authenticated management interfaces
  • Unvalidated or plaintext device-to-cloud communication
  • Patch mechanisms that are unreliable or nonexistent

These aren’t theoretical problems. Recent vulnerabilities enabling man-in-the-middle attacks against connected cameras and conferencing systems are examples of flaws that should not exist in enterprise products - but still do.

What’s striking isn’t that these vulnerabilities exist, but that after more than a decade of public incidents, some manufacturers still treat them as someone else’s problem. That tells you this is no longer a technical gap, but an organizational failure.

In 2025 alone, IoT-related incidents surged:

  • Multiple 2025 industry surveys indicate that roughly three-quarters of enterprises reported at least one IoT-related security incident.
  • Manufacturing and critical infrastructure sectors were among the most targeted.
  • Extortion and data theft were the dominant motives.

As one industry report summarized:

“Third-party vendor and supply chain compromise was the second most prevalent attack vector and the second costliest, at $4.91 million.”

Enterprise connected devices are no longer “peripherals.” They are part of the attack surface.

From “Cool Gadget” to Corporate Entry Point

The UK National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) puts it plainly:

“ECDs are a hugely attractive target for different types of threat actor as they can hold and process valuable, sensitive, or personal data. Many categories of ECDs (particularly IoT devices) present an easy target to compromise due to typically limited security efforts by vendors, a large attack surface, and their use as a base for lateral movement.”

This transition - from helpful device to network foothold - is now one of the most common initial access paths in modern enterprise breaches.

Attackers favor ECDs because they are often:

  • Unpatched
  • Unmonitored
  • Running outdated software stacks
  • Deployed behind overly permissive firewall rules

Once compromised, these devices can:

  • Exfiltrate sensitive data directly
  • Serve as command-and-control nodes
  • Act as a bridgehead for lateral movement into core systems

From an attacker’s perspective, they are ideal.

The Walls Are Closing In

Based on current incident frequency, regulatory enforcement timelines, and insurance behavior in 2025, manufacturers that systematically ignore security are operating inside a narrow risk window, plausibly 18 to 36 months, before they encounter an extinction level event.

This doesn’t require multiple breaches. One well-documented, high-impact incident is enough.

The Financial Reality

The often-quoted “60% of small businesses fail after a breach” statistic is debated - and shouldn’t be used uncritically. But the broader conclusion is not controversial.

According to firms like IBM and Hiscox, for SMEs and mid-sized manufacturers, a major breach is not an IT problem. It is a viability crisis.

In 2025:

  • The average cost of an industrial IoT breach ranged from $4.44M to $5.56M, depending on sector
  • These figures include downtime, response costs, legal exposure, and reputational damage

For ECD manufacturers, the risk compounds.

A single vulnerability is not a single incident - it can be hundreds or thousands of downstream incidents, across customers you may never directly interact with.

If your device becomes the initial access vector for a breach at a household-name client:

  • They will stop buying
  • Their insurers will pursue recovery
  • Your legal exposure multiplies rapidly

At that point, survival becomes unlikely.

Regulation Now Has Teeth

In the past, “we were hacked” was an explanation. In 2026, it is a liability.

Both the EU and the US have shifted from guidance to enforcement:

  • The EU Cyber Resilience Act mandates security-by-design and patch obligations
  • Updated CISA and procurement requirements increasingly exclude non-compliant devices

Governments now have the authority to effectively ban the sale of insecure connected devices outright through procurement exclusion, market surveillance, and compliance enforcement.

If a government customer determines that your product enabled the compromise of sensitive data, the outcome is no longer just a fine - it can be a permanent prohibition on selling that product line.

That is not a recoverable event.

One Incident Is Enough

What many company owners and executives consistently underestimate is that a single security incident can trigger a cascade of business, legal, and reputational consequences that are effectively impossible to control once set in motion.

It does not take a pattern of negligence - just one undeniable case.

Imagine:

  • Ransomware enters a customer environment via an ECD, OR
  • A device is shown to have enabled surveillance or data leakage
  • A public incident report explicitly names the vendor and documents the failure

The cascade is predictable:

  • Customers do not negotiate, they rip and replace.
  • Insurers deny coverage.
  • Executives panic and overcorrect.

At that point, the company as it exists today typically has 12-24 months to radically transform - or wind down.

The Trust Deficit and Replacement Cycles

Ironically, a diverse customer base increases risk.

When a small, unknown customer is breached, the damage is quiet. When a household brand or government institution is breached, it becomes public - and sticky.

Enterprise buyers now perform supply chain security audits. Once a reputable security firm publishes a critical vulnerability in an ECD - and IoT devices remains low-hanging fruit - replacement decisions often happen within one fiscal quarter.

The failure mode is slow but fatal:

  • Security questionnaires get stricter.
  • Deals stall.
  • Renewals quietly fail.
  • Sales teams blame pricing or competition.

Until the pipeline collapses.

So what?

If you are a manufacturer today, start here - in this order.

This ordering matters. Without the foundations, downstream controls either fail silently or create a false sense of security.

Not negotiable

  • Implement secure update mechanisms: Ensure you can patch devices in the field, reliably and securely.
  • Establish a Vulnerability Disclosure Program (VDP): Make it easy for researchers and customers to report vulnerabilities, and process reports for the entire product lifecycle.
  • Audit your SBOM (Software Bill of Materials): Know what’s in your product, including all third-party and open-source components.
  • Disclose vulnerabilities: This builds trust with customers and regulators, improves collective defense by sharing threat intelligence, and reduces the overall impact and cost of attacks through faster, coordinated response.

Engineering Hygiene

  • Remove secrets: Eliminate hardcoded credentials or private keys. Never, ever, rely on code obfuscation.
  • Service Minimization: Disable unnecessary services.
  • Harden your software: Use zero trust design principles for all new modules, always use the least viable permissions. Use static code analysis (SAST) to avoid issues like buffer overflows.

Operational Maturity

  • Secure lifecycle support: Provide timely security updates, publish clear end-of-support dates, offer responsible decommissioning guidance.
  • Train your team: Make security part of engineering culture, not just compliance.

Pivot or Die

The only way to stop this clock is a top-down shift.

Security cannot be treated as:

  • A cost center
  • A compliance checkbox
  • An obstacle to shipping

For enterprise connected devices, security is now a prerequisite for market access.

Manufacturers that recognize this early can change their trajectory. Those that don’t won’t fail because of a lack of innovation - they’ll fail because they treated security as someone else’s problem.

And in 2026, that mistake is no longer survivable.