For manufacturers like WeatherTech, they can’t afford a cybersecurity incident to disrupt production. WeatherTech, a leader in automotive accessories, had a clear challenge: how to secure proprietary technology and ensure uninterrupted operations without overburdening lean security teams or disrupting critical processes.
This blog delves into how Hadrian’s agentic AI offensive security platform helped WeatherTech address unique manufacturing exposures, enabling them to stay ahead of threats, gain partner trust, and keep production lines running with confidence.
Unseen exposures threaten production and intellectual property
WeatherTech, a long-established company renowned for inventing, engineering, and manufacturing its products in-house, relies heavily on proprietary technology and processes for its competitive edge. However, like many modern manufacturers, WeatherTech utilizes numerous third-party platforms as part of its technology environment. Attacks on any of these providers can expose the company to critical cyber exposures, directly threatening their intellectual property. Compounding this, WeatherTech has developed a complex network of IoT and OT, which is becoming increasingly difficult to manage. External exposure assessments frequently requested by partners add further time and resource-intensive burdens.
Traditional security measures by themselves, such as point-in-time pentesting, often fall short of providing solutions for this complexity. Point-in-time assessments quickly become outdated as attack surfaces evolve. Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) or Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS) frequently lack visibility into OT networks or the myriad of shadow IT devices. This leads to blind spots and a reactive security posture, leaving manufacturers vulnerable to costly downtime and intellectual property theft.
Illumination of the entire attack surface
To counter these challenges, WeatherTech sought a solution that could provide best-in-class continuous exposure monitoring of their entire digital footprint, including third-party vendors. Hadrian’s innovative External Attack Surface Management (EASM) capabilities proved to be the ideal solution.
Hadrian’s continuous asset discovery engine, powered by agentic AI, autonomously scans the entire internet for all of WeatherTech’s digital assets, mapping them on a clustered Asset Graph. This goes beyond what traditional Attack Surface Management (ASM) tools provide by starting from the attacker's perspective, continuously probing the moment the attack surface changes. Using proprietary fingerprinting and reconnaissance technologies, Hadrian gathers deep contextual data on technologies, versions, configurations, and associated third-party providers. This continuous, comprehensive discovery ensures nothing slips through the cracks, from publicly exposed industrial control systems to overlooked test environments.
Beyond noise to real-world threats
For WeatherTech, knowing where exposures lay was just the beginning; verifying their true exploitability was paramount. Traditional scanners often generate thousands of alerts, many of which are false positives or theoretical exposures that consume valuable team time and lead to alert fatigue. WeatherTech needed confidence that every flagged item was a genuine threat.
Hadrian’s AI-driven security engine precisely validates these exposures using Adversarial Exposure Validation (AEV). It deploys hacking modules on findings, identifying real and relevant exposures by emulating attacker behavior with strict non-mutative actions, ensuring no disruption to live production systems. Each exposure is assigned a level of criticality based on its unique context, then visualized in a clustered Asset Graph, illustrating how each exposure could propagate through WeatherTech’s network.
This rigorous verification eliminates the need for WeatherTech to waste time chasing false positives, allowing their security team to focus solely on remediation, which resulted in an 80% boost in patching cadence. As the CISO at WeatherTech affirmed, "Hadrian’s innovative technology and experienced team wowed us from the first meeting. The platform discovered exposures that other solutions did not find, and the lack of false positives was another big ‘plus.’ At which point, it was a no-brainer for us to add the solution to our security stack."
Protecting intellectual property and third-party ecosystems
The threat of intellectual property theft is a constant concern for manufacturers. In May 2023, after a new vulnerability was disclosed, WeatherTech’s security team observed a string of automated attacks on their main domain provider. This incident highlighted the urgent need for continuous exposure monitoring of their third-party vendors, as IP located on these platforms could be compromised.
Hadrian provided the ideal solution. Its continuous, outside-in security platform allowed WeatherTech to monitor external exposures in their supply chain. Hadrian’s AI-driven reconnaissance and validation capabilities pinpoint where attackers are likely to make their initial access, safeguarding critical systems by identifying exposures that could lead to data exfiltration from third-party systems. This proactive approach gives manufacturers like WeatherTech confidence that their designs, processes, and trade secrets remain protected.
Seamless integration and operational continuity
A key concern for WeatherTech, particularly whilst undergoing digital transformation and connecting new OT to the network, was achieving continuous proactive security without disrupting business operations. Hadrian's platform was designed specifically for this. It provides 24/7/365 monitoring without any disruption to client systems. Hadrian employs both passive and active scanning; passive scanning is virtually "silent" and cannot impact infrastructure. Active scanning, which rigorously probes and validates exposures, is only deployed when necessary, strategically spreading the load on the network. If a new asset is discovered or the configuration of an existing one changes, an active scan may be triggered.
This innovation ensures Hadrian can provide deep probing and monitoring with no disruption to operational continuity. As WeatherTech's CISO noted, "Hadrian was able to analyze our attack surface in such depths and find those exposures other tools didn’t pick up on. It’s amazing to work with a tool with so little noise. If it came from Hadrian - we know it’s real."
Gaining the trust of partners with exposure transparency
With distribution links in over 80 countries, WeatherTech relies on global partners to enable its operations and growth. Consequently, the company is regularly required to prove compliance and undergo due diligence, a process that was previously resource-intensive due to manual efforts and reliance on external services.
The platform's user-centric features streamline remediation, compliance, and exposure communication. Beyond verifying exposures (saving security teams days of time), Hadrian uses stakeholder-specific exposure-scoring. This alternative methodology assesses exposures more accurately by considering how actively exposures are exploited, their technical impact, the automation potential of the exploit, and the impact on business operations. As a result, companies gain a more accurate metric of their external exposure that they can communicate confidently to partners, solidifying trust and ensuring seamless global operations.
Hadrian’s agentic pentesting fosters manufacturing excellence
WeatherTech's experience exemplifies how manufacturers can navigate the complexities of digital transformation by adopting a proactive, offensive security strategy. Hadrian provides the precision, speed, and scale required to secure modern manufacturing operations, continuously discovering and validating exposures that threaten production uptime, IP protection, and supply chain integrity.
By shifting to Hadrian’s solution, manufacturers gain clear visibility into their true attack surface, eliminate noise, accelerate remediation, and confidently communicate their strengthened security posture to all stakeholders. This proactive approach allows manufacturers to build truly resilient systems, secure their competitive edge, and navigate the convergence of digital and industrial technologies with confidence.
