Chattanooga & the I-24 Corridor: Cyber Risk for Logistics and Manufacturing

Chattanooga and the I-24 corridor have quietly become a logistics and light manufacturing hub. If you run a warehouse, trucking operation, or plant in this region, you’re probably more focused on uptime, throughput, and on-time delivery than on patch cycles or MFA policies. Attackers understand that dynamic, and they lean on it.

Ransomware crews in particular love environments where downtime is expensive and margins are tight. A warehouse that can’t ship, a plant that can’t run production, or a logistics shop that can’t see its loads is under enormous pressure to get back online. That pressure can translate into ransom payments if recovery options aren’t clear and tested.

From an adversarial perspective, the pattern in this region looks familiar: aging Windows boxes running critical line-of-business apps, vendor-managed equipment on the same network as office machines, remote access tools installed for convenience, and backups that haven’t been fully tested under stress. None of that is unique to Chattanooga—but the concentration of time-sensitive operations is.

Improving your situation doesn’t require a full rebuild. Start by identifying which systems truly keep the business moving: WMS, TMS, ERP, label printers, PLC interfaces, and the machines that directly control them. Then ask a hard question: if one of these were encrypted tomorrow, how would we recover, in what order, and using which backups or rebuild paths? If you don’t have clear answers, that’s a priority.

Network segmentation is another powerful tool. If every device in your warehouse or plant lives on the same flat network, ransomware has an easy time moving sideways. Even simple segmentation—separating office IT from operational systems, locking down who can talk to what, and restricting remote access to specific jump points—can dramatically slow down or contain an incident.

In this region, vendors often have deep access. They remote into your systems to troubleshoot gear, update software, or pull data. Those access paths need the same scrutiny you’d give your own internal users. Who can log in? From where? With what authentication? What happens if their credentials are stolen or their systems are compromised?

Ingress Labs works with logistics and manufacturing clients by blending operational realities with adversarial thinking. We don’t tell you to shut down every risky system—you still need to ship. Instead, we help you make sure that an attacker who lands on one machine can’t effortlessly take the rest with them, and that if something does go wrong, you have a practiced, realistic way to come back.

If you’re operating along the Chattanooga and I-24 corridor and feel like cybersecurity is a luxury you don’t have time for, consider how much time an unplanned week of downtime would cost. The right time to tune your defenses is before that math becomes real.

If you’re running logistics or manufacturing operations in the Chattanooga or I-24 corridor and want a clear view of your real cyber risk, the Chattanooga service-area page at local cybersecurity for Chattanooga is a good starting point—and the contact page is where you can request a focused review.