Cybersecurity for a new industrial age

Piotr Siwek, EMEA marketing director for factory automation at Mitsubishi Electric

In this article, Piotr Siwek, EMEA marketing director for factory automation at Mitsubishi Electric, discusses the importance of cybersecurity for companies increasingly adopting the latest interconnected Industry 4.0 advances.

For many decades, the primary focus of industrial cybersecurity has been to prevent machine downtime and keep factory operations running as smoothly as possible. While availability of assets remains a critical issue, a significantly bigger risk is beginning to emerge: namely, the loss of control and trust, as the worlds of information technology (IT) and operational technology (OT) infrastructure continue to converge.

This unification helps to facilitate real-time data exchange, enhancing the efficiency and effectiveness of both systems, and provides manufacturers with improved decision making and operational processes. However, the potential for cyber-attacks in disrupting operations remains a critical threat, and one that manufacturers cannot afford to ignore.

Current risks
In recent years, the cyber-attack vector has widened considerably for manufacturers, as the technology used by criminal entities has grown increasingly sophisticated, and capable of bypassing even some of the most complex security measures.

What’s more, manufacturing remains the most targeted industry for cyber-attacks, accounting for 26% of all ransomware incidents worldwide, with a further 26% of attacks affecting OT systems and other critical architectures.

The impact of these cyber-attacks can be severe, holding the potential to lead to unexpected shutdowns, loss of temperature control, damaged equipment, serious safety events, and extended downtime, to name just a few. All such incidents not only have a significant impact on digital security, but also on the physical processes and operations of critical infrastructure.

Meanwhile, although manipulated control models help to keep systems running, they do so in highly unpredictable ways, given the inherent limitations of their assumptions. As such, the decisions that they make have the potential to be even more dangerous than a complete shutdown.

The growth of AI also presents substantial cybersecurity risks for manufacturers. As AI systems become ever more integrated into industrial processes, they require robust cybersecurity measures to protect against severe risks like data poisoning or exfiltration, alongside a wealth of other cyber-attacks.

As such, it’s evident that the attack landscape for the manufacturing industry is an especially broad one, and is getting wider all the time, particularly as IT/OT convergence continues to spawn new threats. If they are to turn the tide on the risks that lie ahead, therefore, manufacturers must take swift and decisive action in strengthening their cybersecurity measures.

How to bolster protection
To ensure that they are sufficiently protected against the evolving threat landscape, manufacturers must focus their efforts on safeguarding control systems, while keeping supply chain access as limited as is feasibly practicable. After all, it stands to reason that the more weaknesses present within their supplier networks, the more vulnerable manufacturers are to the threat of cyber-attacks.

Implementing strong access controls and following National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)-aligned practices to defend OT networks and Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems are both effective methods of achieving this goal.

Meanwhile, emerging cybersecurity technologies are placing a strong focus on correct interaction with OT assets, as well as on an understanding of the OT environment, setting themselves apart from the many existing solutions that are primarily focused on safeguarding IT networks. As such, manufacturers should explore these emerging, OT-focused solutions to explore how they can optimise their protection against the threats.

Crucially, however, manufacturers must ensure that the basics of cybersecurity have been handled properly before making way for more sophisticated protection. This involves shifting mindsets from treating cybersecurity as an IT checkbox, and instead regarding it as a critical business function.
Conducting cyber risk assessments, network segmentation, and workforce training are all basic steps that should be taken to build a solid foundation for a more robust cybersecurity strategy in the future.

Furthermore, all digital assets within a facility should be recognised as real assets and afforded the same amount of care as their physical counterparts. Due to the interconnected nature of IT and OT systems, prioritising certain assets over others will simply lead to a disjointed cybersecurity approach and without a recognition of the potential threats that digital assets pose, they cannot hope to be properly secured. This will grow increasingly important as cybersecurity becomes just as much about awareness of the many risks to assets as it is about the technology itself.

A new vision
Cybersecurity has, for too long, been viewed by many within the manufacturing industry as an inconvenient problem that can easily ignored. Due to the complexity of today’s threat landscape, however, this is simply no longer the case.

To ensure that both control systems and data are properly protected, manufacturers must ensure that their cybersecurity systems are afforded a full certificate of trust. This need is especially pressing given the ongoing evolution of AI in industrial processes, and the acceleration of the technology across autonomous production in the years ahead.

Treating digital and physical assets equally, recognising the evolving nature of the cybersecurity attack landscape, and protecting control systems through stronger access management are all vital first steps in tackling the scourge of cyber-attacks, and for keeping production lines running like clockwork.