S P OT L I G H T S M A RT E R FA C T O R I E S
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CYBER SECURITY RESEARCH FOR INDUSTRIAL AUTOMATION Cyber security for industrial control systems has been largely neglected for many years. It received little attention from industry and research alike. The rise of elaborate cyber attacks and the associated financial impact has slowly turned the situation around. However, security methods established in information technology (IT) can often not be simply applied to industrial systems. Instead, adequate and dedicated methods for operational technology (OT) are required. AUTHORS: STEFAN HUBER, THOMAS ROSENSTATTER, OLAF SASSNICK, JOSEF RESSEL CENTRE ISIA
COPA-DATA and the Salzburg University of Applied Sciences (SUAS) have cherished their strong partnership over the past two decades. A prominent result of this collaboration is the Josef Ressel Centre on Intelligent and Secure Industrial Automation (JRC ISIA). The 2.50M research center was launched in July 2022. COPA-DATA is one of three cooperative partners and industrial cyber security is one of three research fields.
CYBER SECURITY FOR INDUSTRY Industrial systems have long been spared from cyber attacks, mainly due to their isolation from other networks, such as the Internet, and the proprietary nature of the computational systems. A key aspect of IoT and Industry 4.0, however, is the permeability of data, requiring devices and systems to be interconnected. Consequently, the number of connected IoT devices doubled from
eight billion to 16.7 billion devices1 within the last five years (from 2018 to 2023). This continuing trend makes cyber security a pressing issue, because the number of potential points malicious actors could use to attack the system (the attack surface) has vastly increased. Cyber attacks vary depending on the attackers’ motivation. The most common motives in 2022 were espionage and monetization 2. The goal of espionage is to gain access
State of IoT 2023: Number of connected IoT devices growing 16% to 16.7 billion globally. en-US. May 2023. url: https: //iot-analytics.com/number-connected-iot-devices/ (visited on 07/10/2023). 2 ENISA threat landscape 2022: July 2021 to July 2022. eng. OCLC: 1370608603. Heraklion: ENISA, 2022. isbn: 9789292045883 1
