Cyber Security Challenges in the Digital World
In the growing digital world, Cyberattacks have become an everyday threat. They not only affect financial and customer data, but machinery and industrial engineering companies through networked production systems and software-laden products. A holistic approach is needed to fully counter these threats.
Recently hackers attack on Intelligence Agency, data theft from US government agencies, a spy attack on the German federal government. A recent American Bar Association survey found that one in four law firms with at least 100 attorneys have experienced a breach. Leading New York Law Firms hacked by Cyber attackers. Four North American hospitals The Ottawa Hospital, Kentucky Methodist Hospital, Chino Valley Medical Center and Desert Valley Hospital were recently infected with ransomware in March 2016: Spectacular cases of cybercrime like these are now a regular feature of daily news headlines. Indeed, cyber security attacks have become a major threat to companies around the globe and across all industries. From the year 2010, annual cyberattacks globally have increased ten times over.
Not long ago, nearly a thousand globally dispersed CCTV cameras were revealed to be enslaved to an IoT botnet for launching DDoS attacks. This news followed research indicating that several baby monitor products were laden with vulnerabilities exposing connected-home systems to a breach. And let’s not even get started on the YouTube Tea Kettle hack video. These recent examples show how little effort is required for hackers to exploit unsecured devices, and they rightly renew fears about how the rise of the Internet of Things (IoT) is being outpaced by a rise in risks to user data, privacy and devices.
The World Economic Forum’s 2015 Global Risk Report ranks cybercrime as a top ten risk to the global economy. High-tech nations in particular, such as Germany and the United States, are preferred targets for increasingly aggressive, diverse, and sophisticated cyberattacks.
Motivation behind attacks
The result is that enterprises now must consider manifold threat scenarios when assessing their cybersecurity. In the past, manufacturing companies mainly had to worry about cyberattacks as a form of industrial espionage. Today, however, cyberattacks can include attempts to take control of production networks and infrastructure for a huge ransom, infecting machinery with malware to attack the end customers, indirect attacks on critical infrastructure via controllers, etc. Networked manufacturing in the context of Industry 4.0, M2M and the Internet of Things (IoT) likely will give rise to yet
more threats.
Precautions and Preparation needed Globally
Governments are responding to the threat of cyberattacks. In the United States, for example, executive orders this year have authorized sanctions against “cyberspace threats” and created a new Cyber Threat Intelligence Integration Center (CTIIC) to coordinate information sharing. The German government recently passed a law that will require institutions on a list of critical infrastructure to adopt state-of-the-art information security.
Individual companies are a different story. It’s alarming how poorly prepared machinery and industrial engineering companies are, particularly small and medium-sized companies, which often don’t take cyber threats seriously enough and fail to implement appropriate countermeasures. This is partly due to a lack of understanding of the intensity of threats and partly to not knowing how to mitigate the risks. In many organizations, the information technology (IT) departments are still in charge of dealing with cyber risks. This is no longer enough: If a company wants to effectively improve its resilience, it must adopt a mix of measures in the areas of technology, organization, governance, and culture, and integrate them into the company’s established risk management processes.