Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1472190
24 SMT007 MAGAZINE I JULY 2022 Tube.) Imagine a group of vehicles taken over and used for coordinated disruption. As vehi- cle control security is ever heightened, the hackers simply get more resourceful; they are focusing on manufacturing, with even the sim- plest and seemingly innocuous Smart/con- nected devices as targets. Cars have hundreds of interconnected controllers, where a sim- ple media player or window winder module could become the cyberattack entry point. In the same way, a compromised USB stick on the manufacturing shopfloor could easily be the attack mechanism. Once they succeed into a manufacturing net- work, it is open season on: • Competitive information: Customer and supplier names, capacities, capabilities, schedules, and shipping information that anyone from counterfeiters to dishonest competitors can use against you • Private information: Organizational and structural details, investors, employee details, payroll records, travel, and expense information • Intellectual property: Product design and technologies, bill of materials, which together enable the creation of clones and counterfeits in the market • Product alteration: e changing of data related to product documentation, bill of materials, and embedded soware to establish quality or security vulnerabilities • Hijacking: Implementation of ransomware or parasite programs mining for bitcoin using computers built into automation • Sabotage: Machine instructions can be altered, either to damage processes and cause downtime, or to make sub- tle changes leading to quality issues, new product launch delays, or product-related issues in the market ough these may sound a little ambitious, consider that there have been complex attacks in which design information, for example, was intercepted between design and manufactur- ing such that cloned products could be man- ufactured but with alterations that allowed embedded spyware to be active. Shipping information was also hacked so that substitu- tions of real products with the cloned products could be made. Traceability data was hacked so that legitimate serial numbers would be matched. Noticing a single cybersecurity inci- dent within an organization oen represents just the tip of the iceberg of what has been unknowingly happening, which, in at least one documented case, went on for over a decade. Further Complicating the Problem Industry regulators are responding to the threat, but with requirements that significantly impact the profitability of most manufacturers and increase the burden on executive account- ability but do little to reduce risks. e idea that a firewall and virus checkers keep things relatively safe in IT networks may be true in the office, but this is not true when it comes to manufacturing floors. Most production auto- mation has internal computers, which have been designed for the single purpose of oper- ating the machine and use the same common operating systems, such as Windows. ese machines are oen now connected for the purposes of MES, machine learning, closed loops, dashboards, program management etc., so in most manufacturing facilities, there is a manufacturing network (OT) in place. ese machines, however, typically cannot run anti- virus soware, as that may affect the precise timings of the machines, and very oen oper- ating systems cannot be upgraded due to the fixed hardware and soware limitations. ey continue to contain known security vulner- abilities with no checks in place for the lat- est known vulnerabilities. Any cybersecurity intrusion can spread almost instantly from a single point of entry to every machine on the network.