The challenge of exploiting data and protecting critical facilities from cyber-attacks

People talk about cybersecurity as a necessary or indispensable technology for the new era 4.0. The increasingly real integration of the smart factory with the cloud via the Internet makes it imperative to protect critical facilities from cyber attacks. But the issue is complex, and we need professionals who know the requirements of operation, availability, and functional security of an industrial plant, the specific characteristics of industrial communications, Ethernet architectures, the capacity of switches, routers, and firewall, as well as the standards that define the appropriate target architecture for the protection of such facilities.

All this was discussed during the Roundtable ‘Industrial Cybersecurity: The New Profession, held in early December with the sponsorship of GMV and Siemens, and drawing on the knowledge of four magnificent professional experts in these matters: Javier Hidalgo (Industry Sector Solutions Architect at GMV), Juan Carlos Pozas (Communications and Cybersecurity Product Manager at Siemens), Jose Ignacio Armesto (Professor at the University of Vigo and coordinator of the Industrial Cybersecurity Specialist Degree) and Adriel Regueira Suárez (IT and Cybersecurity Director at Tecdesoft). The meeting was moderated by Juan Manuel Ferrer Miralles (Iturcemi), coordinator of the Advisory Board of Automatics and Instrumentation.

“The risk is growing,” said Juan Carlos Pozas from Siemens during his first speech. He continued: “As soon as we are more connected, we are more vulnerable. We also have to understand the context in which we find ourselves, the industry has become much more connected in the last ten years, so we are much more exposed. If we take, for example, INCIBE publications, in 2020, we are talking about the environment of 133,000 cybersecurity incidents in Spain, an increase of 24%.

A very similar opinion to that of GMV’s representative, Javier Hidalgo, who said that businesspeople should digitalize their companies and add cybersecurity systems for, above all, “competitiveness and business reasons.” In his opinion, the objective of an industry is to sell more for less cost, and this is what is linked to what is called industrial revolutions, what we now call the digital transformation, which is still the fourth industrial revolution. “And this fourth one is different, what we are trying to do is to make the industry more competitive by exploiting the data we have in the factory, for example through the introduction of IoT systems, to make the most of the information and be able to produce more cheaply, efficiently and for our product to have greater market penetration” he added. By way of conclusion, he also provided three messages to keep in mind in the field of Industrial Cybersecurity: security is security regardless of the field, no matter if we are talking about IT or plants; cybersecurity is not a technological problem but a problem of people, processes, and knowledge; and finally and most importantly, that we must design our approach to cybersecurity from the premise that sooner or later we will suffer an intrusion and an incident

We need to protect industrial facilities against cyberattacks “because factories and control systems were not designed to connect, they are not designed from a cybersecurity point of view” he said in the same line as Adriel Regueira from Tecdesoft, while the professor of the Universidade de Vigo, José Ignacio Armesto, said that nowadays a plant can not not be connected, since we must take advantage of all the added values that digital transformation brings to be more efficient and improve our processes, but without forgetting that this can generate a problem of cybersecurity.