Tesla CEO Elon Musk recently revealed one of his employees confessed to sabotaging the company’s Fremont, CA production plant. The employee changed the computer code of the plants manufacturing operating system and exported large amounts of highly sensitive company data to unknown third parties.
The deceit is earth-shattering on several levels.
First, disrupting a manufacturing line not only jeopardizes the viability of the company and its ability to produce and deliver quality products, but it exposes the vulnerability of connected machinery and systems.
The next paradigm in manufacturing is Industry 4.0, which enables machine-to-machine communication along with automation technologies, which continuously aggregate data, captured at-the-edge from connected equipment and processes, and then derives actionable insights and business intelligence to optimize efficiencies.
On a consumer level, it’s your smart refrigerator that gathers temperature and humidity readings, along with what’s inside, and then enables you — and probably the refrigerator manufacturer — to view this information via a mobile app on your smartphone. Add a bit of intelligence and your refrigerator can send an alert when it senses something has spoiled based on the length of time refrigerated.
Your refrigerator, like all connected “things” from aircraft engines to robotic arms plucking defective products from assembly lines, contains software that’s prone to security exploits from malevolent bugs to cybercriminals who can wiggle into your entire network from an insecure connection.
Tesla isn’t the only one with a problem. All manufacturers who are eagerly embracing Industry 4.0 and the industrial internet of things (IIoT) face both internal and external risks. According to the State of Industrial Cybersecurity 2018 survey by Kaspersky Lab, 77% of industrial organizations say their company is likely to become a target of cybersecurity involving industrial control networks.
While science fiction flicks like 2001: A Space Odyssey pit machine-against-man, the truth is more sinister. The real threat is individuals with the ability to access and compromise connected devices, machinery and systems from the factory floor, through a Bulletproof Hosting Server (BPHS) or their basement with the drapes drawn.
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