How Secure Is Your Shop Floor Network?

It may not be top of mind, but job shops and midsize manufacturers have to be thinking about IT/OT cybersecurity, especially in making military and defense parts. The regulations are here. Are you ready?

Is it enough to purchase the latest machinery and tooling technologies such as 5-axis machines, hire and mentor apprentices and new machinists, crank out parts, and stay on top of maintenance schedules? With smart sensors and more internet-based infrastructure in use now by employees on the shop floor, there is so much technology in and around machines and the control rooms of most shops.

Security management is now a real issue and it includes managing all systems and employee behavior. For those shops that make parts for the defense industry, security is a top compliance issue with a real consequence on business.

“The practicality today is that small to midsized manufacturers are running at capacity, orders are coming in, and the biggest issue is finding and retaining talent—the biggest constraint in getting product out the door. Considering all the decisions that manufacturers have to make every day, cybersecurity is not high on their radar,” says Elliot Forsyth, vice president of business operations at the Michigan Manufacturing Technology Center, in an article for Advanced Manufacturing.

We talk to industry insiders about the state of security in today’s manufacturing—and where it is heading.

Industrial Cyber Attacks: Data Breaches, Cyberespionage and More

The internet is a fantastic tool and boon for business. But it’s also a place of criminal activity where fraud, ransom, theft and system manipulation happen too often.

Manufacturing has not been spared from security issues. Industrial sectors, including oil and gas and critical infrastructure segments such as electrical and nuclear power plants, are also having to shore up their security. In 2018, petrochemical companies were hacked in Saudi Arabia with the intent to sabotage the operation and cause explosions.

This is an extreme case, of course, but it can happen. The majority of security incidents are targeting financial information and intellectual property.

“It’s a very insecure space,” says John Livingston, CEO of Verve Industrial Protection. “Most manufacturers are generally unaware of the problem or they do not have the resources in-house [to handle it]. … On one hand, many rely on cloud services and at the other end of the spectrum, they rely on old operating systems in their environments that are not patched.”

In 2018, there were 352 security incidents in manufacturing and 87 of them had a confirmed data disclosure, according to Verizon’s “2019 Data Breach Investigations Report,” which is one of the most comprehensive studies published annually.

“For the second year in a row, financially motivated attacks outnumber cyberespionage as the main reason for breaches in manufacturing, and this year by a more significant percentage (40 percent difference),” the Verizon report’s authors conclude. “If this were in most any other vertical, it would not be worth mentioning as money is the reason for the vast majority of attacks. However, manufacturing has experienced a higher level of espionage-related breaches than other verticals in the past few years.”

If the goal is peak production and part making, there’s little doubt that technology is playing a central role in helping companies achieve their goals. Gathering and monitoring precise machine information is becoming more critical to attaining peak performance.

Job shops are often connected to the internet, and the applications employees use, including email, websites and mobile apps, can all be the opening attackers need to get to employee and company information or intellectual property. This information could include libraries of parts specifications that an original equipment manufacturer would want out of the hands of competitors and a government would not want other nations to have.

“Manufacturers must undertake a risk assessment of their operations,” says Koushik Subramanian, strategic advisor to the National Center for Cybersecurity in Manufacturing, in an article for Advanced Manufacturing. “Risk can be technical—found in machines, controls or software, and also found in personnel, practices and processes. Risk takes many different forms, but the most common is from cyberattacks where malicious individuals or groups try to break into systems by taking advantage of the weakest link: people. That’s the reason phishing and ransomware are so popular and why attacks are trending higher.”

For smaller shops, managing computers often means hiring outside information technology companies, aka “IT” companies, to help. For midsize and large manufacturers, it might mean some hybrid form of internal IT staffing and additional help from external companies for the more complex technology issues.

“Most of the industry is going through this awareness phase,” says Livingston. “They are beginning to understand that there is a problem. But they are asking themselves: ‘How do I get my arms around the world that has never really been managed as an internet-based infrastructure before?’”

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