No matter if it’s sabotage, malicious code or an online attack: Two out of three companies expect the number of so-called industrial security incidents to continue to increase, according to the only survey ever done on the issue by the VDMA German Mechanical Engineering Industry Association from 2014. The group wanted to determine the status of IT security among German machinery and factory makers. The result was shocking: Some 29 percent of all firms surveyed had already been forced to halt production due to industrial security incidents.
KORAMIS is working to make industrial plants more secure. The industrial security specialist from the western German city of Saarbrücken uses the Open Telekom Cloud for simulations to detect, among other things, IT weaknesses at production facilities and develop the appropriate protective measures. “Industry is being much more heavily targeted by hackers than many companies realize,” explains Marco Di Filippo, Lead Cyber Security Engineering at KORAMIS. With boosted value in mind, many factories are being networked with other facilities and set up for remote maintenance. But if every single piece of equipment is accessible via its own IP address, a factory’s systems become vulnerable.