If your email inbox looks anything like mine then you will
be receiving a steadily increasing flow of communications relating to "Industrial Cyber Security". Announcements of new products or services or kind invitations to attend seminars
where the subject will be explored in depth. Most of these emails manage to
integrate some reference to the pivotal Stuxnet attack (looks like I have just
done the same) in the hope of creating a degree of fear and then go on to offer
a simple solution.
Discussing this developing ‘frenzy’ amongst the SolutionsPT
team someone likened it to the hype surrounding Y2K, and those that were
involved in Y2K will no doubt have views on how proportional the preparations
turned out to be.
I believe it’s fair to say that industrial cyber security is
not another Y2K and, although high profile targeted attacks such as Stuxnet
(sorry, mentioned it again) will continue to make great news headlines across
not just our industry press but also national media, it’s the inadvertent
contamination of industrial IT systems by well-meaning individuals that pose
the biggest threat to the on-going availability of our industrial IT
infrastructure.
What has been highlighted though in our experiences is the
difference between mainstream IT and industrial IT. Our demands for extended
operational life of IT equipment and the challenges associated with applying
system updates and patches means that we are a ‘special case’, but I guess we
always knew that!
Mike Lees, Business Manager - Hardware, SolutionsPT
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