ISQ to integrate European cybersecurity initiative into industry

Cybersecurity risks in industry and manufacturing are increasingly complex and increasingly tended to grow, making it urgent to equip SMEs with the tools appropriate to the dynamic environment of industry 4.0. Cyberattacks are among the top five global risks, becoming the new standard in sectors such as energy, healthcare and transportation. 60% of SMEs suffering a cyber attack end up losing their business within six months. ISQ will join the European Erasmus+ Encrypt 4.0 Project, a joint initiative to create a cybersecurity task force in European industry, which leads the development of the Cybersecurity Risk Matrix for manufacturing companies within industry 4.0. "This matrix will allow a systematic overview of the cybersecurity risk scenario and the creation of accurate risk profiles in real time in order to enable the adoption of preventive measures and to establish corrective measures in smart factories. ISQ will also develop online cybersecurity training laboratories as well as a document collection tool with real cases of cyberattacks that will be fed and commented on in an open regime," explains Pedro Matias, president of the ISQ Group. Cyberattacks are among the top five global risks, according to the World Economic Forum.Cybersecurity Ventures, the world's leading global cybereconomy company, predicts that globally, cybercrime-related impacts in 2021 will be greater than all natural disasters within a year. In this context, cyber attacks on critical infrastructure are ranked as the fifth highest risk in 2020 by the World Economic Forum's network of experts and have become the new standard in sectors such as energy, health and transportation. However, manufacturing is suffering increasing cyber attacks. Organized cybercrime is on the rise with the increasing sophistication of darkweb tools that make its services cheaper and easily accessible. "But the defence capacity of SMEs is generally weaker compared to large companies and the figures suggest that only 14% of affected SMEs recover without external assistance," adds Pedro Matias. The National Cyber Security Alliance shows, for example, that 60% of SMEs suffering a cyber attack lose their business in 6 months and are much more vulnerable due to connectivity in Information Technology (IT) and Operational Technologies (TO) systems, the result of digitisation of industry. Manufacturing companies, in an attempt to maintain a competitive advantage by adapting to industry 4.0 practices, invest sporadically in control systems and external consultants, but lack an integrated approach to cyber risk management. These efforts fail when trying to effectively address rapidly evolving cybersecurity threats, because most manufacturing systems have traditionally been developed to focus on employee safety and high performance rather than cybersecurity. Historically companies were primarily concerned with protecting their TO environment by often neglecting IT security. In this context, Andreia Morgado, project manager, explains that "the Cybersecurity Risk Matrix will outline key risk indicators that will be easily applied to real-time data. The matrix will allow companies not only to design a long-term cybersecurity strategy, but also to quickly carry out daily reports that will show the actual levels of risk to processes at any given time. This is of the utmost importance in the manufacturing environment, since it keeps production running, which would otherwise represent an irreparable impact with huge financial losses."