We were delighted to host a recent workshop on Cyber Security and Resilience with Elite Control Systems, winner of the Cyber Resilience Award, sponsored by The Scottish Government, at the CeeD Industry Awards in February 2020. Elite’s Applications Engineer, Colin Crosbie, provided an insightful and highly informative overview of Cyber threats and best practice design considerations facing major manufacturers and engineers today.
We had a fascinating and engaging discussion covering business preparedness for and ability to deal quickly and effectively in the event of a Cyber-attack.
Colin shared some alarming, recently published, statistics such as:
- Hacker attacks happen every 39 seconds – that is an average of 2,244 times a day.
- It takes an average of 33 hours to recover from a Cyber-attack – with some businesses taking a week or longer to recover. This can have an enormous impact on business operations and incur significant costs, not to mention some organisations paying £millions to hackers.
- Up to 40% of companies do not have any backups at all. While this is vital not only for business continuity, the ability to test your backup plans to determine business recovery times is also key.
- 34% of data breaches involve internal actors - people are still considered the weakest link and companies need to ensure they train staff and guard against former or disgruntled employees too.
Understandably, many businesses are not keen to share their experiences if they have been a victim of a Cyber-attack. It is really important that companies do tackle this subject, review their systems and processes and take time to explore vulnerabilities. This allows robust contingency plans to be put in place.
Processes and people are key to mitigating against hackers trying to infiltrate your company. With the increasing need for more remote working and, the growing use of new IoT devices and technologies, making sure that our country’s critical industrial base is safe from Cyber threats has never been more pressing.
If you have not already done so with your own OT landscape, you should consider starting your incident plans with a detailed risk assessment and audit. The question is: “can you really afford not to?”
If you’d like to have a confidential discussion about your Cyber Security and Resilience, you can send an email to Elite Controls.