Editorial
Shoulder view
When I travel by train, I'm always happy to see hard-working people sitting next to me. Lost in thought, they are working on spreadsheets, writing minutes or checking emails. Yes, I'm curious, and no, I'm not interested in this data at all. So there's no danger from me.
Many people think this sentence and allow themselves to be looked over the shoulder - whether in the real or virtual world. In addition to the danger of visual hacking, our open and relatively security-insensitive communication in social media offers undreamt-of opportunities for manipulation, known as social engineering. As Markus Brändle, Head of Airbus CyberSecurity, explains, social media are an easy target for attackers because of the large number of users and the fact that the platforms are easy and inexpensive to access.
But it's not just the hacking of individuals that is a growing threat. According to a study by Kaspersky Lab, one in four industrial companies has recently been affected by a cyber attack. Targeted attacks increased by more than a third. The ICS-CERT experts (Industrial Control Systems Cyber Emergency Response Team) are certain that this trend will continue, as the demand for zero-day exploits for industrial control systems on the black market increased significantly last year. Kaspersky therefore expects to see specific malware targeting vulnerabilities in industrial automation components this year.
That sounds frightening. But we must not forget that the barriers to industrial production facilities are manifold: If you compare a factory to the human body, the first protective barrier, the firewall, corresponds to the skin. It intercepts the worst, but existential damage is rarely caused by a breach of this barrier. If, for example, a virus has made it into the complex system, the human immune system is activated. Once the intruder has been detected, it is fought off. In the company network, this is done by the corresponding software. Two possible scenarios pose an acute danger here: firstly, if no protection program is available, and secondly, if the intruder is not recognized as such. Even if this means the highest alarm, the system can survive, albeit with collateral damage.
However, to prevent this from happening, it is important to change mindsets and assumptions and adapt security strategies to the framework conditions. For example, security structures that have evolved over time and only focused on office IT are not able to secure the dissolving boundaries between the IT level and the production system (read more about this in our cover story from p. 10).
Back to the hard-working train drivers: don't make yourself a weak point in IT security and don't lose trust in your fellow passengers. I promise not to look over your shoulder in future.
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