FLIP SIDE OF THE COIN

The industry 4.0 revolution has brought about unprecedented levels of efficiency in manufacturing. But it also comes with its own set of challenges, the biggest one being cybersecurity and the protection of data

- Kruti Bharadva

When Torstein Gimnes Are’s phone rang at 4 am in Oslo, Norway, he knew it wouldn’t be good news.

“We may be under attack,” were the words from the other end, from Gimnes’s IT colleague at Norsk Hydro, one of the world’s largest aluminium companies. Production lines had stopped at some of its 170 plants. Other facilities were switching from computer to manual operations.

The breach would ultimately affect all 35,000 Norsk Hydro employees across 40 countries, locking the files on thousands of servers and PCs. The financial impact would eventually approach $71 million. All this damage had been set in motion three months earlier when one employee unknowingly opened an infected email from a trusted customer and allowed hackers to invade the IT infrastructure and covertly plant their virus.

The cyberattack on Norsk Hydro is perhaps one of the most well-known, and certainly the most well documented as the company made a swift and unshakeable decision in face of the ransom demands – Transparency. We shall circle back to this vital point, but first a look down to the very roots of cyber security in manufacturing.

THE ROLE OF INDUSTRY 4.0

McKinsey defines Industry 4.0 as ‘the next phase in the digitisation of the manufacturing sector, driven by four disruptions: The astonishing rise in data volumes, computational power, and connectivity, especially new low-power wide-area networks; the emergence of analytics and business intelligence capabilities (BI); new forms of human-machine interaction such as touch interfaces and augmented-reality systems; and improvements in transferring digital instructions to the physical world, such as advanced robotics and 3-D printing.’