Robotics are used together with industrial control systems for production, replacing manual labour and improving business efficiency. However, according to recent Kaspersky research, the majority of employees surveyed in manufacturing companies in South Africa (73%) believe that because of possible cyberattacks on robots, there are significant risks.
The study found that 53% of employees think that, in case of a cyberattack, production processes run by robots can be disrupted and stalled for several weeks or even longer.
Only 18% of employees believe disabled robots can be fixed immediately in case of a cyberattack, and 21% say it would take a few days.
More than half of employees (53%) expect that recovery operations would take a significantly longer time: 44% said it would take from a few weeks to half a year, 4% think it will take from seven months to one year, and 5% believe the production outage in case of a cyberattack on robots would last for more than a year.
“In our research we asked respondents to assess not only the level of robotisation at their companies but also their ability to resist related cyber risks,” comments Andrey Suvorov, head of KasperskyOS business unit. “It turned out that many employees had mixed feelings when assessing how protected robots are. They are confident that it’s necessary to pay more attention to their security and skeptical about how quickly a robot can recover after a cyber incident.
“In fact, we face the concerns about the modern industrial IoT systems proper work and protection, with all the variety of complicated smart devices inside. That’s why we offer Cyber Immune solutions to protect specific enterprise units or the entire IT-system, making industrial robots, ICS machines or autonomous vehicles immune to most cyberattacks without using applied security tools.”