Warning Issued About Threat to Industrial IoT

Industrial IoT or IIoT are those devices that businesses use to automate and control their worlds. This includes everything from robots to building automation to drinking water plants to hundreds of other devices and systems.

Now there is guidance from Britain’s National Cyber Security Center (NCSC), a part of their signals and cyber security agency GCHQ, which is their version of the NSA. Our CISA issued a similar advisory last month

The new guidance was co-authored by every western cyber agency including CISA, FBI, the Dutch and German cyber agencies, Australia, Canada and New Zealand. Yikes!

This comes after hackers launched cyberattacks against five British drinking water suppliers in 2025.

While all of the intelligence agencies are worried about your drinking water being poisoned or the lights going out, your company likely has computers automating processes that could be vital to your operations.

Back in the dark ages – like 5 or 10 years ago – these systems were always isolated from other networks. Now many (most) of these systems are on the Internet. While some hackers go old school like cutting fiber optic cables with bolt cutters or shooting transformers in power substations to cause blackouts, others rely on poor cyber hygiene to break into systems and take them over. In the US their have been a number of these that made the news and probably dozens or hundreds that did not make the news.

So far we have not had any major incidents that caused death or serious injury, but that is not a guarantee that won’t happen tomorrow.

These systems need to be part of your overall annual cyber and AI risk assessments and you need to mitigate any risks that are found.

If you need assistance with this, please contact us. Credit: The Record

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