How a UK software firm is helping manufacturers repel the cyber threat

Industrial espionage sounds like it belongs in the realms of fiction. Sinister characters lurking around test sites or peering through factory windows. The reality is both more shocking, and at times more mundane.

These days, the biggest threat comes from data breaches. In the UK alone, the cost of cyber crime is estimated at £27bn a year, with £9.2bn of this relating to intellectual property theft. Instances range from opportunistic employees manually copying data to attacks from hackers at home or overseas.

These attacks can be state-sanctioned. In 2018, 10 Chinese nationals, including intelligence officials, were indicted in the US for allegedly stealing trade secrets to be used in the design of the Comac C919 airliner. But there’s a question mark over Western governments too. The CLOUD Act, for instance, allows the US government to request access to any data stored by cloud providers based on its soil – even if the actual data is held overseas.