UK centre to study threat of industry cyber-attacks

The newly announced Research Institute into Trustworthy Industrial Control Systems at Imperial College London will explore how malevolent hackers, viruses and other threats from the internet could shut down the industrial control systems that run power stations, transport systems and factories.  

‘Our Industrial Control Systems are vital for running most of the industrial processes that underpin modern society,’ said Prof Chris Hankin, who will direct the new institute.   ‘From electricity generation to making sure trains run on time, these systems are vital to our everyday lives, but more work needs to be done to determine how vulnerable they are threats from cyber-attack.  

‘Research at Imperial’s Institute will focus on working out what the potential dangers are, so that new technologies and procedures can be designed to mitigate them in the future.’   Such control systems have increasingly been connected to the internet, enabling them to be maintained remotely and providing engineers with more information about how they are operating, but also making them more vulnerable to cyber-attacks.