UK researchers to protect factories from cyber-attacks

Amidst growing concerns over cyber-security, the EPSRC and the UK National Cyber security programme have announced a £2.5m research programme aimed at helping to protect factories and critical infrastructure from cyber-attacks.

Coordinated by Imperial College’s Research Institute in Trustworthy Industrial Control Systems (RITICS) the three-year program will see teams from a number of UK universities work with industry partners to improve the understanding of the threats posed by cyber-attacks and, ultimately, develop solutions that can help repel them.

Explaining the background to the funding, the leader of one of the teams, Lancaster University’s Prof Awais Rashid said: ‘We hear a lot about cyber–attacks, but one of the things we’ve ended up ignoring for a long time is a lot of the industrial control systems used in, for example, power plants, water treatment facilities, and the power grid.’

Rashid said that whilst many early industrial control systems had little or no connectivity to the outside world, current systems are increasingly interconnected. And whilst this level of connectivity opens up a host of opportunities (such as enabling engineers to remotely interrogate, monitor and even control systems via their smart phones) the openness of current systems can pose serious threats to their security and resilience.