CYBER SECURITY
Boliden has been using ABB’s 800xA process
control system for some time and recently
employed ABB’s Cyber Security Fingerprint
security defences, recently employed ABB’s
Cyber Security Fingerprint. This programme,
according to ABB, is a non-invasive diagnostic
and gap analysis service that generates
recommendations to improve cyber-security
protections for industrial control systems (ICS).
“Fingerprint employs a multi-layer approach to
improve security,” ABB says. “The Fingerprint
process not only collects data from over 100
critical points in the ICS, but ABB engineers and
cyber security experts conduct in-depth
interviews with plant personnel to understand
how policies and procedures are implemented
and followed day-to-day.
“A proprietary software-based tool then
analyses the findings and compares them with
industry standards and best practices.”
ABB said going through this process gave
International Mining | JANUARY 2019
Boliden greater confidence in the plant’s current
programme to minimise cyber security risks,
while a customised, detailed action plan that
identified and prioritised additional threat
mitigation actions was produced. the vendor of the industrial control and
automation system.”
System providers would need to collaborate
much more closely in order to create such a
solution, he added.
Such protection is a little more complicated
where mining companies are employing systems
across their operations from various vendors or
OEMs. This problem has led to mining companies
building and establishing a global platform to
integrate and orchestrate the full cyber-threat
detection and incident response processes
across its operations, according to Rundus.
EY’s Rundus explains: “A bigger challenge with
the adoption of OEM- or vendor-specific
solutions is the ability to scale and provide full
coverage across the enterprise, particularly for
areas and functions where there isn’t an installed
base with that particular vendor or product.” The cyber-security burden is, for the time
being, going to be shifted between mining
companies, OEMs and software and system
providers until some standardised, OEM-agnostic
tools arrive that can be applied across the board.
While ABB’s Schierholz admitted the company
is looking to provide an OEM-agnostic solution,
he said ABB is “not quite there yet”. Regardless of which part of the mining
ecosystem takes this on, there is a clear need for
someone to take responsibility.
“An industrial control and automation system
is a special purpose system, which must perform
according to specifications in a fairly strict
manner,” he said. Rundus said: “All mining companies are now a
potential cyber-attack target, and most
organisations have a ‘when’, rather than an ‘if’,
attitude in preparing for an attack.”
“Any modification may have negative side-
effects that need to be ruled out by appropriate
testing and validation – and usually our
customers don’t want this to be done as a one-
off project (ie a particular version of a security
solution with a particular version of the industrial
control and automation system), since they will
need to maintain the versions of those systems
and prefer a general support of the solution from Carr’s assessment was more severe.
“Our network centre in London deals with
thousands of attacks per day, mostly
automatically. These include simple penetration
and vulnerability testing, originating from
botnets, through to phishing, malware and
ransomware attacks,” he said.
“We would expect most large organisations to
be handling many attacks every day.” IM