Process industries “ignoring” cyber threat
5 Nov 2013
Owners and operators of process plants are failing to take the threat of system software hacking seriously, top Honeywell executives claimed today.
Speaking at his firm’s EMEA users group conference in Nice this morning, Honeywell Process Solutions (HPS) president Darius Adamczyk quoted the government’s 2011 estimate of cyber-crime costing the UK economy £27 billion per year to indicate why he thought the problem should be considered a top priority.
I urge each one of you to take cyber security as seriously as process safety
HPS vice president for technology Jason Urso
“I don’t think as an industry we are taking cyber-crime seriously yet, and I really hope it doesn’t take a major event to make us take it seriously,” said Adamczyk.
His views were echoed by HPS vice president for technology Jason Urso, who told delegates at the conference that cyber security ought to be afforded the same level of respect as process safety.
“I urge each one of you to take cyber security as seriously as process safety,” said Urso, who warned of a ticking time bomb for distributed control system (DCS) software running off the Microsoft Windows XP platform.
“The Windows XP operating system is reaching the end of its life in March 2015, with Microsoft no longer providing security hot fixes, and this will create a huge vulnerability to hackers [for those DCSs running off XP].”
Urso and Adamczyk were speaking in the opening session of the Honeywell Users Group EMEA conference, which like its preceding Americas event in June is focussing heavily on the firm’s “Control Room of the Future” concept.
This centres on the new technology to be included in the latest version of its DCS, Experion PKS Orion, to be released in the first half of next year. This new version, Experion PKS Orion R430, moves away from desktop PCs to large touch-screen plasma screens, and is capable of being operated via tablet devices.
The Windows 7-based DCS also introduces a Cyber Security Dashboard, which consolidates all data onto a single view for better visibility, and allows the creation of customised alerts that advise personnel to take actions such as updating anti-virus protection and managing patches network. The dashboard follows the introduction of whitelisting capability to the DCS last year.
