GMV participates in the first study of industrial cybersecurity incidents in Spain’s essential services

Spain’s Industrial Cybersecurity Center ( Centro de Ciberseguridad Industrial (CCI) is continually striving to hone the skills of all industrial cybersecurity professionals, doing so by means of publications, training, credentials, standard-based guides and conferences. Javier Zubieta, Marketing and Communications Manager of GMV’s Secure e-Solutions sector, has participated in CCI’s first study showing the degree of cybersecurity preparation of organizations running essential services.

The provision of essential services in Spain depends increasingly on big data processing, growing automation of internal production services and economic management; this development brings it into an increasingly close relationship with information systems and networks. This in turn entails a higher exposure to the inherent risks of running an open, worldwide system like internet, a vector that can equally be employed for spreading virus infections and malware that might then interfere with the provision of essential services, spring leaks of personal data, jeopardize commercially valuable confidential information and upset the workings of said internal market.

CCI’s document stresses that nearly 75% of interview respondents believe the vulnerability level of their essential services’ OT infrastructure to be high. As for attack consequences, nearly 30% reported the loss of an essential service to be the main cyber-incident they have to deal with. This is due mainly to the fact that essential-service-operating industrial technologies do not take cybersecurity requirements into account. The document also shows what structure is followed by essential service operators in the management of OT cybersecurity and what they expect of the future in terms of cybersecurity applied to physical infrastructure.

In the words of Javier Zubieta: “We have detected significant progress in incorporating cybersecurity requirements into new industrial facilities. The facility owner, the engineer and manufacturer are now all assimilating good design-up cybersecurity practices. In industrial facilities that have now clocked up some years of useful life, however, recovering from any cyber-incident still calls for a considerable effort”.

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