The manufacturing industry comes as the top targeted sector by cyberattacks in 2022, according to Orange Cyberdefense’s (OCD) Security Navigator 2023, which will be published on December 1, 2022.
With this backdrop, Marie Forrat, head of the OT Use Case Factory at OCD demonstrated how easy it could be to hack industrial robots.
During a demonstration of how OT can be manipulated Orange showed a robotic arm locked in a cage across the room that was picking up small cubes and moving them a few centimetres away from their original location, in the same configuration. With one simple command sent to the supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) machine, Forrat was able to ask the robot to open its metallic fingers after picking up each cube. By doing that, the robot then dropped the cubes each time it picked them up and they fell randomly and rolled around the platform.
“By attacking the SCADA, itself connected to the programmable logic controller (PLC) that controls the industrial robot, I can modify the parameters and create significant physical damage. Imagine replacing those small cubes with industrial products that weighed several tons,” Forrat, head of the OT use case factory at Orange Cyberdefense (OCD), explained in front of an audience of 30 journalists and analysts gathered at one of the company’s headquarters in Lyon, France, on November 25, 2022.
“While quite sophisticated, this type of OT cyberattack can be particularly impactful and can be used either to entice the victim to pay a ransom, disrupt the production process or destroy some of the infrastructures,” Forrat added.
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