Cybersecurity

Factories May Be Destroyed Via Mobile App

Mobile apps often serve for monitoring and managing machines, and even entire industrial processes. However, the combination of apps and industrial control systems makes them target for cyber attacks, as hackers might exploit the flaws to destroy machines — and potentially entire factories.

A recently published research checked the extent of these vulnerabilities. Two security researchers, Alexander Bolshev of IOActive and Ivan Yushkevich of Embedi, examined 34 apps from companies including Siemens and Schneider Electric. They found a total of 147 security holes in the apps, which were chosen at random from the Google Play Store. Only two of the 34 apps had no security halls at all.

Some of the vulnerabilities the researchers discovered would allow hackers to interfere with data flowing between an app and the machine or process it’s linked to. So an engineer could be tricked into thinking that, say, a machine is running at a safe temperature when in fact it’s overheating, according to technologyreview.com.