All technologies have their benefits and liabilities. Digital technologies are transforming the way in which people interact with each other and employ machines, and how machines connect to machines. Enormous amounts of data are flowing and being stored; our world increasingly depends on the internet and digitization to be able to function. Vulnerability to theft of these data has become one of the major drawbacks of financial and other commercial transactions. The protection of data and the secure functioning of the critical infrastructure – such as energy, food and water resources, transport and communications – depend on digital technologies functioning safely and securely. Individuals’ privacy in regard to, for example, medical records and insurance data is still being breached to detrimental effect. This report, while considering such situations, focuses on a far more dangerous category of cyber attack – when a facility’s industrial control systems are disrupted or even captured and harnessed by saboteurs acting either inside or outside the facilities where these systems are located.
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