Modeling a Cyber-Resilience-for-Manufacturing Ecosystem Through Causal Loop Diagram

From script kiddies to sophisticated and organized cybercriminals, cyber threats are constantly growing, adding new and further challenges. Therefore, overseeing and proactively responding to this severe and emergent cyber risk is of the utmost importance. This is called cyber resilience, which designates the ability to withstand and quickly recover from any cyber-related incident. Without this fundamental capability, a cybersecurity failure could inflict considerable damage on organizations and even drive them out of business. According to a recent IBM cyber security intelligence index survey, manufacturing is one of the most targeted industries for cyber-attacks. Manufacturing 5.0 is increasingly being adopted by companies as a transformation pillar to harness the potential of data and create value at scale. This includes connected factories, moving from insights and decision to operations and actions driven by analytics and artificial intelligence, scaling valuable use-cases and solutions and multiplying the impacts through a leverage effect, considering human resources as value creators, accelerators of innovation, and architects of change. These ambitions are accompanied by several cyber risks, such as system vulnerabilities, social engineering, malicious insiders, data loss, etc. In the present paper a cyber-resilience-for-manufacturing ecosystem will be introduced, and cause-effect relationships, identified within this ecosystem, will be illustrated using causal loop diagram in order to understand how an industrial site could be more resilient.

Keywords: Resilience, Cyber incidents, Manufacturing, Ecosystem, Causal loop diagram, Awareness, Availability.

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