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The changing threat
As we noted previously, the number of cyber incidents occurring against manufacturing systems took a significant jump in late 2001. This begs the question, 'Did the nature of these events change as well?'
To help answer this, the ISID data was analysed for incident type to get an idea of the threat sources. First, the period up to and including the year 2001 was investigated. Figure 3a shows the breakdown of 27 incidents between the years 1982 and 2001. Note that accidents, inappropriate employee activity, and disgruntled employees accounted for 74% of the problems, indicating that most of the threat, malicious or otherwise, was coming from within the company boundaries. These statistics correlate well with the numbers being expressed by security researchers in the IT world at the time. For example, a study by the FBI and the Computer Security Institute on Cybercrime, released in 2000, found that 71% of security breaches were carried out by insiders.4
The ISID study team then produced the same graph for 78 incidents during the period 2002 to 2006, as shown in Fig. 3b. In this time period externally generated incidents account for 60% of all events, indicating a surprising and significant change in threat source.
Fig. 3. (a) Incident types percentage charted as a from 1982 to 2001 (27 records); and (b) Incident types from 2002 to June 2006 (78 records)
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