Do you want to know how is the theme of the industrial cybersecurity in Spain? Do you think it's not necessary to have a security plan for your systems?

What better time to speak of the Cyber Security in our country that after the recent cyberattack already suffered worldwide a very short time ago and has managed to put in check dozens of countries, by highlighting the industrial cybersecurity and household present in systems of large and small companies.

Spain and industrial cybersecurity

Spain is at the top of countries with more facilities and industrial process control systems with internet access, in the fifth place to be exact. The bad thing about this is that, of course, the vast majority of systems are considered critical infrastructure, I mean, they have no protection or this is inadequate.

These critical infrastructures are increasingly under attack, with the number of cyberattacks rising by 357% between 2015 and 2016. This figure was calculated after 479 incidents related to the cybersecurity of critical infrastructures in the country were reported—according to the National Centre for protection of the critical infrastructure-.

The number of critical operators, the capabilities of the CERT security and industry and the trust between critical operators means that the number of alerts and hazard notifications is increasing day by day. It should also be noted that the incidents that are detected account for less than 10% of those that actually occur.

The sectors most attacked are the sanitary, the energy and transportation - specialy RENFE-. Even so, the director general of the CCI claims that this sector in our country is, at present, of the safest in the world.

Those responsible for the electricity grid - as well as the governments themselves -, on the other hand, if they are worried about their sector. In the winter of the 2015, Ukraine was left without light during 7 hours because of an attack in which a virus carried out most of the work, depending on the heating of many homes.

The fear that this return to occur is real, as viruses and other malicious programs are the cause of the vast majority of attacks in Spain. However, the same attacks tend not to recur, in part because we prepare to counter them.

Second are denial of service attacks. These are designed so that the services stop working, emerging in Spanish critical operators.

However, the thing looks even worse, because we must not forget that what we see is only the tip of the iceberg and that most cyber attacks are discovered with the passage of months or years and there are even times when we never know what happened or how and, thus, we do not solve the problem.

Attacks from a hacker's mouth

The famous hacker Amador Aparicio has made statements of various kinds that make it more clear how affected are the Spanish, without knowing it and knowing it - which is the worst of all -.

Aparicio tells us how simple it would be to empty ponds, to change the temperature of swimming pools of luxury hotels, turn on the crematorium ovens of the funeral homes or deactivate the pressure alarms of the boilers.

Although they are examples that it seems that no one would have an interest in doing, they do not fail to perfectly reflect the state of installations of industrial communication networks that we have in our country.

To combat this the best is, undoubtedly, prevention, starting with perform one audit of industrial networks in which professionals leave your network system ready and advise you properly.