Imperial hosts new cybersecurity institute

Imperial is to host a new centre focussed on preventing cyber attacks against UK industry and infrastructure. The new centre will be artfully named the Research Institute into Trustworthy Industrial Control Systems and will focus on preventing cyber attacks on large infrastructure such as nuclear power and the national rail.

Professor Chris Hankin, director of the new institute, said: “Our industrial control systems are vital for running most of the industrial processes that underpin modern society. From electricity generation to making sure trains run on time, these systems are vital to our everyday lives, but more work needs to be done to determine how vulnerable they are to threats from cyber-attack.”

As engineers have sought more realtime information from infrastructure, such as railways, systems are become increasingly interconnected, leaving them with more vulnerabilities. As well as attacks on infrastructure, the institute will investigate the impact that a cyber attack on a single firm can have in triggering a domino effect on other businesses further downstream.

The threat and destructive potential of a cyber attack is very real. As Prof. Hankin pointed out, commenting on the new centre: “In 2007, parts of Estonia ground to a halt when it experienced a ‘denial of service’ cyber-attack, overloading servers, which lead to a temporary government shutdown. While this is an extreme example, it highlights how vulnerable countries are to these types of threats.”