This is according to the recent study of cybersecurity firm Kaspersky where “79 percent of employees believe that robots should be more widely used across different industries, however, 85 percent of them fear robot hacking.”
Nowadays, robotics is being used to command industrial control systems, production processes and other information technology. It replaces manual labor, improving efficiency, speed, quality and performance.
Kaspersky surveyed the employees of manufacturing companies and other large organizations around the world about the consequences of automation and increased use of robots.
The survey was conducted across 15 countries in the USA, France, Italy, Germany, Spain, South Korea, Japan, Singapore, Argentina, Brazil, Egypt, South Africa, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Turkey.
Employees reported an increase in robotization levels in their companies over the last two years. Forty-one percent of employees said their organizations already use robots and 29 percent of organizations plan to use them in the near future.
One of the findings in the research was that respondents believe robots can help industries increase economic benefits as well as saving people from dangerous duties.
This point of view is shared by more than half of the surveyed employees, as 52 percent think use of robots can accelerate and increase the efficiency of production processes and cut down costs and 60 percent believe robotization can free people from hard or dangerous duties, reducing risks to life and health in the future. This, in turn, will help employees avoid routine and boring duties and retain more interesting and highly paid positions (36 percent).
More than one third of respondents also consider that one of the key tasks that robots can successfully perform is to build a safe environment and reduce the likelihood of accidents due to human error. This point of view was shared by 36 percent of employees.
Cybersecurity concern
Another important finding was that cybersecurity risks increase because of robotization.
The majority of respondents (85 percent) believe that robots can get hacked and 51 percent know of incidents such as these occurring in their company or other local businesses.
Respondents are split in their assessment of how protected robots are: almost one half of employees (44 percent) believe that not enough cybersecurity measures are in place to protect the robots in different industries while 40 percent believe that sufficient protective measures are in place.
Cyber-physical systems use industrial robots more often to increase production efficiency. However, according to Andrey Strelkov, head of Industrial Cybersecurity Product Line at Kaspersky, new technologies like these bring new cyber risks because they are potentially vulnerable to cyberthreats.
“Kaspersky sees ensuring that cybersecurity remains at the forefront of robot technology adoption as its mission, helping to tackle the challenges and capitalize on the opportunities that robotization presents,” said Strelkov.
He noted that in their research, they asked respondents to judge not only how convenient and efficient robots are to use in production, but also their level of safety.
“It turned out that many employees believe that using robots causes risks. Robots, robotic controllers, automation systems and supply chains are going to become the prime vector for cyberattacks in the coming years and they need protection here and now. Before one integrates robots into production, one needs to guarantee network intrusion robustness and overall network security,” he said.
“Not all modern technologies are designed with security in mind, so only the use of defense-in-depth industrial network protection and multifunctional monitoring platforms will ensure uninterrupted operation of the company. Dedicated solutions like Kaspersky Industrial CyberSecurity may become an efficient assistant for protecting robotics in production,” he added.
Kaspersky is a global cybersecurity and digital privacy company founded in 1997. (KOC)