Hacking Factory Robot Arms for Sabotage, Fun & Profit

Security researchers have been accumulating a trove of breakthrough discoveries on Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) vulnerabilities and releasing them at the Black Hat Briefings over the last few years - which has certainly helped raise awareness of dangerous flaws in critical infrastructure like power grids and gas pipeline control systems. Next month at Black Hat USA in Las Vegas, a group of researchers will help broaden enterprise security horizons by showing a new use case of how attackers can bridge the cyber world with the physical world by creatively targeting IIoT systems. This time they shifted gears and focused on the factory floor. In the talk, Breaking the Laws of Robotics: Attacking Industrial Robots, a group of researchers from the Politecnico di Milano in Italy stress-tested the cyber and physical security of computer-controlled robotic arms used worldwide in factories throughout a range of manufacturing scenarios. The idea was to move beyond the question of whether or not an IIoT device like a robotic arm could be hacked, and instead start looking at scenarios of what could be done with these devices once they're hacked, says Stefano Zanero, one of the researchers.