Issue link: https://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/1132978
42 I ICT TODAY CYBERSECURITY: GETTING BAS UP TO SPEED Historically, cyberattacks predom- inantly impacted IT, but now they are starting to become more common in building automation. Physical security and cybersecurity are becoming increasingly intertwined (Figure 4). The building automation world is not prepared to handle this alone. Due to their lack of fundamental security controls, BAS IoT devices are soft targets for cyber criminals and they can be easily hacked and added to botnets, which are used to launch DDoS attacks against organizations. 4 There are many growing threats, the likes of WannaCry, Petya and NotPetya. Facilities managers have the ability to change passwords, but in the past they did not need to since that was the responsibility and juris- diction of IT. Likewise, the building automation industry and controls engineers viewed cybersecurity as an issue for the IT side also. And they were right to have viewed it that way for many years. The OT networks were very basic; they were connected without complexity, and they certainly did not have IP addresses. Therefore, there was not much to target, because there was not much to access, except in the case of a physical security breach. With today's IP-based complex systems, networks and online devices, many facilities managers FIGURE 4: Physical security is a big component of cybersecurity—but it's just one side of it. FIGURE 5: IT and OT are different in many ways. It is important that they work together to design robust and secure systems. 5 INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY OPERATIONAL TECHNOLOGY User-centric communication Managed by IT experts Sensitive corporate data Unpredictable traffic behavior Machine to machine communication Maintained by facility operations Critical building functions Predictable device behavior are trying to beat the learning curve that IT already beat years before, which is why IT person- nel are needed to support the BAS side despite their functional and techno- logical differences (Figure 5). There are many ways that an IT team or IT partner can help with the funda- mentals to get BAS and facilities managers on the right path toward improvement: