Development of Easy Risk Assessment Tool for Factory Cybersecurity: Short Paper

In the context of digital transformation (DX) worldwide, the digitization of factory systems is advancing and digital connections between supply chains are increasing. For example, sharing order and delivery information and sharing CO \(_2\) emissions from factories as a decarbonization effort increases for achieving SDGs. With the increase in digital connections, the cybersecurity risks of factory systems are also increasing, and there have been many incidents of factories being shut down due to ransomware attacks. Large enterprises such as critical infrastructure (CI) can allocate budgets for cybersecurity and hire personnel, including outsourcing, but small and medium-sized enterprises(SMEs) making up the supply chain find it difficult to secure budgets and personnel. This paper presents a simplified and easy risk assessment method for factory systems using the checklist which has only 32 items from Japanese government. It provides support to SMES to improve their cybersecurity readiness of factory assets with lower cost. For the purpose, we newly developed the web based diagnostic tool of the checklist showing the risk score. We confirmed the tool provides the rough grasping of cybersecurity readiness from interviews. We also observed that 80% of the respondents indicate insufficient readiness. The easy risk visualization will help SMEs to allocate the appropriate budget and resources.