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Can Robotics Be Hacked?

If you can plug it into a wall, you can hack it. The question is not so much whether or not industrial robotics and so on can be hacked, but under what circumstances, and whether or not it's a serious threat.

Something worth acknowledging up front is that hacking is a crime of opportunity. It's rare that a victim of hacking or cyber-crime is specifically targeted. Certain high-profile organizations and people are, of course, at a greater risk, but not so much because they are being targeted by single, brilliant cyber-crooks. Rather, a high-profile individual or company is at risk because a lot more people are attempting to hack them. It can take one person a hundred years to guess your password, but it might take a thousand people only a weekend.

Hackers are looking for vulnerabilities anywhere they can find them. They're not picky. If they can't hack into a bank account, then they'll use some bots and algorithms to try credit card numbers. If you work with robotics in your business, you're not a target because of your robotics, you're a target because a hacker thinks your security is weak.

If your robot is hacked, then what's the worst that can happen?

In sci-fi movies, we see hacked robots rob banks on behalf of their new masters or, at the very least, they put cars together all wrong. The reality is far less exciting.

It's possible for a hacker to bring production to a halt by cracking into a robotics system, but a robotic arm built to attach car doors is not going to be reprogrammed to pickpocket factory workers. Rather, the robot provides a means of cracking into whatever network it's attached to. It could be a webcam or a tablet or USB drive. All the hacker cares about is that it's an opening to load viruses, spyware, etc. Anything that's connected to your network can be used to attack anything else that's connected to your network.

Again, hacking is a crime of opportunity. This means that if you have decent security measures in place, then you're going to be a low-priority target for a hacker. Hackers are not usually spending all week, or even a full hour, trying to crack into any given system. They'll try for a few minutes, and then move on. Just having security measures in place at all makes hackers reluctant to bother with you.
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