Book of the Week: Operational Cybersecurity Risks

This week’s selection is “Operational Cybersecurity Risks and Their Effect on Adoption of Additive Manufacturing in the Naval Domain” by the US Government.

Actually, the work is written by Michael D. Grimshaw, Lieutenant Commander, US Navy. He works for the US government, though.

You might be wondering why we would select a book as this one, which has an extremely narrow target audience. I suspect a majority of our users are not involved in directing US Naval manufacturing technologies.

However, everyone is subject to cybersecurity risks, even if you’re not in the military, even if you’re not in the USA. Many of those cybersecurity risks are indeed the same, regardless of what industry you are involved in.

After all, the military is in many ways just a specialized form of a business: it buys services, provides function, hires and fires staff, etc. Many of the steps involved in manufacturing are in fact identical to those in civilian business, and the military often engages civilians to perform work.

The premise of the book is as follows:

“AM technology adoption in the naval domain is facing the same challenge of building trust from leadership and potential end users in the automation inherent in creating a 3D print. Generally if users are not confident in the technology’s ability to achieve their desired result, it will be abandoned in favor of established methods.

However, the level of trust required for adoption can vary greatly based on multiple factors including user group, domain of intended use, and degree of automation. The user group consisting of military members typically have higher trust judgments than the civilian population due to intensive training, increased discipline, and adherence to orders which may require the use of technology. These factors may lead to the assumption that AM adoption in the naval domain would be easier than in the civilian domain but multiple additional issues continue to stand in the way of adoption.”

Trust is a factor that’s clearly at play in all industries to one degree or another, and the idea here is that some industries beyond the military might fear adoption of 3D printing technologies because of a lack of trust.

Here we see a chart from the book that details some of the potential cybersecurity risks points involved in the 3D design and printing lifecycle.

This book outlines those concerns in a technical manner and thus a reader, regardless of industry, might be able to counteract some of those fears by addressing some of the issues.

If you’re a business that’s considering engaging 3D printing technology but is unsure of the risks involved to your organization, you might want to review this book.

And it’s inexpensive, too.

Via Amazon