Open Access

Günther Schuh, Jacques Engländer, Lars Kaminski, Jan Hicking, Martin Bülskämper

• The digital transformation is changing the way companies think and design their manufacturing environment. Both due to the increasing number of connections between IoT-Devices, tooling machines, and production lines and the phenomenon of the convergence of IT and OT, systems are becoming more complex than years ago. Organizational and cultural changes within manufacturing companies strengthen this trend and form Industry 4.0 environments and cyber-physical production systems (CPPS). As these systems do not longer stay alone but are connected to each other and the company’s outside, the size of the potential attack surface is increasing as well. Besides that, manufacturing companies, small and medium-sized in particular, are facing complex challenges based on lack of knowledge, budget, and time to understand as well as to interpret their current situation and risk level and therefore to derive necessary counter-measures. Efficient as well as pragmatic tools and methods for these companies do not exist. This paper shows a research approach in which the company-specific set-up of Industry 4.0 environment and CPPS is characterized by its potential vulnerabilities. This enables companies to evaluate their risk potential before setting up this kind of environments and to undJo,erstand the potential consequences more precisely. By doing so, companies can derive and prioritize important counter-measures and so to strengthen their level of cyber-security efficiently. This will decrease the number of cyber-security attacks and increase the company’s competitiveness.