Many of us are familiar with the infamous video of the hacking at the Ukrainian power station in December, 2015 that caused a blackout impacting a quarter million people in the area. As the hackers remotely took control of their workstations, the plant systems operators could do little more than record for posterity the activity that they saw on their PC screens with their mobile phones. So now, any of us can go over to YouTube and watch in horror along with the operators as their cursor moves around their screen, maliciously clicking commands and tripping breakers in various substations. Of significant interest, as they helplessly watch the screen activity that was advancing their power station inevitably toward doom, we hear one operator say to the other “We should call the IT guys,” to which his colleague quickly replies “What if it’s the IT guys doing this?”

The Industrial Internet Consortium (IIC) is a global organization working to accelerate the successful adoption of the tools of the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) within organizations of all kinds. It was founded in March 2014 by an agreement among AT&T, Cisco, General Electric, IBM and Intel, and currently has more than 260 members located in 30 countries, with hundreds more non-members beneficially tapping into its resources.

IT Ethernet networks were first put to use in the office environment long before the advent of OT Ethernet networks carrying data to and from equipment in the harsher industrial environment of the factory floor. Perhaps that’s one reason why so many organizations, when building their vital latter-day factory OT networks, simply went back automatically to specifying what they knew—the same familiar cable that served them well on their enterprise side—without taking into account the added challenges of the industrial environment.

Wireless Ethernet technology can be an extremely powerful tool for both the IT and OT environments—it makes it possible to successfully incorporate areas into the network that would otherwise remain silent. Whether it’s linking remote locations such as depots or offshore rigs; pulling in data from vehicles or field people carrying handheld sensors; or flexibly integrating other applications where cabling is just not possible, wireless can give you instant, reliable connectivity nearly anywhere.

Digital attackers are targeting organizations in the energy sector like never before. For example, just a few weeks ago, the FBI and Department of Homeland Security issued a joint report describing a massive Russian hacking campaign to infiltrate America’s critical infrastructure. In a first, the US government publicly blamed Russia’s government for attacks on energy infrastructure.