European industry is ill-prepared to counter attacks by hackers, according to a study by US tech company Cisco released ahead of the Hanover Fair, one of the world's largest industrial trade fairs, which opens on Monday.
Just 2% of European industrial companies have top-class protection, while 17% can be seen as well protected. The remainder need to act to safeguard their systems, Cisco said.
By contrast the European tech sector is better protected, with 28% well or very well protected. In finance the figure is 23%. The worst performers are in the education and health sectors.
The situation is better in the United States, where 29% of industry is well or very well protected, 10 percentage points up on the European figure.
"These are shocking figures," Cisco Germany executive board member Christian Korff told dpa. "European industry clearly needs to play catch-up, as it is vulnerable in many areas." A successful cyberattack could bring a company down completely, Korff believes.
The long service life of many production process is one reason for the backlog. "Manufacturing processes have been supported for the past 30 years. There are operating systems running on Windows 95 or 98. They are of course not state of the art," Korff said.
These systems are also difficult to update. "The old operating systems and the machines being used make it extremely hard to build in security technology," Korff says.
For the study, Cisco surveyed more than 8,000 company executives worldwide in January and February, including almost 2,000 in Europe, with 214 coming from industry.
