Siemens has formed a consortium of giant companies to form a community of trust to build greater cyber security. The major industrial and tech allies in the consortium include Airbus, Allianz, Daimler Group, IBM, MSC, NXP, SGS, and Deutsche Telekom.
Those companies believe that cybercrime is getting out of hand and they need to band together to protect both digital assets and physical assets — from data centers to power plants. The companies will sign the Charter of Trust at the Munich Security Conference today in Germany.
Siemens CEO Joe Kaeser said in an interview with VentureBeat that his company has 460 factories around the world, with many of them in China. His company needs to keep the data safe, and it has to comply with data laws in various countries. He can’t bring some of that data out of China.
“I need to know how these factories are doing no matter where I am,” he said. “I have to access my data wherever I am. But we also have to keep this data safe. We need something that verifies identity and enables trust. We have to build a community. People have to understand that the physical world can actually be the victim in cyberattacks. Data theft can impact the physical world.”
The trust group will do things like eliminate duplicate costs for manufacturers and bring standards to the Internet of Things. The companies want to share resources for defending themselves against attack, and they are calling on governments and chief information security officers to join them and create independent certification for critical infrastructure and the Internet of Things. Kaeser doesn’t want…
