Nowadays, the industrial sector is being challenged by several cybersecurity concerns. Direct attacks by malicious persons and (or) software form part of the severe jeopardies of industrial control systems (ICSs). These affect products/production qualities, brand reputations, sales revenues, and aggravate the risks to health and safety of human lives. These have been enabled due to progressive adoption of technology trends like Industry 4.0, BYOD, mobile computing, and Internet-of-Things (IoT), in the quest for improved relevance and value of production decisions, minimised operational overheads, optimum resource utilisation, markets globalisation, etc. However, several security vulnerabilities and risks have also emerged, and are increasingly being exploited in the industrial sector especially manufacturing. To manage this phenomenon, refined and holistic (combining people, process, and technology perspectives) security strategies and solutions are required to enhance security in ICS. This paper offers an insightful review of possible solution path beginning with the understanding of ICS security trends relative to cyber threats, vulnerabilities, attacks and patterns, agents, risks, and the impacts of all these on the industrial environment and entities that depend on it. Such episteme can improve security awareness, proficiency for respective stakeholders, and advance the development of appropriate security mechanisms, and adoption of recommendations.

Purpose -As cyber-attacks continue to grow, organisations adopting the internet-of-things (IoT) have continued to react to security concerns that threaten their businesses within the current highly competitive environment. Many recorded industrial cyber-attacks have successfully beaten technical security solutions by exploiting humanfactor vulnerabilities related to security knowledge and skills and manipulating human elements into inadvertently conveying access to critical industrial assets. Knowledge and skill capabilities contribute to human analytical proficiencies for enhanced cybersecurity readiness. Thus, a human-factored security endeavour is required to investigate the capabilities of the human constituents (workforce) to appropriately recognise and respond to cyber intrusion events within the industrial control system (ICS) environment.Design/methodology/approach -A quantitative approach (statistical analysis) is adopted to provide an approach to quantify the potential cybersecurity capability aptitudes of industrial human actors, identify the least security-capable workforce in the operational domain with the greatest susceptibility likelihood to cyber-attacks (i.e. weakest link) and guide the enhancement of security assurance. To support these objectives, a Human-factored Cyber Security Capability Evaluation approach is presented using conceptual analysis techniques.Findings -Using a test scenario, the approach demonstrates the capacity to proffer an efficient evaluation of workforce security knowledge and skills capabilities and the identification of weakest link in the workforce.Practical implications -The approach can enable organisations to gain better workforce security perspectives like security-consciousness, alertness and response aptitudes, thus guiding organisations into adopting strategic means of appropriating security remediation outlines, scopes and resources without undue wastes or redundancies.Originality/value -This paper demonstrates originality by providing a framework and computational approach for characterising and quantify human-factor security capabilities based on security knowledge and security skills. It also supports the identification of potential security weakest links amongst an evaluated industrial workforce (human agents), some key security susceptibility areas and relevant control interventions. The model and validation results demonstrate the application of action research. This paper demonstrates originality by illustrating how action research can be applied within socio-technical dimensions to solve recurrent and dynamic problems related to industrial environment cyber security improvement. It provides value by demonstrating how theoretical security knowledge (awareness) and practical security skills can help resolve cyber security response and control uncertainties within industrial organisations.

This article conducts a literature review of current and future challenges in the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in cyber physical systems. The literature review is focused on identifying a conceptual framework for increasing resilience with AI through automation supporting both, a technical and human level. The methodology applied resembled a literature review and taxonomic analysis of complex internet of things (IoT) interconnected and coupled cyber physical systems. There is an increased attention on propositions on models, infrastructures and frameworks of IoT in both academic and technical papers. These reports and publications frequently represent a juxtaposition of other related systems and technologies (e.g. Industrial Internet of Things, Cyber Physical Systems, Industry 4.0 etc.). We review academic and industry papers published between 2010 and 2020. The results determine a new hierarchical cascading conceptual framework for analysing the evolution of AI decision-making in cyber physical systems. We argue that such evolution is inevitable and autonomous because of the increased integration of connected devices (IoT) in cyber physical systems. To support this argument, taxonomic methodology is adapted and applied for transparency and justifications of concepts selection decisions through building summary maps that are applied for designing the hierarchical cascading conceptual framework.

This article addresses the topic of shared responsibilities in supply chains, with a specific focus on the application of the Internet of Things (IoT) in e-health environments, and Industry 4.0 issues—concerning data security, privacy, reliability and management, data mining and knowledge exchange as well as health prevention. In this article, we critically review methodologies and guidelines that have been proposed to approach these ethical aspects in digital supply chain settings. The emerging framework presents new findings on how digital technologies affect vaccine shared supply chain systems. Through epistemological analysis, the article derives new insights for transparency and accountability of supply chain cyber risk from Internet of Things systems. This research devises a framework for ethical awareness, assessment, transparency and accountability of the emerging cyber risk from integrating IoT technologies on shared Covid-19 healthcare supply chain infrastructure.