Representatives from the White House, the U.S. Department of Energy, the FBI, National Science Foundation and several national laboratories came together inside UTSA’s downtown School of Data Science Wednesday to discuss their interconnected efforts to harden the nation’s manufacturing sector against cyber attacks.
They descended on San Antonio to attend “Secure Together,” the second annual conference hosted by the Cybersecurity Manufacturing Innovation Center, or CyManII, an Energy Department-funded cybersecurity research and development institute launched in 2020 and housed at UTSA.
Advanced manufacturing, which incorporates new technologies in its processes, is one of the most vulnerable sectors of the economy to cyberattack — and most manufacturers have neither the resources nor the know-how to secure themselves against increasingly sophisticated nation state-backed adversaries.
That was the main message from Howard Grimes, who serves as CEO of CyManII, which everyone pronounces “sigh-man-ee.”
The responsibility to keep manufacturing secure must move away from individual businesses and be taken up by organizations like CyManII, he said — which is itself a consortium that includes some of the nation’s top research universities, national laboratories and industrial leaders.
CyManII’s mission goes beyond increasing cybersecurity in manufacturing; it also seeks to make manufacturing more energy efficient, and conduct workforce training.
CyManII has already trained close to 40,000 individuals, said Ty Middleton, CyManII’s education and workforce development director, in part through its Cybersecurity for Manufacturing hub located at Port San Antonio. There, employees from companies across the region get hands-on training in secure smart manufacturing.
CyManII also hosts a Mobile Training Vehicle which takes cybersecurity training on the road, giving far-flung manufacturers and their employees the opportunity to detect, identify and mitigate cyber threats.
Humans remain the weakest link, Grimes said, with about 80% of breaches against manufacturers due to human error.
On Wednesday, Middleton took the stage with a number of regional partners who are working together to train up the next generation of workers.
That included Domingo Ruiz, South San ISD’s e-sports director and sponsor of the district’s IT pathways, who has been methodically building a program that reaches younger and younger students through gaming, e-sports and drone competitions.
“Challenges are always there with resources,” Ruiz said, so partnerships with “everybody” — Port San Antonio, CyManII, private industry, the military — are “so important to our students.”
Dan Yoxall, president and CEO of the San Antonio Manufacturers Association, said the region supports 1,500 mostly small- and medium-sized manufacturers in a diverse array of industries, including aerospace, food and beverage, automotive, metal, wood and plastics, many with fewer than 50 employees.
“They need what is going on” at CyManII, he said, noting that such training not only increases security, but also has the chance to improve companies’ bottom lines.
CyManII is housed at UTSA because of its cybersecurity expertise and due to the “depth and breadth” of the partnerships it pulled together. The Energy Department’s five-year contract to fund the institute includes $70 million in federal funding, $41 million from the partners and $10 million from the University of Texas System.