Increased automation in the mining industry is adding complexity to ensuring workers' health and safety, according to industry players in Australia.

Connecting more assets to digital capabilities and robotics raises the risk of cyberattacks and will likely require more regulations and accompanying compliance costs, they said.

"Automation is making cybersecurity a health and safety risk," Sameera Bandara, head of IT at Australian gold producer St Barbara Ltd., said Oct. 12 at the Western Australia Mining Conference & Exhibition in Perth. "I really hope, as an industry, we'll realize it and start addressing this instead of it becoming a knee-jerk reaction to some unfortunate incident."

Sameera Bandara, St Barbara's head of IT, addresses a mining conference in Perth on Oct. 12, 2023. Source: S&P Global Commodity Insights.

Miners are feeling the lure to adopt automation and artificial intelligence because it can provide an edge over the competition.

"Either you can adopt it to reduce your all-in sustaining costs and mining costs to be cheaper than competitors, or you fall behind," Bandara said, adding that AI also "lets you scale with limited overheads."

But miners need to get better at protecting against possible cyberattacks, Luke Forsyth, cyber and strategic risk partner for Deloitte Risk Advisory, told a separate panel at the conference.

Attempts to interfere with the metals and mining industry's safety systems have already been observed, Forsyth said. He cited an online video from 2022 showing a purported cyberattack on an Iranian steel facility that caused a fire.

"One of the big achievements in mining in Australia in the last 20 years has been improvements in safety," Forsyth said. However, "overseas, they know that if they hit our safety systems they can hit our economy. They will come after it. So yes, cyber is a safety issue and we need to think about how we protect our safety systems from a cyber threat."

Any interference with a mine's water desalination or underground air systems becomes not only a production issue but a health and safety issue, Bandara said.

"An Ultra Class truck running amok in your mine site can do some real damage," so industry needs a "mindset shift" to address cybersecurity challenges that automation has introduced into sites, Bandara said.

Rapidly changing risks

Forsyth called for the use of basic tools, such as "placing good segmentation inside networks which create divides over which that type of hacking behavior, particularly supply chain hacking, can be more easily detected, by having multiple lines of defense."

Bandara believes industry needs to shift the focus of cybersecurity in mining to operational technology where increasing investments are being made, as "that's where people can get hurt."

Data integrity to make good decisions will thus become a key priority, and "with all this additional data we're going to be storing there's going to be increased regulation," Bandara said.

Cyberrisk needs to be reassessed on a regular basis because it is a "very dynamic risk," which means the businesses of miners and the third-party providers they hire are also changing rapidly, Alex Eakins, client manager for professional services firm Aon PLC's cyber solutions group, told the panel.

All of these developments are also taking place amid great change to the global regulatory landscape relating to cybersecurity and an increase in enforcement activity, Kieran Seed, head of content for global regulatory compliance at information analytics firm LexisNexis SA, told the panel.

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