Digital twins—virtual digital counterparts of physical objects, people, or processes—are rapidly being adopted by organizations as tools for simulation, testing, and decision-making. The concept traces its roots to NASA’s physical replicas of spacecraft in the 1960s, but today’s digital twins have evolved into sophisticated frameworks that bridge physical and digital systems, offering the power to predict real-world outcomes and inform business strategy.
David Shaw, Intuitus Corp. CEO and Digital Twin Consortium (DTC) working group co-chair, notes that these systems now do much more than simply mirror physical systems; they actively link both worlds, enabling predictive analytics at scale.
Greg Porter, Principal Solutions Architect at Sev1Tech, describes digital twin technology as still emerging, but increasingly central to business innovation. Their key advantage lies in the ability to simulate future scenarios and outcomes without disrupting the actual physical assets, allowing companies to test changes, interventions, or potential failures in a risk-free environment.
Industry applications are diverse: in healthcare, digital twins can model the effects of new medications or surgical procedures before implementation, while other organizations use digital twins to map employee interactions with physical assets, providing insights into cybersecurity attack surfaces and operational efficiencies. The cost to implement these systems varies widely, from a few hundred dollars for basic models to multi-million-dollar deployments for complex, mission-critical infrastructures.
However, while digital twins unlock new capabilities in prototyping, testing, and risk management, they also introduce significant cybersecurity risks. Porter warns that, particularly in “full-loop” digital twin environments—where data flows both from the physical system into the digital twin and back again—organizations open a new attack vector from the digital realm directly into physical assets. If the digital twin infrastructure is insecure, threat actors could manipulate data in ways that affect real-world systems, potentially leading to loss of control or catastrophic outcomes.
Kayne McGladrey, CISO in residence at Hyperproof, highlights that intellectual property theft is another rising threat; access to a digital twin could allow attackers to reverse-engineer sensitive business processes or product designs, providing competitors or nation-state actors with a strategic advantage. In sectors such as aerospace, defense, and critical infrastructure, the consequences of such breaches could be both severe and far-reaching.
Mitigation tips
To secure digital twins, organizations must implement robust data controls, segmenting and monitoring digital twin environments to prevent lateral movement by attackers. McGladrey recommends adopting “classic cybersecurity” measures with some enhancements: deploying phishing-resistant multi-factor authentication, tightly controlling user access, and maintaining comprehensive activity logs to support forensic investigation if an incident occurs. These steps, he notes, are not overly complex but do require deliberate planning to ensure that the security of both digital and physical assets is maintained.
As digital twin adoption accelerates, organizations must weigh their operational benefits against the new risks they introduce. By understanding the full scope of both opportunities and threats, and by embedding strong cybersecurity principles from the outset, businesses can harness digital twins’ transformative potential without exposing themselves to undue risk.
