The systems that run physical infrastructure were never designed to be defended. Attackers know this. Most boards do not.
The systems that keep the lights on, the water moving and the production line running were, for the most part, never designed to be defended. They were designed to be reliable and to last decades — and they have. The cost of that longevity is that much of the world's critical infrastructure runs on technology that predates the threat it now faces.
For years that did not matter, because these systems were isolated. They are no longer. The drive for efficiency and remote monitoring has connected operational technology to corporate networks, and corporate networks to the internet. Each connection is sensible on its own terms. Together they have given attackers a path to the physical world that simply did not exist a decade ago.
The asymmetry is stark. On the IT side, a breach costs data and money. On the OT side, the same intrusion can stop a process, damage equipment, or threaten safety. Yet OT is frequently the part of the estate with the least monitoring, the oldest software, and the fewest people who understand both the engineering and the security of it.
Closing the gap does not mean ripping out systems that work. It means seeing the converged estate as one attack surface, segmenting it so a compromise on the office network cannot reach the plant floor, and putting monitoring where there is currently none. Most of all it means having people who can hold both worlds in their head — because the engineer who understands the process and the defender who understands the adversary are usually two different people, and the risk lives exactly where they fail to meet.
Attackers have already understood that operational technology is the soft underbelly. The work now is to make sure the boards responsible for it understand the same thing — before it is demonstrated to them.
This is part of how we think, shared publicly. The specifics we cannot publish, we discuss privately.
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