Episode 121

Who Actually Owns OT Cybersecurity? Not Who You Think

· 30:36 · Host: Craig and Dino

Dino and Craig break down what they are seeing in real industrial environments as companies begin the OT cybersecurity journey. They outline why most organizations are still in an “unaware to awareness” phase, what creates the “oh wow” moment after the first pilot, and why ownership and execution…

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Chapters

  1. 00:00:00 — Why OT vulnerabilities and remote access are the real “kicker”
  2. 00:01:00 — The market reality: 60% unaware, 30% starting, 10% operationalized
  3. 00:03:00 — Who owns remediation: IT vs OT and the plant-floor accountability gap
  4. 00:05:00 — Why “visibility” often stops at Purdue Level 3 and misses Level 2 assets
  5. 00:07:00 — OEMs, integrators, and why support models matter in OT cybersecurity
  6. 00:09:00 — Flat networks, north-south traffic, and why you still miss panel-level devices
  7. 00:11:00 — The human capital problem and why outsourcing is often unavoidable
  8. 00:18:00 — A real-world warning: EDR in ICS can create massive operational cost
  9. 00:20:00 — Safety, quality, and cybersecurity: the three things leaders will fund
  10. 00:24:00 — Change management failures and why monitoring PLC edits matters

Read the full transcript ↓

Show notes

Dino and Craig break down what they are seeing in real industrial environments as companies begin the OT cybersecurity journey. They outline why most organizations are still in an “unaware to awareness” phase, what creates the “oh wow” moment after the first pilot, and why ownership and execution often falls to plant-floor teams and their OEM and integrator partners.

The conversation covers the limits of surface-level visibility, why accurate asset inventory and remote access control are foundational, and how practical constraints like flat networks, legacy switches, warranty concerns, and limited human capital can stall progress.

They also share cautionary examples of IT-first security tooling causing operational impact, and they close with a clear message: think globally, act locally, and build a defensible OT program that matches how plants actually run.

Chapters:

  • (00:00:00) Why OT vulnerabilities and remote access are the real “kicker”
  • (00:01:00) The market reality: 60% unaware, 30% starting, 10% operationalized
  • (00:03:00) Who owns remediation: IT vs OT and the plant-floor accountability gap
  • (00:05:00) Why “visibility” often stops at Purdue Level 3 and misses Level 2 assets
  • (00:07:00) OEMs, integrators, and why support models matter in OT cybersecurity
  • (00:09:00) Flat networks, north-south traffic, and why you still miss panel-level devices
  • (00:11:00) The human capital problem and why outsourcing is often unavoidable
  • (00:18:00) A real-world warning: EDR in ICS can create massive operational cost
  • (00:20:00) Safety, quality, and cybersecurity: the three things leaders will fund
  • (00:24:00) Change management failures and why monitoring PLC edits matters

Links And Resources:


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Full transcript

The complete conversation, in order. 5,851 words.

Dino [00:00:00] you can't take them seriously. You just can't, because we see so many vulnerabilities down there and people might say, well, we're patching, you know, they never patch that stuff anyway.

Dino Okay, that's maybe true, but it doesn't mean that you can't segment and then it's the remote access we find down there. That's the kicker. 'cause nobody knows who's coming in and accessing that environment. They have no idea. And it changes all the time.

Intro Welcome to the Industrial Cybersecurity Insider. In each episode, we dive into the world of industrial cybersecurity. Join us as we cover the latest trends, innovations, and practical insights as we talk with leaders. And practitioners across the industry. Gear up and let's get into this week's episode.

Dino Hi, my name's Dino Bussi and I'm the Chief Technology Officer of Veta Technology, one of the [00:01:00] co-founders,

Craig and I'm Craig Duckworth, the president and the CEO of Delta technology, and the co-founder as well. Today we are gonna talk about. What we're seeing in the field. I know that you're out there all the time, Dino.

Craig We have clients and prospects that have purchased or are looking at purchasing an IDS or one of these industrial solutions. So what do they do next? What's, what are you seeing? What's out there?

Dino Well, let's start about the state of the state, right? So I've heard this from three major players, right?

Dino Cisco amis, clarity. In the OT IDS cybersecurity space, right? Top tier OT IDS platforms, 60% of OT environments are still in the unaware to awareness phase, meaning they haven't done anything they know about OT cybersecurity, they know the term, but they haven't done anything. They're just aware of it.

Dino You got 30% [00:02:00] that have started doing something. Maybe A POV, maybe they got a couple of sites in, right? So that's, right. 90% up out there are still kind of walking in the wilderness you got 10% that are actually at the operational integration phase. And those are gonna be your very large companies.

Dino Those are your Fortune one hundreds. Right. Those that have the, uh, the pockets, , the, to be able to. Get the resources to focus on this and get after, right. Regulation might be driving it, cybersecurity, the board of directors. There's a lot of different things that drive that, but that's kind of the state and that's fresh, right?

Dino That's real. And we're seeing that. So then you get down to the, now you've started doing something, and , it's like, well, who executes? They're decided to do a pilot, POV, proof of Value, and they've got 120 sites, 200 sites global, right? Over 50, and there's plants in their fleet, and they've done one or two.

Dino You have to get the Oh wow moment. It's like, holy smokes. There's [00:03:00] a lot of stuff going on in here. I had no idea whether it's remote access, default configurations, you know, malware could be in there. There unencrypted, passwords and, , and a whole bevy of things that are going on inside that environment that, that are, it's new and lights being shut on it.

Dino And then the challenge is, well, now that you know this, who actually owns the responsibility? Right. Trying to figure out who's going to move it to the next level to do this. Uh, and it's challenging for these clients, ?

Craig You and I have had that conversation on several different episodes, you know? Does does it own it?

Craig Does OT own It does. Is it a mix of both? Because at the end of the day, the asset owners. Are really responsible for the remediation to fix the things that these IDS tools uncover the issues that come out of 'em, the remediation, let's call the where the rubber meets the road process of how do you start.

Craig [00:04:00] Fixing these things that has typically always fallen to the OT or operational technology teams that controls engineers. Not so much in it, regardless of who owns the project. Wouldn't you say.

Dino Yeah, well what What I'm seeing is the automation technology industry, right? You think of the supply chain, everything from the Rockwell, Siemens, Schneiders, Honeywells, et cetera, yada, yada, yada.

Dino And then they're partners, right? The OEMs and the system integrators. They're building practices, they're building partnering relationships with these OT cybersecurity firms. What I see happening is they're gonna push it out. Tackling to be able to get the visibility that you want at the control where safety is an issue, where quality is an.

Dino The asset ownership to your point, is still gonna be handled at that level, right? The remote access in there to solve problems and fix that, [00:05:00] you know, it's role is gonna default to receiving information up to their sim, to their SOAR platforms or to their soc for risk metrics that, that they need to have, and, and you want that data to be accurate, right there.

Dino You don't want all the false positive stuff that usually gets pushed around because nobody. Even all these tools that we've seen deployed are getting to the level of visibility. What I wanna call, if you think of the Purdue model down to level two now, some would say, why do you wanna be at that level?

Dino Well, there's PLCs down there, there's HMIS down there, there's drives down there, and there's soft PLCs down. There's a whole bevy of technology that's, even though they put in an O-T-I-D-S platform, they're only seeing 30, 40, 50% or less of their OT assets.

Craig Yeah. But it goes, it kind of goes back to some of the other philosophies that, that we kind of believe in, and again, it, their responsibility is really to help the organization manage the business. They're there to help support it, to [00:06:00] manage it, and OT is more their, the reason that. The organization's in business, it's the cash register.

Craig It's what they make as an organization. So if you look at that separation and you say it's the

Dino revenue, right? It, who

Craig drives

Dino the revenue IT staff

Craig at driving the revenue on plant floor? If you look, no, not at all. But they are there to help guide, help leverage, Help OT manage that business is really that role.

Dino Yeah. But they struggle with it because they don't understand the plant floor. They don't understand the process or operations. That's why I get back to it's who do they buy from today to help them build those machine centers that they use to make their goods. And not just build them, but maintain, manage and support them.

Dino Right. So if you've got a filler that's putting liquid in a can or a bottle, tell me what it's role is for that.

Craig Give you a port address when you need it.

Dino Right? Right. So it it's gonna fall to who built the filler and who's supporting me if I can't figure out why my filler's got low levels.[00:07:00]

Craig It's the OEM,

Dino right? It's the OEM. And so now the OEMs are ha and it's not that, they're not trying to help. They're getting better and they're building practices. I can tell you right now, you, you go to some of these major, OEMs or EPCs, you know, EPCs, like engineering procurement companies like Burns and Mac or, or, you know, you get into the, the Barry Waymiller of the world and some of these others that are providing all these o EMM and system engineering services are building cyber security practices.

Dino And I'm gonna tell you right now, they're not talking to the CISO and the CIO. They're down there talking to the plant manager and the people in that plant engineering teams on how they're hardening that cybersecurity posture because it can't break through the control system barrier. I don't care what anybody says.

Dino I haven't witnessed. Now, there may be a few, there's exceptions. There's always exceptions, but the majority, because if it was really doing their job, we wouldn't be sitting at 60 to 90% still unaware of what this stuff [00:08:00] is. If it was doing it.

Craig Part of it, again, goes back to it, still believes that the tools they have at their disposal that have been around for 15, 20, 30 years will work in the OT environment.

Craig And we all, as practitioners know, they absolutely will not. They are not designed.

Dino They'll buy a tool like ForeScout or Tenable, or maybe they already have it right as part of their IT cybersecurity, uh, platform. And then Tenable and ForeScout, for example, both provide OT cybersecurity. But these companies aren't installing the ot IDS piece from ForeScout or Tenable.

Dino Right. and even if they did, they wouldn't know how to install it down in that space. Right. One of the biggest challenges that we see with the work that we do is that when we put an OT IDS platform in a manufacturing facility, and we try to get it down as far as we can in the environment, it usually sits somewhere around level three.

Dino The Purdue model, if you're familiar with the Purdue model, you're, we, ideally we get it [00:09:00] three and that'll get you a pretty good chunk of the environment, but sometimes it gives you more than you want. 'cause the networks are flat and you're picking up on a lot of it traffic.

Craig But I would say we call that the north south traffic, though.

Craig That's the predominant traffic.

Dino It is. But even then, you know, the question then becomes, it's like, well, okay, you got a hundred panels out there that have hundreds of other devices in that space and you're not seeing any of'em. Right. So then somebody has to go out there and open up those panels and look at that ICS infrastructure, look at those PLCs and see how many ethernet cards it has in it.

Dino Look at the switch that's out there. Can it even span? Can you even run a span port on that? You know, you. We do that, but it doesn't do that. I never see them out there on the plant floor at that level of trying to determine how am I gonna get the metadata in this panel back to this platform that I just put in.

Dino Right. and some of 'em, OEMs will tell you flat out, you can't put a device in that panel. 'cause I will. It voids the warranty and support [00:10:00] Right. What we do though is we have intermediate steps and there's other technologies that we can use that, okay, I can't put, uh, a sensor or a collector in there, but I have other programs, I call 'em dissolvable executables that I can run in that environment.

Dino I can get the patch build on that HMI instead of having a, you know, the base Windows 10, that tells me I got 800 CVEs when I actually only got maybe 200. So I can get the base, I can get the build, I can get a software bomb. And I know when that software was installed and was the last time it was used, right, is it running?

Dino And I get the neighbors surrounding that control system who's talking to that machine center and what's it talking to? And I can feed that back into the baseline. So then I go from 30% of the OT assets I'm seeing when I install to maybe 70 or 80% right? Not continuously, but at least I got a better idea of what I have out [00:11:00] there and I have a more accurate, CVE or vulnerability management number to deal with versus something that that's bogus.

Dino Because anybody who uses these tools will, you should know that capturing Windows machines on a spam port is not gonna give you the build number. So you have two choices. You either figure out how to get WMI down there and running. So some of the, you know, these O-T-A-I-D-S platforms will provide active query is what they call it.

Dino You know, but even then you can't snake your way all the way down across the back plane of the PLC to get to another PLC or to another set of, uh, control systems down there to get that stuff. So you have to do it on the other side. You have to do it.

Craig Layer one. Right? So,

Dino and that's the magic to make this work.

Dino And that's where I see the O-T-I-D-S. I know people talk about convergence, it's convergent, but it's really convergence from LA level three and up potentially.

Craig Yep, it is well before I need two days before it takes over that [00:12:00] responsibility. 'cause I'm going straight out and I'm gonna buy a whole bunch of Red Wing stock because not a single IT person owns a pair of hard toed shoes, steel-toed shoes.

Craig So I'm gonna need some advanced notice 'cause there's gonna be a huge run on those before they're allowed to go out and do that. Just so you know. That's part of the problem.

Dino Alright, well it's. It can be a heavy lift. I mean, it, it, working in these plants is, it can be a heavy lift. It's, again, it's an industrial environment.

Dino You know, you might be walking a million square foot facility, you're gonna be out there for maybe two days. Right. Crawling through it. And uh, and sometimes you gotta work around the weekends and maintenance windows whenever, just to gain access to the machine centers when, not, when they're not in production.

Dino So, I mean, that's, part of, the job. And I will tell you, there's a lot of it folks that they, they're not interested in doing that, you know, that's just not someplace they wanna be. But on the OT side, they do that all day, every day. So you might as well just keep it with them. It again, we've said this many times in many podcasts.

Dino You gotta think globally, but you [00:13:00] gotta act locally.

Craig You need that local tribal knowledge. Yeah, absolutely.

Dino You do. And it's not gonna be some IT person sitting 500 miles away and some corporate office thinking that they can do what they need to do on that plant floor in order to do a better job of protecting it or finding out what's going on down there without going out there and really understanding it.

Dino Right. And so it, it takes that level. You have to get to that. That piece to build that, collection capability at those lower levels within that industrial environment. Anybody who says, oh, we don't need to collect information down there, is you can't take them seriously. You just can't, you know, because we see so many vulnerabilities down there and people might say, well, we're patching, you know, they never patch that stuff anyway.

Dino Okay, that's maybe true, but it doesn't mean that you can't segment and it, and then it's the remote access we find down there. That's the kicker. 'cause nobody knows who's coming in and accessing that environment. They have no idea. And it changes all the time.

Craig So once [00:14:00] they put this solution in, let's say that, they've done a POB, they ha they have us or somebody else come in and do a, a bake off and they choose a technology and they decide what they want.

Craig They put it in. What happens then Who's gonna help 'em operationalize? Who's gonna help 'em understand the data? Because it's like you, you've said this a thousand times a month, drink it from a fire hose. It's just coming as fast as it can. What do they do with the data? How do they begin to make, let's call them actionable decisions, risk decisions from the organization on what do we do with this stuff now?

Craig How do they manage that?

Dino Well, first you can't. Manage what you're not measuring, is that right? Can't manage what you're not measuring, right? So until you get to the point where I have a true asset inventory. The very first thing you gotta do, you gotta get an, an accurate asset inventory. And a snapshot in time is not good enough anymore.

Dino Right. And in some regulations, it's [00:15:00] changing. That model is changing. And we have the technology, right. You know, when we were having this discussion with the CIO not too long ago, you know, her comment was, you have any idea how much it's gonna cost to do that? And I'm like, yeah, I got a pretty good idea.

Dino You know, and then it's like, where are we gonna get the people from? Uh, it's not gonna be you. It's gonna be the people who work in this environment, who are accustomed to these machine centers\ and working here every day and know how this plant operates and know if I lose, you know, this group of machines over here, this plant goes down.

Dino If and if you lose them, well, who puts who gets remote access in order to try to fix it? And how do they get in? And then once they're in, how do you keep 'em where you need 'em instead of letting 'em wandering through the other, the underbelly of that control environment. And go from plant to plant, machine to machine, right?

Dino You don't know, you know, 'cause you're not watching it. So asset inventory identification, that's job one, right? Remote access, you gotta start. You really gotta, if you're thinking VPN is sufficient, again, you can't be taken seriously. [00:16:00] Right. In this environment, there are two tools out there that are specific for these control systems, and if you're not looking at them, you're not paying attention.

Dino Right. And then you can start building in your defensible architectures. You want to do continuous monitoring, you know, and it's not easy to put in collectors, you know? That's a thought process, that's an engineering, you know, decision that has to be made. And, and maybe some negotiations. Again, with the OEM, it's like, if I wanna take out the, the cheap.

Dino Mann switch you put in there, it doesn't span. Or Phoenix contact, for example, and I wanna put in a smarter switch that can I get a span port on it? Or if I can't take the switch out, can I put taps in there so I can get a span port, put my collector in there so I can collect that information. That's not an overnight decision that that's gonna take a little bit of work and time to get that in.

Dino Right. So for you customers out there who have bought. Arm or Clarity, or Cisco Cyber Vision or Nazomi, whatever, every machine center that [00:17:00] you got coming into your plant that the engineering teams are buying throughout the year, lifecycle replacement expansions, there's always machines coming in and out of that environment.

Dino If you're an arm shop, you should be specking in collectors into that machine center with the OEM that you're buying that stuff from. And if you're not doing that, why aren't you doing that?

Craig Part of the process and part of the concern is the human capital. These organizations, Dino, we see it all the time, don't have trained resources.

Craig They're teams that they have that are in that OT environment already have a. 5, 6, 8 jobs. They're working 75 hours a week, getting paid for 40 or 50 or whatever it is. And all they wanna do at the end of the day is go home because they don't want another job. And this is another job for 'em.

Dino So what, you know what they do?

Dino They spend six and seven figures for maintenance support from the OEMs to to maintain and manage support that stop. So [00:18:00] why wouldn't you just do the same thing for this? Right. That's where, because you're not, you don't have an inside, even. Even to manage. The machines you have today requires support from your OEM, and you pay them a quarter of a million, half a million, million dollars a year, depending on the size and scope of your organization.

Dino Number plants. You have to do that work well. You're gonna have to do the same thing for this, right? You're gonna have to put the same effort in there with organizations who work within that environment.

Craig Yeah. You know, you take organization like, like ours or the many other ones around the country that do the same things that where they focus on industrial IDS, industrial cyber platforms, they're familiar with the tools, the technologies, the techniques, the environment, the practitioners.

Craig You, you gotta have somebody that understands,

Dino well, you know, we had a client, they, they wanted to put in an EDR. I'm not even gonna tell you which EDR platform it was, but it was a [00:19:00] million dollar. CapEx project to do it. And, industrial control system, compute platform. Their hmis, their engineering workstations, their historians, application servers or VMs.

Dino Predominantly not very much bare metal out there, just VMs. That $1 million CapEx project to put EDR. Cost them 8 million in opex to fix what that EDR system did to their ICS environment because of the resources that it consumed to run. And not only did it break applications, right, it slowed things down and they had to buy more storage.

Dino They had to buy more memory, they had to buy more processing capability just to run that EDR package.

Craig Well, but then you continue down that rabbit hole. What was their loss of production because of the downtime that product caused their manufacturing environment that they can't get back.

Craig So it that. 1 million, you add the eight, now you're at nine plus the other stuff. So you're at 10 plus. That could have been a [00:20:00] $25 million hit to 'em for a $1 million project.

Dino Well, and that was, and that was an IT push, right? Hey, we're doing this on the enterprise. Surely we can do it on the control system side.

Dino Right? And then went down there and, did what to the bed. Right? And so that's what happened. And this happens a lot because when it really comes down to when push comes to shove. And it's, we're talking about quality and safety and production process integrity. The only people are gonna, that really have, you know, skin in the game are the people who work in those plants to make that happen.

Dino Right? At the end of the day, and we see this because, because when we drag the IT guys down into the bowels of that plant, nine and 10 of them just walk back to where they came from and, and say, yeah, that's not my problem. I don't wanna mess with that stuff. Right. Well, yeah, it is. And, and because they see Windows seven and they see these layer two unmanaged, you know, Phoenix contact switches out there that, that were put in 10 years ago or whatever.

Dino They don't want any responsibility for that stall. They [00:21:00] don't, you know, I'd love to talk to a CIO that wants to say, yeah, I don't want responsibility for that. So that means you're gonna be the new plant manager. Right. Your job is to make sure the plant runs every day.

Dino That's your job. Oh, and you got 30 plants in your fleet.

Craig At the, at the end of the day though all of this still falls from the ownership. If you look at the ultimate ownership of who's responsible, it's the CEO and the board of directors. There may be a risk manager, there may be a board of Governors.

Craig There may be an. EHS and safety. There's gonna be all kinds of layers that are responsible, but it all is gonna ultimately roll up to a C level and the board to help manage this. And I think that that's, again, part of that. Disconnect is how do they align with teams that understand how do they bring the right resources to the table?

Craig Whether that's a tabletop [00:22:00] exercise to do alignment within the organization. That's a look. Pick two or three technologies and start doing a evaluation. Choose some success criteria. For your organization, what makes the most sense for you? What's important for you as an organization?

Dino There's three things I've learned that they'll spend money on and I heard this directly from a very large global beverage company, safety, quality, and cybersecurity.

Dino They will spend money on that, right? Without a doubt. They will spend you, you get any one of those three things that, that kick you in the teeth and , the checkbook will come out.

Craig Yep. True. And I would say that would be the exact same three criteria if I were to ask pharma or if I were to ask automotive or I were to ask oil and gas.

Craig Because those three things are what gets you on the news. You have an accident at a plant and you have two or three or a dozen people die. You are on the news. That's a bad day if people are, and people [00:23:00] are

Dino losing their jobs.

Craig Yeah. You're, you're an oil and gas, you have a spill. Yeah.

Dino You are getting fined.

Dino Yes, your doors might close. Right.

Craig Well, perfect real life example this week that, that container ship that hit the, the Scott Key Bridge up in the Baltimore area that closed the port. What's the impact?

Dino 15 million a day? They said 15 million a day was the number I heard.

Craig That's crazy.

Dino I don't know what caused that crash. Right. But I will tell you that a lot of mechanical failures, , they're blamed as mechanical failures. Sometimes it could be a digital issue that caused that mechanical failure because of the sophistication and complexity of what we've put into these control systems that are run by networks and software and applications.

Dino That they can cause mechanical failures, right? If, if they're interrupted or if they're hacked, or if they're not operating as they're intended to. As they're supposed to. I've [00:24:00] seen a lot of, of process integrity issues that go to, to, to making quality issues safety. It was one of them. You know, there's one story that, that I know that I'll tell you real quick.

Dino Had to do with a roofing company who had an engineer that made a change to, um, A PLC, and it dumped five pounds more material per single s slap, right? Yeah. Per, for each one of the singles, it had five pounds more material on it, and the way that, that it got caught. Was it the truck scales? Because the guy running the truck scales was sitting there going, why are these trucks so damn heavy coming outta here?

Dino Right? And so after a half a day of trucks going out really, really heavy, he is like, Hey, you guys need to tell me why these trucks are way overweight. And they wake, they make their way back. Find out what happened. They fired the engineer. All those trucks that went out had to come back 'cause that was all scrap.

Dino 'cause you couldn't put that on roofs. It was too heavy. Right. So the load was wrong. So you had to, you had all that scrap, you know, millions of dollars just [00:25:00] trashed because somebody made a simple change and some people say, well that change management, you know, change, manage control is a good thing in a control system environment.

Dino But if you don't have something watching that and alerting you to that. Then you don't know that somebody made a, an online edit for that PLC or changed the program. Right. Until you have a quality issue. And that had both, right? That was a quality issue and a safety issue. Right. Wasn't a cybersecurity issue, but the tools that we have, catch that stuff.

Dino Now, some clients will sit out there and go, well, you know, I'm a big Rockwell shop. I got asset center. An asset center will tell you that.

Craig Yeah,

Dino it will. That you're like, too intent. In the Rockwell world, you know, and even some of the Rockwell stuff, because of its age, it doesn't even communicate and work with asset center.

Dino So, you know, you have to know the environment. You really, really do. And it takes a little bit of effort. I mean, think of our, um, our [00:26:00] cybersecurity. , Assessments, our visibility studies, the work that we do, it's a three to one cost difference between an IT group doing the same thing on the carpeted space compared to what we do on the shop floor because of the work is different.

Dino Three to one difference. So for those of you out there thinking about cost, it's a three to one difference between the work that's done on the plant floor compared to what it is doing on in the, office space.

Craig Nope, I get it. But again, it all, it all kind of rolls back to, to asset visibility. You can't protect what you can't see.

Craig They have to start somewhere. You know, we, it, this rolls all the way back to that very beginning statement that you made from what are you seeing in the field? And it's 90%, 90% of organizations from the small ones that have one or two facilities to the large global fortune.

Craig In an unaware or holy cow, look what I've gotta do. State only 10% are truly beginning the journey and [00:27:00] are taking steps to get better period over period. And it, that has to change. It has to change. We gotta see change.

Dino It's a shock. It is a shock when you're at that. If you're in that 30%, you know, that's got that old wow moment.

Dino you, you got a lot of decisions to make. And it's, and you do, and it'll slow you down, right? Because we can always move faster than the client can doing what we do. But when you start putting a spotlight on all the crummy things that are going on inside their environment, that they need to start figuring out how to deal with it, it slows them down internally.

Dino Right. Well, we need to redesign our network. No, that's this. These tools helped you get to that point, right? And there's other blocking and tackling defense, defensible architecture moves you can make that are much more cost effective, saying, well, we're just gonna redesign the whole plant network.

Dino No, you're not, because you're not gonna go out there and start ripping switches out of panels. You'll sit at the level four of the IDF environment and try to tap down OT and separate yourself between the two. That's what I see is it [00:28:00] is always trying to protect themselves from ot.

Craig Well, it should be both ways.

Craig Why? Why do I have to trust you, but why won't you trust me?

Dino That's right. I exactly right. That's exactly right. And one in 10 will have their own firewall in the OT side and have a true IDMZ with a firewall at three, four, and a firewall down at three down for the OT world. And that firewall is managing controlled by ot, right?

Dino And anybody again, that, that thinks that they can handle it differently. You can't take 'em seriously. They don't understand. Alls I would say is you're just trying to protect yourself from your OT people. 'cause down here you don't care what goes on down there. It's not your problem. And they need to admit that, right?

Dino And they need to tell their senior management that. It's like, look, we're we stop at four, what happens from three down? You need to find people that are better at this than we are. That

Craig was a great conversation. It, really helps, hopefully, organizations can see, they take a [00:29:00] look at themselves, look internally and say, okay, where are we in this journey?

Craig has our teams identified something? Have we taken the steps needed to begin the journey? And really look at it hard and figure out what's next steps because this is not gonna go away guys. This isn't, and ladies, this is not going away.

Dino Yeah, you gotta look at how you handle technology today.

Dino You know, is, is your model to, to manage it all internally and hire your own staff, you know, where you've got hundreds of people working for you that work for the the CIO and the ciso and that's how you manage it, or do you outsource and you just have a few key individuals and their job is to manage all these different groups, you know, service providers, for example, and contractors and consultants, and that's how they do it.

Dino Well, if that's your model. You gotta look at the model for the plant floor. Sometimes that'll fit down here. 'cause right now building a practice of your own on the ot, cybersecurity front is not an overnight thing. You know, and so you're gonna have to go find the Schneiders, the Siemens, the [00:30:00] Rockwells, the honey mills, their partners, , the EPCs, the Veta technologies that go and do just that.

Dino That's all we do.

Craig All right, Dino, great conversation. Thank you very much. Again, it's always great to hear what's out in the field as you're out doing your journey. So.

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About Industrial Cyber Security Insider

Industrial Cybersecurity Insider brings clarity to one of the most urgent gaps in manufacturing and critical infrastructure: the divide between IT and OT. Hosts Craig and Dino talk with plant leaders, engineers, and security practitioners about protecting industrial operations in the real world — practical conversations for the people responsible for keeping production running and secure.

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