Industries · Industrial & manufacturing

The line runs. Every shift, uninterrupted.

On the plant floor, downtime is a safety problem before it is a security one. The job: the line runs and the shift ends normally, because the paths from IT to OT were tested and closed first.

The shift board

Full shift, full output. Downtime: none.

Three lines, twenty-four hours. Testing found the IT-to-PLC route someone would have taken and closed it before it reached the floor.

00:0012:0024:00Line Astamping14,200 unitsLine Bassembly9,860 unitsIT-to-PLC path found · segmentation — closedLine Cpackaging21,400 units
One route to the controllers. Found in testing, closed off the floorDowntime: none · schematic shift
The problem

What industrial & manufacturing is up against.

Hover or select any one to see what it means.

Uptime comes first

A scan that nudges a PLC the wrong way can stall a line or fault a controller. Availability is the whole point of the plant.

IT/OT convergence

Once an attacker is on the business network, a flat or poorly segmented design lets them walk straight to the controllers.

Ransomware on OT

Ransomware on IT doesn’t have to touch a PLC to stop the plant. Encrypt the engineering workstations and historian and production halts anyway.

Legacy, unpatchable OT

Much of the install base predates modern security and runs for decades more. You often can’t patch it, reboot it on demand, or rip it out.

When a breach turns physical

When the security failure is a safety instrumented system, the blast radius isn’t data. It’s pressure, temperature, and people.

The problem

Uptime comes first

The aggressive scanner that finds everything on a web app will happily knock a 20-year-old controller offline mid-batch. On the plant floor, the test that breaks production is worse than the attack you were trying to find. We treat uptime as a hard constraint, not a footnote.

  • Passive discovery before any active touch
  • Throttled, controller-aware probing
  • Maintenance-window testing for the risky bits
OT-aware penetration testing →
The problem

IT/OT convergence

Someone connected the historian to the corporate domain “just to pull reports,” and now the path from a phished laptop to a PLC is three hops with no door in between. Convergence brings real efficiency, and a real bridge for attackers. We map that bridge before they do.

  • Trace real IT-to-OT reachable paths
  • Test the DMZ, historian, and jump hosts
  • Validate segmentation actually holds
Red teaming across the boundary →
The problem

Ransomware on OT

Operators often pull the plug on OT themselves the moment IT lights up, because nobody can prove the malware stopped at the boundary. That precautionary shutdown is the outage. We test whether ransomware can reach production and whether your isolation story survives contact.

  • Path-to-production from a ransomware foothold
  • Backup and recovery assumptions stress-tested
  • Isolation that holds under a real incident
Ransomware readiness →
The problem

Legacy, unpatchable OT

That HMI running an OS nobody has supported in years is not getting replaced before the next maintenance cycle, or the one after that. When patching is off the table, the defense is everything around the device. We test the compensating controls you’re actually relying on.

  • Inventory what is exposed and unpatchable
  • Test the compensating controls, not the wish list
  • Prioritize by reachable, real-world risk
How we prioritize →
The problem

When a breach turns physical

A tampered safety system doesn’t page you with an alert; it fails to stop the thing it exists to stop. This is the corner of the plant where automated testing should never go and seasoned operators take over. We treat SIS as off-limits to anything but the most careful, hands-on validation.

  • Operator-led, never automated, around safety
  • Validate SIS isolation and access paths
  • Safety treated as the hardest constraint
Operator-led testing →
How an attacker gets in

Every route ends at the same place: the systems that move the physical world.

EntryIT footholdIT/OT boundaryOT controlImpactPhishingstaff inboxRemote accessVPNVendor remoteintegratorExposed serviceedgeRemovable mediaUSBCorporate ITworkstationIT domainActive DirectoryEngineering WSOT-connectedOT DMZperimeterOT jump hostaccessData historianIT ↔ OTOT remote gatewayvendor maintSCADA servercontrolHMIoperatorPLCcontrollerField I/Osensors · valvesSafety PLCSISHalt the linedowntimeSafety systemsSISRansom productionencryptTamper processqualitythe route taken this runother possible routesloop back to go again

What you get: every path from IT to the floor, mapped and ranked, tested with care for systems that cannot simply be taken down.

Ransomware readiness →
The standards the plant answers to

The bar the standards set, and how we test to it.

The frameworks set the floor. The real bar is whether an IT compromise can reach the machines.

CIRCIA

Covered incidents and ransom payments reported to CISA on the clock.

We test the routes that would start that clock, so you close them first.

NIST 800-82

OT security engineering: segmentation, access control, monitoring.

We test whether an IT compromise can actually reach the controllers.

IEC 62443

Zones, conduits and security levels across the automation lifecycle.

We test the conduits the way an attacker would cross them.

Compliance & risk alignment →
Proof on the floor
0 stops

line stoppages while we tested the ICS live.

A purple team ran offense live alongside the defenders at a meat producer. Segmentation gaps found, lateral movement to the ICS closed off.

Read the ICS study →
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