Industrial environments are often described as different — different technologies, different priorities, different risks.
And while that’s true operationally, one thing hasn’t changed nearly as much as many would like to believe: the threats themselves.
In a recent Insane Cyber OT Office Hours leadership panel, our team discussed a reality that continues to surprise organizations responding to their first major OT cyber incident.
The attacks impacting industrial environments today often look strikingly similar to what IT teams have been dealing with for decades. What has changed is the context, the scale, and the impact.
That combination is what makes this trend particularly dangerous.
The Myth of “Special” OT Threats
There’s a persistent idea in industrial security that OT threats are fundamentally different from IT threats — that attackers need deep, specialized knowledge of control systems to cause harm. In practice, that’s rarely how incidents begin.
Many of the most disruptive OT incidents start with:
Credential abuse
SMB-based lateral movement
Ransomware variants long familiar to IT teams
Exploitation of unpatched systems or exposed services
From a technical standpoint, these are not novel techniques. As one panelist noted, industrial environments were being impacted by IT-borne malware as far back as the early 2000s, when worms like SQL Slammer disrupted plant operations by abusing standard IT protocols.
The uncomfortable truth is that attackers don’t need new tricks when old ones still work.
What Has Changed: Incentives, Access, and Geopolitics
While the tooling and techniques may look familiar, the ecosystem surrounding OT attacks has evolved significantly.
One major shift is the rise of access brokers operating in industrial environments. These groups specialize in gaining initial access to networks and then selling that access to other threat actors. Industrial organizations are no longer fringe targets — OT access has become a commodity.
Geopolitics also plays a growing role. Some threat groups make targeting decisions based on political considerations, sanctions, or broader international conflict. In certain moments, industrial environments become “off-limits.” In others, they become fair game.
Combined with the financial incentives of ransomware and extortion, this creates a volatile threat landscape where motive and opportunity increasingly align.
Why IT-Style Threats Hurt More in OT
If the threats look the same, why do OT incidents feel so much worse?
Because industrial environments magnify impact.
Unlike IT environments, OT systems are:
Geographically distributed across plants, substations, wells, and remote sites
Often located in harsh or inaccessible environments that limit physical access
Constrained by on‑prem requirements, legacy systems, and strict uptime demands
When something goes wrong, response isn’t as simple as deploying an agent or pushing a patch from the cloud. Latency, limited connectivity, safety concerns, and operational risk all slow down investigation and remediation.
Even visibility becomes a challenge when assets sit far outside traditional network boundaries.
The Purdue Model vs. Reality
For years, the Purdue Model has served as a useful reference for understanding industrial network segmentation. But in real-world environments, it often breaks down.
Modern OT architectures include:
PLCs connected via cellular modems in remote locations
Assets that don’t map cleanly to any Purdue level
Communication paths that cross layers in unexpected ways
When security strategies rely too heavily on idealized models, blind spots emerge. Attacks don’t respect architectural diagrams — they move where connectivity exists.
This mismatch between theory and reality is one reason IT-style attacks continue to succeed in OT environments.
Familiar Threats, Bigger Consequences
Perhaps the most important difference between IT and OT incidents is cost.
In industrial environments, the largest losses often aren’t tied to forensic investigations or recovery services. They’re tied to downtime and lost production. In some industries, even a single hour of outage can translate into millions of dollars in losses.
When familiar IT threats hit OT systems, the financial and operational consequences escalate rapidly. What might be a contained incident in IT becomes a cascading failure across interconnected processes.
Key Takeaway
The problem facing industrial organizations isn’t that OT threats are new or exotic. It’s that familiar threats are being applied to environments that are harder to defend and far more expensive to disrupt.
Understanding this reality is the first step toward building effective OT security programs — ones grounded in real-world architectures, realistic threat models, and operational constraints.
In the next post in this series, we’ll look at what this means for the people tasked with defending these environments — and how organizations can approach IT/OT convergence and training without breaking operations.
This article is based on insights from Insane Cyber’s OT Office Hours leadership panel. Watch the full discussion and explore more OT cybersecurity resources on our YouTube channel and LinkedIn page.
