AI-powered ICS/ OT Cybersecurity

  By Muhammad Ali Khan ICS/ OT Cybersecurity Specialist — AAISM | CISSP | CISA | CISM | CEH | ISO27001 LI | CHFI | CGEIT | CDCP In most industrial environments, vendor management is treated as a procurement task. Contracts are signed, access is granted, and systems go live. Once production starts, vendors quietly fade into the background until something breaks. In ICS and OT environments, that assumption is dangerous. Vendors do not just supply technology. They become part of the control system itself. They configure PLCs, maintain HMIs, manage firmware, and often retain remote access for years. Yet their role in cybersecurity is rarely defined with the same seriousness as their role in operations. This gap shows up during outages, incidents, and recovery, when assumptions about trust collide with reality. Why Vendor Management Is Fundamentally Different in OT In IT, vendor access is typically limited, logged, and governed by standardized controls. In OT, vendors often require priv...

Industrial systems usually fail in predictable ways. A machine part gets stuck, a sensor provides incorrect data, a controller malfunctions, or a human makes an error. These problems are slow, easy to see, and well understood. Agentic AI changes this. When autonomous AI is integrated into ICS and OT systems, it introduces new types of failures that are unfamiliar and do not conform to traditional safety models. The risk isn’t that AI makes a bad choice; it’s that the system starts behaving in ways people don’t recognize or know how to fix quickly. Press enter or click to view image in full size Traditional OT Failures Are Linear Imagine a control room where an AI is continuously adjusting a compressor to keep it perfectly within operating limits. Each adjustment is technically correct and within safety thresholds. Operators see stable trends on their screens. Months later, vibration-related wear increases, bearings fail early, and no one can point to a single moment where something “we...

  When Autonomous Decisions Meet Physical Consequences Industrial cybersecurity is entering an uncomfortable phase. For decades, ICS and OT security have been built on the assumption that humans remain  in control . The process was assumed to be simple: systems monitored, the tools alerted, and the security teams decided. Agentic AI challenges that assumption entirely. Unlike traditional automation or analytics, agentic AI doesn’t just observe or recommend. It  acts , sets goals and plans steps, and executes decisions across systems with minimal human intervention. In IT environments, that’s powerful, and in OT environments, it’s dangerous unless it’s handled correctly. The Reality of Traditional ICS/OT Cybersecurity Most traditional ICS and OT cybersecurity still works reactively. Alerts only appear after something abnormal has already happened. Engineers then have to investigate the issue manually. Decisions take time because of shift changes, approvals, and uncertainty...