Cyber-Informed Engineering (CIE) Needs A Jumpstart

Cyber-Informed Engineering (CIE) Needs A Jumpstart

One reason new ideas, concepts, and methodologies fail is they take too long to try and get early wins. I think CIE is in danger of becoming a well-documented, good comprehensive methodology, and ultimately failed approach to a problem. This is not an argument against...
Solving The “What Is The Threat To OT Systems” Problem

Solving The “What Is The Threat To OT Systems” Problem

Recently I wrote about the dichotomy between the reports and experts annually citing a big increase in the cyber threat to OT systems and the year after year tiny actual impact of cyber attacks on OT. Outside of ransomware on IT, not reaching OT, affecting Operations,...
Number Of Cyber Incidents With A Physical Impact Down In 2025

Number Of Cyber Incidents With A Physical Impact Down In 2025

My favorite OT security vendor threat / incident report was released last week: The Waterfall / ICS Strive 2026 OT Cyber Threat Report. It’s my favorite because of their criteria of “cyber incidents causing physical impacts” and because they include...
The OT Cyber Incident And Threat Dichotomy

The OT Cyber Incident And Threat Dichotomy

The impact of OT cyber incidents, excluding ransomware on IT, has been less than 1% of all cause OT outages and OT related financial loss. A motivated and skilled OT cyber attacker could cause a high or catastrophic incident on many OT systems in almost every sector....
Reducing OT Incident Impact Inflation

Reducing OT Incident Impact Inflation

Where does the media get the information and quotes that turn a couple of residential swimming pools of water spilling out of a water tank (Muleshoe) into a major story and congressional hearing … from us, the OT security community. Since we are part of the...
S4x26 Theme Keynote: Connect

S4x26 Theme Keynote: Connect

Below is what I intended to say on stage. It always varies a little bit live. The video will be out next week. Each S4 Conference has a single word theme. This year’s theme is Connect. Connections are exciting, unpredictable, scary, they bring opportunity, and...

Celebrate And Prepare For S4x26

Congratulations. You’ve completed the OT Security Weekly Plan. If you are like most people, some weeks were a lot more helpful than others. Some weeks easier than others. There might have even been some weeks where you said, Dale is just wrong about this. All this is...
First Nozomi, Now Armis

First Nozomi, Now Armis

2025 saw two of the four top tier OT detection + asset inventory vendors get acquired. First Mitsubishi Electronics acquired Nozomi Networks at a valuation of $950M (read my analysis of the Nozomi acquisition). Then last month ServiceNow announced they will be...
25 Years, 3 Lessons

25 Years, 3 Lessons

I’m finishing my 25th year focused on OT security (called SCADA security when I started, then ICS security, and now OT security). So many failures, successes, changed analysis, and lessons learned over that time. Here are 3 lessons that I wish hadn’t taken...