IT/OT security:
defending the plant floor.
For decades the control network was safe because it was an island: isolated, obscure and unplugged from the world. Convergence ended that. The floor now talks to the cloud, and the same Ethernet that carries your OEE can carry an attacker. You can't secure a PLC like a laptop, either. You can't reboot it at 2 a.m., patch it on Tuesday, or trade 50 ms of latency for encryption. This module teaches the OT way of doing it, built on the Purdue pyramid you already climbed: segment the network with IEC 62443 zones and conduits, and assume the breach. Where safety meets security, people are at risk as well as data.
Different stakes, inverted priorities
🔄 IT protects information: confidentiality first. OT protects a physical process: availability and SAFETY first. A leaked spreadsheet is bad; a turbine spinning past its limit is a funeral. Get the priority order wrong and every other decision follows it off a cliff.
You can't patch your way out
🩹 the laptop playbook (patch now, reboot, rotate passwords, encrypt everything) breaks on a 24/7 process with 20-year-old controllers that can't be touched mid-run. On the plant floor, security means segmentation, monitoring and defense in depth, and it can't be run on a Patch Tuesday schedule.