OT/ICS Cybersecurity Fundamentals: A Primer Worth Watching

A primer on OT/ICS cybersecurity fundamentals, plus an illustrative look at where incidents in this space typically originate — usually an ordinary gap, not a novel exploit.

Before the Deep Dive, the Fundamentals

We write a lot here about the specifics of cyber-physical resilience — failover design, incident response, IT/OT boundary hardening. It's worth stepping back occasionally to the fundamentals for anyone newer to the space. This is a solid primer on what OT/ICS cybersecurity actually covers, and how it differs from traditional IT security.

Where Incidents Actually Start

The breakdown below is an illustrative example, not a cited industry statistic — but it reflects the general shape of where we typically see OT-related risk concentrated: less often a novel zero-day, more often a known gap that was never closed.

The Common Thread

Almost none of these originate from a sophisticated novel exploit. They originate from ordinary gaps — an access path nobody closed, a patch nobody validated against production, a vendor connection nobody re-reviewed. Resilience work is mostly about closing those, consistently, before they matter.