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The Air Gap Myth: Why Your Plant Is More Exposed Than You Think
Episode 145 • 29th September 2026 • Industrial Cybersecurity Insider • Industrial Cybersecurity Insider
00:00:00 00:31:32

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Dino sits down with Matt Pike of Rockwell Automation for an honest conversation about why industrial cybersecurity still stalls out inside so many plants, and it has very little to do with technology. Matt walks through his path from onsite IT support at a large automotive manufacturer into OT security, and explains why modern security principles keep colliding with legacy systems that were built to run untouched for fifteen or twenty years. The two dig into the real reason the IT and OT gap has not closed, why CISOs often reach for a familiar tool instead of a strategy, and how Rockwell approaches visibility in a fully vendor agnostic way across Siemens, Honeywell, Emerson and everything else sitting on a plant floor. They also get practical about the pieces most teams skip: secure by design language inside RFQs and integrator contracts, response and recovery plans that almost nobody has written, and the funding question of who actually pays for security when a capital project lands. Matt shares what he is seeing from attackers using AI to speed up reconnaissance and rewrite ransomware around detection, and why the air gap most plants believe in disappears the moment data reaches a historian. His closing advice cuts through the noise: stop buying tools and start with an asset visibility strategy, because you cannot secure what you have never actually seen.

Chapters:

  • (00:00:00) Matt Pike's path from IT support into OT security
  • (00:03:00) Why the IT and OT gap still has not closed
  • (00:06:00) When leadership thinks a tool will fix a people problem
  • (00:09:30) Vendor agnostic visibility down to the asset layer
  • (00:11:00) Secure by design on greenfield and brownfield projects
  • (00:14:00) The incident response plan nobody wrote
  • (00:17:30) AI on the plant floor and what it actually requires
  • (00:20:00) How attackers are already using AI
  • (00:22:30) The air gap myth and east/west blind spots
  • (00:27:30) Funding security through the capital project

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