Beyond the Air Gap: How IT/OT Convergence Changes the Attack Surface

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Presented at BSides Bristol 2026 by

Akash

Operational Technology networks are often discussed as if they are completely isolated. In reality, remote maintenance, vendor access, business systems and centralised monitoring have created more connections between IT and OT. This talk explains how that convergence changes the attack surface and why familiar networking weaknesses have different consequences when the network controls a physical process. I will walk through a simple attack path from remote access into an OT environment, introducing concepts such as segmentation, trust boundaries, HMIs, PLCs and RTUs along the way. I will also briefly reference real incidents affecting European energy infrastructure to show how network access can move towards operational disruption. This is an introduction to modern OT networking, focused on one question: how can an ordinary network weakness become a physical problem?