What it means for security teams: The publication closes a gap that CISA’s Zero Trust Maturity Model 2.0 acknowledged, having stated it did not address challenges specific to operational technology. It follows February’s Barriers to Secure OT Communications and earlier CISA warnings that exposed VPNs, firewalls, and legacy edge devices remain the dominant entry points for critical infrastructure attacks.The document told buyers that strategic procurement is how operators escape the legacy trap, and pointed them to the Secure by Demand guide for contracting criteria and to its open-source SIEM tool, Malcolm, for OT protocol parsing.Luban said the harder problem is verifying that any of these controls hold. Organizations need to test boundaries against real-world adversary tactics, he said, to identify “where trust is being assumed, where access is too broad, and where attackers may still be able to cross from enterprise environments into operational systems before those gaps are exposed in a real incident.” The tooling adopted to run those tests carries its own risk. Tausek said AI-driven security agents now sitting alongside OT environments have become high-value targets in their own right. “If an attacker can tamper with an agent, disable it, or use it as a trusted pathway, the tool meant to improve detection can become part of the problem,” he said.
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