OTSEC™ (OT CYBER SECURITY)
What is OTSEC™
OTSEC™ (Operational Technology Security) is the Cyber Defense Center’s flagship research and readiness program for securing critical infrastructure, industrial control systems (ICS), and exotic operational technologies. Beyond training and certification, OTSEC encompasses full-spectrum OT strategy, advisory services, advanced research, and live simulations designed to defend systems that move power, fuel, water, goods, and people.
The OTSEC™ program develops and tests defense capabilities across all major critical infrastructure sectors—beginning with the electricity subsector (generation, transmission, and distribution) and expanding into pipelines and oil & gas, water and wastewater, transportation (rail, ports, aviation, and logistics), chemical facilities, manufacturing, and other high-consequence industrial environments. Our work spans both conventional ICS and “exotic” or non-standard systems, including bespoke controls, legacy platforms, and emerging automation technologies.
OTSEC™ research and services include:
- Strategy & Architecture: Sector-specific OT security strategies, reference architectures, and consequence-informed engineering practices.
- Threat Modeling & Intelligence: Adversary modeling, campaign analysis, and OT-focused threat intelligence for nation-state, criminal, and insider threats.
- Defense Capability Development: Design, evaluation, and optimization of monitoring, detection, segmentation, and response capabilities across IT/OT/IoT boundaries.
- Simulations & Cyber Ranges: Realistic grid and plant simulations (e.g. GridSim), live lab environments, and multi-entity tabletop exercises for wartime and crisis readiness.
- Advisories & Incident Support: OT-focused advisories, early-warning insights, and support for complex investigations and recovery planning.
As OTSEC™ matures sector by sector, it provides a unified, consequence-aware approach to safeguarding critical infrastructure which provides operators, regulators, and communities a practical path to defend the physical world against increasingly sophisticated cyber threats.
Industry Focused Training
The OTSEC™ program provides a scalable, sector-aligned workforce development pathway designed to meet the unique cyber defense needs of each critical infrastructure industry. As OTSEC™ research expands across electricity, pipelines, water, transportation, chemical, and manufacturing sectors, the Cyber Defense Center builds corresponding certification tracks that equip professionals with the competencies required for their specific operational environments.
This progression, beginning with foundational OT security principles and advancing through sector-specific architectures, threats, regulations, and mission-critical systems, creates a unified learning framework that can be adapted to any industry. Each certification path produces practitioners who are not only technically capable, but also trained in consequence-informed engineering, industrial process awareness, and real-world incident response.
By mapping OTSEC™ research directly into hands-on training, lab simulations, and nationally recognized credentials, the program accelerates workforce readiness, strengthens industry resilience, and ensures that critical infrastructure operators can recruit, develop, and retain talent capable of defending the systems that keep society running.