The myth of the OT “air gap” is officially dead — and attackers know it.

In the final session of our 4-part Building a Defensible Architecture series, we walked through what’s now the #1 initial access vector for OT breaches:

Poorly secured remote access.

Not theory. Not speculation.
Reality.

Clarity’s 2025 report showed 80% of OT attacks begin with weak or exposed remote access pathways — third-party vendors, shared passwords, unmanaged VPNs, forgotten TeamViewer instances, exposed CVEs… the list goes on.

And if you think attackers are still working at “human speed,” think again.

Today, AI-powered reconnaissance can:

• Discover your exposed OT assets
• Identify exploitable CVEs
• Generate working exploit code
• Generate working exploit code

We even tested this with ChatGPT: feed it a CVE, and it will describe exactly how to exploit it.

If your defenses rely on detection and alerting alone, they will drown.
Alert fatigue isn’t a possibility anymore — it’s happening right now across OT.

And attackers are proving, over and over, that they don’t need to breach your most hardened systems…
They just need to compromise the weakest link in your maintenance chain.

Just ask Oldsmar.
A single inactive TeamViewer account with a weak password nearly led to a poisoned water supply.

Ask Target.
An HVAC vendor’s stolen credentials turned into a $300M breach and 40 million stolen credit cards.

The pattern is clear:
Remote access is no longer optional — and unsecured remote access is no longer survivable.

So how do you fix this?
You replace passwords and VPN tunnels with something attackers cannot steal, phish, or brute-force:

Passwordless MFA + identity-based microsegmentation + cloaked OT assets.

With BlastWave’s architecture:

• Remote vendors only see the assets they’re explicitly authorized for
• East-west movement is eliminated
• Device posture and location matter
• No credential vaults, no passwords to phish, no open ports to exploit
• Even AI-powered attacks can’t perform reconnaissance because…

Your OT simply isn’t visible to them

One of the most compelling examples we shared was Lineage Logistics — a global cold-storage chain with sites across seven countries. After a maintenance contractor was hacked and 26 facilities were impacted, they adopted BlastWave across 241 sites.

Now:

• Their OT is cloaked
• Vendors authenticate with passwordless MFA
• Remote access is granular, logged, and locked down
• And they haven’t had a single breach since deploying it

In 2025, OT security isn’t about building walls.
It’s about removing the roads attackers use to reach you.

If AI is accelerating offense, then Zero Trust for OT must accelerate defense — starting with third-party remote access.

If you missed the webinar series, we’ll be sending replay links for all four sessions.
This final one might be the most important yet.

Because the air gap is gone.
But defensible architecture isn’t.

Want to watch how BlastWave shuts down the exact attack paths used in Oldsmar, Target, and today’s AI-driven intrusions?
Get a tailored walkthrough for your environment:
https://www.blastwave.com/schedule-a-demo