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# Failing Forward in Industrial Security
- URL: https://www.cybrsecmedia.com/failing-forward-in-industrial-security/
- Published: 2026-04-13T11:59:15.000Z
- Updated: 2026-04-13T14:17:39.000Z
- Author: Lauren Andrus
- Tags: OT.SEC.CON. 2026, video, OT Security

**Presenter:** 

[Mike Holcomb](https://www.linkedin.com/in/mikeholcomb/?ref=cybrsecmedia.com)

Industrial security is fundamentally broken—not because teams aren’t trying, but because **they’re learning the wrong lessons from failure**. The path forward is to **embrace failure as a learning mechanism** instead of hiding it or treating it as an endpoint.

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## **Key takeaways**

- **Failure is constant—and necessary**  
In OT environments, things will break. The goal isn’t perfection—it’s **learning faster than the attacker and adapting in real time**.
- **The industry hides its mistakes**
  - Failures don’t get shared
  - Near-misses and lessons learned stay buried
  - Everyone keeps repeating the same errors as a result
- **OT security is learned, not installed**
  - You can’t secure what you don’t understand
  - IT-style controls fail when applied blindly to industrial systems
  - Real understanding comes from hands-on experience with how plants actually run
- **The IT/OT gap is still the root problem**
  - IT teams don’t understand physical consequences
  - OT teams don’t always understand cyber risk
  - That disconnect creates fragile, exploitable environments
- **Training needs to mirror reality**
  - Lab work, simulations, and failure scenarios matter more than theory
  - Practitioners need to see how attacks translate into physical impact
- **Resilience > prevention**
  - You won’t stop everything
  - What matters is how systems respond, recover, and keep operating

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