IT & OT: Two Teams, One Attack Surface

Industrial environments face a security challenge that traditional tools were never built to solve. IT and OT networks are managed by separate teams with competing priorities—IT protects data, OT keeps production running—yet attacks cross between them without friction. When ransomware jumps from enterprise email to a production historian, or stolen credentials open a VPN path straight to a PLC, defenders need unified visibility across both environments. Most don't have it.

The gap is structural. OT security platforms monitor operational health and detect anomalous activity inside industrial networks, but they lack the IT context to explain how a threat got there. IT security teams see phishing, credential abuse, and lateral movement, but they can't see what happens when that activity crosses onto the plant floor. Without a way to correlate IT telemetry with OT alerts, security teams run parallel investigations— one team reviewing enterprise logs, another parsing packet captures from SCADA systems —racing to reconstruct the full attack path before production stops or safety systems fail.

Specialized OT expertise is scarce, and industrial protocol knowledge takes years to develop. OT alert triage is manual, context sits isolated from IT workflows, and analysts tool-hop between consoles to gather the evidence they need to prioritize correctly. Compounding the problem: OT environments were designed for reliability, not security. Protocols like Modbus and DNP3 carry no authentication or encryption, devices stay online for years without patches, and IT/OT convergence has expanded the attack surface faster than most security programs can defend it.

The stakes are high. A misconfigured response action in an OT environment can stop production, damage equipment, or create a physical safety hazard. OT teams have to balance risk against fast response—and without unified IT and OT visibility, they're forced to choose between speed and confidence.

Introducing the OT Engineer Teammate

GreyMatter's OT Engineer Teammate is a persona-based agentic system built into the platform, purpose-built to triage and enrich OT incidents. It brings deep OT domain expertise, PCAP analysis, and IT/OT correlation directly into your security team's workflow.

The OT Engineer Teammate handles the time-consuming work—pulling and decoding packet captures, enriching alerts with asset context, correlating OT signals with IT telemetry—so your team can focus on validating findings and taking action.

It's one member of GreyMatter's multi-agentic system, collaborating with the other Agentic Teammates: the IR Analyst, Threat Hunter, Threat Intel Analyst, Detection Engineer, and IT Engineer.

Core Capabilities

OT Incident Reporting.

Produces structured reports with evidence, findings, and recommended next steps that an analyst can act on immediately.

PCAP-Driven Deep Analysis.

Decodes Modbus, DNP3, EtherNet/IP, and other industrial protocol traffic directly from packet captures, translating raw protocol commands into operator-meaningful context.

Asset-Enriched Investigation

Adds device type, zone, criticality, Purdue Level, and process function to every OT incident, so analysts can prioritize by operational impact instead of alert volume.

IT and OT Correlation

Identifies when IT events cross into OT and surfaces the full attack path—from the entry vector on the enterprise side to the blast radius across the production floor.

How It Works

GreyMatter connects directly to OT technologies such as Nozomi, Dragos, Claroty, and Armis via API. When an alert is triggered within a connected OT platform, it's sent to GreyMatter, where the OT Engineer Teammate and the IR Analyst Teammate investigate autonomously.

The OT Engineer Teammate gathers context from both IT and OT sources—asset inventory, packet captures, plant and site IDs—and decodes the relevant industrial protocol traffic retrieved from the PCAP. It assigns an Operational Impact score reflecting the plant-floor consequences if the incident is real, then escalates the enriched incident, including an AI summary, via GreyMatter Investigate for analyst review.

From there, ARPs, Agentic ARPs, or Workflows can be configured to respond to malicious activity. Closure codes and notes are captured for agentic memory and historical context, so the Teammate learns your environment over time.

OT Expertise on Demand

Beyond autonomous triage, you can work with the OT Engineer Teammate in natural language—no dashboards, no query syntax, no OT background required. Ask a question, get an answer grounded in your environment.

Ask the OT Engineer Teammate:

"What is device 192.168.1.45?"

The OT Engineer turns a raw IP, hostname, or device name into a full asset profile: device type, site, Purdue Level, firmware, criticality, and recent alert history.

"Which assets are generating the most OT alerts this month?"

The OT Engineer will rank noisy assets, flag high false-positive rates, and surface alert types that are spiking or appearing for the first time—so you know where to focus tuning and investigation.

"What does a Modbus function code 90 attack mean?"

The OT Engineer will explain OT protocols, attack techniques, and device behaviors in plain language, contextualized against the devices in your own environment. This is helpful for IT-trained analysts ramping up on OT.

"Give me a weekly OT security summary."

The OT Engineer generates an on-demand summary covering alert volume, verdicts, top assets, and connector health—formatted to share with your manager or team as is.

Real-World Use Cases

Stolen Credentials Used to Access the OT Network

An OT security tool detects unusual scanning activity inside the network. The OT Engineer Teammate enriches the investigation with IT telemetry, identifying that the source was a phishing attack—stolen credentials used to VPN into the OT environment. Rather than treating it as an isolated anomaly, the Teammate surfaces the full attack path, from credential theft to active reconnaissance inside the plant. With that complete picture, the IR Analyst Teammate executes a targeted Agentic ARP to terminate the session and block the IP.

PLC Configuration Change

An OT security tool flags a write command to a safety-critical PLC register. The OT Engineer Teammate applies deep OT expertise to interpret what actually changed — a turbine safety limit raised 350°F above safe operating range—and explains why it's dangerous. It ties the event to prior alerts in the network, giving the team full context instead of an isolated, low-detail alert. That enriched investigation gives the IR Analyst Teammate the confidence to escalate immediately, with the right priority and recommended containment actions.

Ransomware From the IT to OT Network

An OT security tool detects anomalous file activity on the OT historian. The OT Engineer Teammate correlates that alert with enterprise-side signals, identifying the ransomware source, the specific legacy firewall rule that allowed it to cross, and the blast radius across the OT environment. Instead of two teams running parallel investigations, you get one unified view—what happened, how it got there, and what's at risk. The IR Analyst Teammate uses that context to execute the right response actions with greater accuracy, prioritizing OT recovery over duplicating the enterprise investigation.

Availability

GreyMatter's OT Engineer Teammate is available now for customers with connected OT security platforms. Supported platforms include Dragos, Claroty, and Nozomi, with additional platform support on the roadmap.

CTA: Meet your Agentic Teammates > Learn More or Demo > I could probably build a guided demo if we wanted to do that, or push them towards the manufacturing Democast