When a water treatment plant goes offline, the first question isn’t about the ransom.
It’s whether the town downstream still has safe water to drink.
Picture a factory floor on a Tuesday morning. Machines hum, forklifts move, shift workers take their positions. Then, one by one, the production lines fall silent. Within the hour, supervisors are making calls no one rehearsed: tell the workforce to go home, contact customers about delayed orders, and try to explain to a parent company why output has stopped, with no clear answer on when it will restart.
This is what an operational technology (OT) cyber incident actually looks like from the inside. Not a dashboard of red alerts, but empty car parks, unanswered phones, and communities holding their breath.