Beyond IT/OT: Closing the Physical Intelligence Gap in Critical Infrastructure Security

The security industry spent a decade converging IT and OT, connecting industrial control systems to enterprise security practices. The threat landscape has moved on. State actors now pre-position through physical reconnaissance. Activist campaigns map supply chains before they strike. Organised theft rings surveil sites before cutting rail signalling cable. A single fibre cut on the Mornington Peninsula took 14,500 customers offline and put triple-zero continuity under scrutiny. The precursor signals were observable for weeks. These threats leave digital traces in social media, dark web forums, and geospatial data, but most security teams have no systematic way to detect them. This session bridges the remaining gap: applying OSINT and geospatial intelligence to the physical threat domain, and why tools built for cyber alone don’t hold up under field pressure.