The International Society of Automation (ISA) just hosted its third-annual OT Cybersecurity Summit in Brussels, Belgium, on 18-21 June 2025 — and what a great event it was!
Read on for a summary of what has quickly become the industry's leading event for industrial cybersecurity and technical content surrounding the ISA/IEC 62443 series of standards.
The OT Cybersecurity Summit featured two content tracks on threat intelligence and securing the supply chain, with a total of 250 attendees and 40 speakers across 35 sessions.
Keynote sessions kicked off each day, with Bola Adesina, director of AI governance and ethics and diversity and inclusion specialist at her own consulting company, discussing how to embrace artificial intelligence technologies while keeping cybersecurity in mind, and John Fitzpatrick, founder of Lab539, discussing resilience in OT cybersecurity.
We aren’t protecting systems from systems. We’re protecting people from people.
– Bola Adesina
ISA president Scott Reynolds also gave a presentation on improving cybersecurity posture for a more resilient supply chain.
Just start somewhere, do something. The easiest way is to start with a passive asset inventory. If you start with 90% of what you have now and you start securing it, that's better than waiting two years to get the funding to do your 100%."
– Scott Reynolds
Where else can you find a virtual escape room specifically targeted to the training needs of OT cybersecurity and automation engineers? Available exclusively at the OT Cybersecurity Summit for the second year running, an awesome escape room experience was programmed by the advanced visualizations team at Visco to walk through a ransomware attack on an offshore oil and gas production unit.
ISA programs — the ISA Global Cybersecurity Alliance (ISAGCA) and ISASecure — cosponsored this year's OT Cybersecurity Summit to raise further awareness about their offerings for the operational technology cybersecurity community.
ISAGCA hosted a panel discussion on international regulatory issues and sought feedback from the end-user community in a special session. ISAGCA also shared two whitepapers focused on the intersection of IT and OT:
ISASecure shared information about its forthcoming IACS Security Assurance (ACSSA) program to demonstrate operating site compliance with the international standard ISA/IEC 62443. The proposed ISASecure site assessment scheme fills a very important gap in the OT cybersecurity landscape — the operating site itself. There is no other standards-based program like this available today, and we anticipate it will become the global standard used by operating sites, certification bodies, internal auditors and public policymakers.
Incident Command System for Industrial Control Systems (ICS4ICS) is a program that is designed to improve cybersecurity incident response efforts by offering workshops and training on emergency cyber response. ICS4ICS has hosted workshops all over the world to share its training exercises.
Since the program was created by ISAGCA, including an ICS4ICS workshop in the overall OT Cybersecurity Summit was part of demonstrating the full scope of ISA's resources, programs and services in support of the industry.
ISA offered its two most popular training courses as an add on for those interested in deepening their knowledge of the ISA/IEC 62443 series of standards:
Twenty-one sponsors joined the OT Cybersecurity Summit in 2025 — a 50% increase over the number that exhibited in the event's second year.
Positive feedback is always nice to hear, and attendees at the OT Cybersecurity Summit had lots of kind words:
Mark your calendars now — OT Cybersecurity Summit is coming to Prague, Czech Republic, in 2026! Save the date for 16-18 June, and check back at otcs.isa.org for more details coming soon.