Are your OT, IT, and ET ready for Cyberwarfare?

A cyber resilience consultant and ransomware researcher argues that ransomware itself is evolving away from encryption toward faster extortion-as-a-service and outright data destruction, driven partly by AI-generated phishing that has pushed detection advice back toward spotting typos. She traces hacktivism's shift from 1990s open-internet idealism through Anonymous-era anti-authority protest to a new establishment era where activist groups align with nation-state political and geopolitical objectives, using crowdsourced DDoS and social platforms to coordinate globally with limited interaction. The talk's core is operational technology: legacy PLCs and SCADA systems resist modern tooling, retiring staff take manual-fallback skills with them, and critical sectors such as water, power, healthcare and data centers turn out to be tightly interdependent, so one attack cascades widely. Her prescription is layered security: inventory every connected device including consumer IoT, enforce least privilege, separate IT and OT Active Directory domains, tightly manage third-party and AI-agent access, use DMZs and unidirectional gateways, and monitor for behavioral anomalies beyond malware signatures. She closes with an ABC incident-response framework and executive-level guidance on business continuity and communications.