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This week we’re looking at the ways IIoT has increased industrial efficiency but also security risk, how connectivity is helping to build a more sustainable planet, drone cities, and more!

Last August, Jaguar Land Rover became the headline nobody wanted to be. Attackers breached a third-party supplier, worked their way into JLR's core production systems, and deployed ransomware that shut down manufacturing across three countries for five weeks. The estimated damage hit £1.9 billion, and more than 5,000 businesses across JLR's supply chain felt the fallout. The incident earned the grim distinction of being the most economically damaging cyber event in British history. It also wasn't a surprise to anyone paying attention. Manufacturing has absorbed more cyberattacks than any other sector for four consecutive years, and 2025 saw a 61% surge in ransomware incidents against factories alone. The JLR attack isn't a cautionary tale about exceptional bad luck — it's a case study in a vulnerability the industry built into itself.

The vulnerability has a name: IT/OT convergence. For most of the industrial era, the systems running factory floors — sensors, controllers, production equipment — were physically isolated from corporate networks. That isolation was never a deliberate security strategy, but it functioned as one. Connecting those operational systems to enterprise IT delivers real value: real-time production analytics, predictive maintenance, tighter supply chain integration. The IIoT buildout of the last decade made all of that possible. By 2025, more than three-quarters of large manufacturers had pursued some form of this convergence. The catch is that factory-floor systems were designed around a completely different set of priorities than corporate IT — they were built for uptime, not security. You can't push a patch to a production controller the way you push one to a laptop. Many of these devices run specialized, decades-old software that can't be easily updated, and you certainly can't take them offline for maintenance mid-shift. The result is an expanding connected environment with security assumptions built for a world that no longer exists.

In the vast majority of documented manufacturing breaches, the initial foothold isn't on the factory floor — it's a phishing email, a vulnerable VPN, a compromised supplier. Once inside the corporate network, attackers move laterally. If there's no meaningful separation between enterprise systems and production systems, the path from a compromised inbox to a live production environment can be alarmingly short. Ransomware operators have grown skilled at exploiting that path, increasingly using AI to speed up reconnaissance and deployment across distributed industrial environments. Supply chain compromise — the vector that brought down JLR — has roughly doubled as an attack vector in a single year, with 70% of organizations reporting at least one material third-party security incident in 2025.

The architectural answer is network segmentation: keeping production systems behind a controlled boundary so that a breach on the corporate side can't freely spread to the factory floor. The frameworks for doing this well have existed for years. The challenge isn't awareness — it's execution. Most organizations still run their IT and OT security in separate silos, using different tools, different teams, different threat models. That fragmentation is exactly what attackers count on. Organizations that have unified visibility across both environments are the ones seeing meaningful improvement — faster anomaly detection, tighter incident response, and fewer places for lateral movement to go unnoticed.

The practical reality for anyone operating connected industrial infrastructure right now is that the IIoT buildout isn't going to reverse. The operational data is too valuable, the business case too strong. The question is whether security keeps pace with connectivity. Start with visibility — most organizations discover significant gaps in their operational asset inventories when they look honestly. Enforce separation between corporate and production networks. And treat third-party access as one of the highest-risk surfaces in your environment, because supply chain attacks are now the fastest-growing vector. The manufacturers doing this well aren't applying exotic solutions — they're applying known principles with consistency and real executive buy-in. That gap between knowing and doing is exactly where attackers are operating right now.

As we celebrate Earth Day, most global conversations center on renewable energy and climate goals. All important topics, however, there’s a quiet revolution happening at some of the world's most remote ranches and farms that doesn’t get nearly enough credit. Connectivity is transforming agriculture one sensor at a time, replacing guesswork with actionable insights to optimize operations. And there’s one thing worth noticing this Earth Day: when agriculture operates more efficiently, the environmental gains quickly follow.

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In this episode of the IoT For All Podcast, Matthias Wagner, Founder and CEO of Flux, joins Ryan Chacon to discuss AI-assisted hardware design for IoT. The conversation covers the historical challenges of hardware design, the current capabilities of AI tools, compressing the hardware iteration cycle, integration challenges, the limitations of AI, and enabling IoT innovation.

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