- Attack Graph
- A map of every foothold an attacker can occupy and every step they can take between footholds, ending at the outcomes a defender most fears. For a facility it spans IT and OT as one continuous surface, enabling prioritization by chokepoints, shortest paths, and terminal impacts.
- Building Management System (BMS)
- The supervisory system that monitors and controls a facility's mechanical and electrical equipment, including cooling, ventilation, power, lighting, and access. It presents dashboards and alarms and issues setpoints to the controllers that run the plant in real time.
- IT/OT Convergence
- The linking of previously isolated operational-technology plant networks with enterprise IT networks and, often, the internet — driven by demands for telemetry, analytics, and remote support. It dissolves the historical air gap and creates the boundary that attackers seek to cross.
- Living off the Land
- An intrusion technique that relies on valid credentials and the legitimate administrative tools already present on target systems, rather than deployed malware, so the activity blends into normal operations and evades detection that watches for new or malicious software.
- Operational Technology (OT)
- The hardware and software that monitors and controls physical processes and equipment. In a data center this includes the controllers, sensors, and actuators that run cooling, power distribution, and safety systems, as distinct from the enterprise IT that processes business data.
- Pre-positioning
- A state-sponsored tactic of quietly establishing persistent access to critical infrastructure during peacetime, without taking immediate destructive action, so that disruption can be triggered later at a moment of the attacker's choosing. It prioritizes long-term stealth over speed.
- Programmable Logic Controller (PLC)
- A hardened, deterministic industrial computer that reads sensors and drives actuators on a millisecond scan cycle to execute control logic. It acts on its inputs with direct authority over motors, valves, and breakers, without waiting for human deliberation.
- Purdue Model
- A layered reference architecture for industrial control that sorts an environment into levels from the physical process and field devices up through controllers, supervisory systems, and business networks. Its principle is that adjacent levels communicate only through controlled, inspected boundaries.