securityweek.comarticle

AI Agents Navigate Unfamiliar OT Systems and Move Equipment in Minutes, Booz Allen Finds

SecurityWeek reports on a Booz Allen study in which frontier AI agents, given no source code, engineering documents or OT guidance, met every test objective across eight scenarios in an isolated OT lab. In one test a model went from perimeter compromise to actions inside an industrial control network in about 16 minutes. In another it found a robotic arm, mapped its protection zones and motion limits, and moved it. Existing defenses slowed some actions but no single safeguard stopped the agents. The researchers say this undermines security through obscurity in OT and advise making environments hard to traverse, removing implicit trust, detecting consequential industrial changes quickly, and limiting what an attacker can affect.