Hack the Plant
Episodes
Cyber-Informed Engineering: Moving Beyond the Firewall
18 Mar 2026
Contributed by Lukas
For the last episode of season 5, host Bryson Bort sat down with Andrew Ohrt, Resilience Director West Yost Associates. A civil engineer specializing ...
Systems Engineering for Survival: A Physician's Guide to Emergency Management
17 Feb 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Our host Bryson Bort welcomes Dr. Natalie Sullivan, Medical Director of the Emergency Response Medical Group and an emergency medicine physician at a ...
Bridging the IT/OT Divide in Oil & Gas
20 Jan 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Bryson Bort is joined by Dd Budiharto, Microsoft’s Customer Security Officer for the Oil, Gas, and Energy sectors, to share her experience bridging ...
AI and the Future of Maritime Cybersecurity
16 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In this episode, host Bryson Bort sits down with Gary Kessler, retired cybersecurity professor and co-founder and director of the Maritime Hacking Vil...
Creating a Cyber Aware Culture for Local Water Utilities
09 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Deputy Managing Director at the Cyber Readiness Institute Lessie Skiba joins host Bryson Bort to discuss the CRI’s new program connecting small- and...
Local Infrastructure is Critical Infrastructure
13 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Our host Bryson sits down with Colin Ahern and Kirk Herath, two of the only cybersecurity experts working in Governors’ offices in the United States...
Old Systems, New Threats
10 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Bryson Bort is joined by Jim Montgomery, Director, Industrial Cybersecurity Solutions at TXOne Networks. TXOne provides network-based and endpoint-bas...
The Truth About OT Vulnerabilities
13 May 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Bryson Bort sits down with Adam Robbie, Head of OT Threat Research at Palo Alto Networks, to pull back the curtain on OT threat research. With a backg...
Bridging the Cybersecurity Resource Gap
08 Apr 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Bryson Bort welcomes Sarah Powazek, Program Director of Public Interest Cybersecurity at the UC Berkeley Center for Long-Term Cybersecurity, to discus...
Preparing for Unnatural Disasters
11 Mar 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Welcome to season 5! Our host Bryson Bort sits down with Institute for Security and Technology (IST) Executive in Residence for Public Safety & Securi...
From the Archives
28 Feb 2025
Contributed by Lukas
For the final episode of the season, our host Bryson Bort reflects on four years and forty episodes of Hack the Plan[e]t, and picks a few favorites. ...
Protecting Critical Infrastructure for Rural Electric Cooperatives
03 Feb 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Bryson is joined by Carter Manucy, Director of Cybersecurity at the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association to discuss rural electric cooperat...
Reliability and Risks of the North American Power Grid
26 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Bryson is joined by Sara Patrick, President and CEO at the Midwest Reliability Organization (MRO) to discuss cyber threats, mitigation strategies, and...
Securing Embedded Systems
25 Sep 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In this episode, Bryson sits down with MITRE EMB3D co-founder Niyo Little Thunder Pearson. For nearly 20 years, Niyo has been at the forefront of prot...
The Case For A Cyber Force
23 Jul 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In this episode, Bryson sits down with Mark Montgomery, Senior Director at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. For three years, Mark served as ...
Supporting Ukrainian Electrical Grid Resilience in Wartime
21 Jun 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Joe Marshall is a Senior IoT Security Strategist at Cisco Talos Intelligence Group. When Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, Joe helped coordinate a multi...
Preparing for the potential worst day
21 May 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In this episode, Bryson Bort is joined by Paul Shaver, Global OT Security Practice Lead at Mandiant / Google Cloud to discuss the cyber threat landsca...
The ICS Hacker
23 Apr 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Claroty is a cybersecurity company that helps organizations to secure cyber-physical systems across industrial (OT), healthcare (IoMT), and enterprise...
Securing, Defending, and Bringing Resilience to Infrastructure
28 Feb 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Psymetis creates Operational Technology (OT) security solutions that quickly and prevent electric grid outages and catastrophic infrastructure failure...
CISA’s Critical Infrastructure Protection Mission with Jen Easterly
02 Feb 2024
Contributed by Lukas
As America’s Cyber Defense Agency and the National Coordinator for Critical Infrastructure Security and Resilience, the Cybersecurity and Infrastruc...
Ensuring Cybersecurity for Amtrak
19 Dec 2023
Contributed by Lukas
I’m joined by Jesse Whaley, the Chief Information Security Officer at Amtrak, for this episode of Hack the Plant. Amtrak is the nation's largest...
Open Source Data Visualization for Cyber Threats
21 Nov 2023
Contributed by Lukas
I’m joined by Dan Ricci, founder of the ICS Advisory Project, for this episode of Hack the Plant.The ICS Advisory Project is a free, open-source pla...
Cyber Threat Intelligence Over the Past 25 Years
31 Oct 2023
Contributed by Lukas
I’m joined by Jason Healey, a Senior Research Scholar at Columbia University’s School for International and Public Affairs, for this episode of Ha...
Architecting Threat Responses
31 Oct 2023
Contributed by Lukas
I’m joined by David Patrick Emmerich, the Principal Cyber-Physical Range Architect at the University of Illinois, for this episode of Hack the Plant...
Managing Incident Responses to Critical Infrastructure Attacks
03 Apr 2023
Contributed by Lukas
For today’s episode, I’m joined by Lesley Carhart. Lesley is the Director of Incident Response for North America at the industrial cybersecurity c...
Idaho National Labs and the Next Generation of Critical Infrastructure Security
06 Mar 2023
Contributed by Lukas
For today’s episode, I’m joined by Zach Tudor, the Associate Laboratory Director at Idaho National Laboratory (INL). INL is a Department of Energy...
Resilience and Safety for Electric Co-Ops
05 Dec 2022
Contributed by Lukas
“One of my favorite topics is disaster resilience. We do quite a bit of work on what mutual assistance looks like and how to improve mutual assist...
Threats to Industrial Control Systems
07 Nov 2022
Contributed by Lukas
“What's been most concerning is the rise of wiper malware. Threat actors are no longer interested in hey we're going to lock up all of your data. We...
Accelerating Innovation in Electric & Gas
13 Sep 2022
Contributed by Lukas
“Most industrial economies only consume about 20% our total end use energy in the form of electricity. The rest, we consume by basically combusting ...
Cyber threats to agriculture and food production
13 Sep 2022
Contributed by Lukas
“Agriculture and cybersecurity has just run under the radar. We're talking about something that's one fifth of the us economy right? This is this is...
Training the Cyber Workforce of the Future
04 Apr 2022
Contributed by Lukas
“You can only cover about 65% of the cybersecurity workforce demand with the existing workforce today. So we need to do something to address that ga...
Diversity in Power Systems Distribution
28 Mar 2022
Contributed by Lukas
“How do we talk about all the great things we're doing in our communities, in optimizing and trying to reduce carbon, and looking at new solutions a...
The future of cybersecurity education?
01 Feb 2022
Contributed by Lukas
“I've been educating now for about eight years within the college system and that hands-on experiential learning is critical. When I have students d...
INL - Wind energy and cybersecurity challenges
07 Dec 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Wind energy is one of the most rapidly growing energy generation sources in the US - how can these renewable systems stay resilient in the face of cyb...
Cyber Challenges to Securing Our Electric System - California and Beyond
01 Nov 2021
Contributed by Lukas
“Initially it was looking at specific types of attacks and thinking how those could be utilized against our systems, but then it became more sophist...
Innovation in Critical Infrastructure
04 Oct 2021
Contributed by Lukas
“We had to go out and talk to experts and just have the conversations and then be brutally honest about what those people were telling us about the ...
AI and Critical Infrastructure
06 Sep 2021
Contributed by Lukas
When will hard infrastructure have machine learning capabilities? It might be sooner than you think. Ariel Stern, formerly an engineer in the Israeli ...
Biden Admin's Cybersecurity Executive Order
27 Jul 2021
Contributed by Lukas
On May 12, 2021, the Biden Administration issued an Executive Order “On Improving the Nation’s Cybersecurity.” This came in the wake of rans...
ERCOT and the Texas Power Outage
28 Jun 2021
Contributed by Lukas
In February, severe winter storms and an electricity generation failure left almost 5 million people in Texas without power, leading to hundreds of de...
Department of Defense Policy and ICS Security
31 May 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Daryl Haegley is the Director of Cyberspace Mission Assurance and Deterrence at the Department of Defense. Daryl oversees cybersecurity efforts to sec...
The Congressman, The Commission, and Our Critical Infrastructure
26 Apr 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Congressman Mike Gallagher (R-Wis.) has been instrumental in setting up the Cyberspace Solarium Commission, a bipartisan, intragovernmental body whose...
On the Front Lines with Rob Lee
29 Mar 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Rob Lee, the CEO and founder of the industrial cybersecurity company, Dragos, is a pioneer in the ICS threat intelligence and incident response commun...
DoD and Critical Infrastructure
22 Feb 2021
Contributed by Lukas
The Army Cyber Institute has been testing the cybersecurity preparedness of cities around the country in an experiment called Jack Voltaic. It is a ma...
Critical Infrastructure Protection & ICS
26 Jan 2021
Contributed by Lukas
For today's episode, I'm joined by Dale Peterson, who is on the leading edge of helping security conscious asset owners in a range of sectors effectiv...
Critical Response for Critical Infrastructure
28 Dec 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Megan Samford is the first woman Chief Product Security Officer in industrial control systems (ICS) manufacturing. She's spent time in both the privat...
BEER and Cyber
01 Dec 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Patrick Miller sits at the intersection of cybersecurity and regulation because, as he likes to say, "those two don't fit well." Beyond his decades o...
Oil, Gas and Cybersecurity in the Middle East
26 Oct 2020
Contributed by Lukas
"Securing and having the right measures of cybersecurity relates to the national security of the whole country and our national income." Reem Al-Sham...
The Nightmare: A Story by AI
19 Oct 2020
Contributed by Lukas
The second half of our interview with author and strategist P.W. Singer. He discusses his latest book - Burn In - where he translates real-world resea...
Where is the Cavalry?
28 Sep 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Hackers may be our best, last hope as our dependence on connected technology is increasing faster than our ability to safeguard ourselves. This episod...
The Future of War with P.W. Singer
31 Aug 2020
Contributed by Lukas
“Our dependence on connected technology is growing faster than our ability to secure it, especially in areas affecting public safety and human life....
Trailer - Hack the Plant
22 Aug 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Learn more about ICS village at http://www.icsvillage.com. Learn more about the R Street Institute at http://www.rstreet.org. Follow Bryson Bort on ...