Defend the Plant Floor: Inside ManuSec Canada 2026
Senior cybersecurity, IT and OT leaders from across manufacturing gather in Toronto to defend the plant floor — without stopping the line.
The machine running your assembly line doesn’t know what year it is. It was built to sit in a locked room, wired to almost nothing, humming along for two decades without a single patch — and it does its job beautifully. Then somebody connected it to the network so a dashboard upstairs could update in real time, and quietly handed an attacker a door onto the factory floor.
ManuSec Canada — held in Toronto on April 14 and 15 — brought together the cybersecurity, IT and OT leaders trying to shut that door without shutting down production. Across ten sessions, one question ran underneath all of them: how do you secure equipment that predates the threat, can’t be rebooted on a whim, and was never meant to be online in the first place?
The answer came together as one connected story. It starts on the floor itself.
The Factory Floor
Manufacturing security begins with a humbling fact: you can’t protect what you can’t see, and most plants can’t see half of what they’re running.
- Rick Kaun of Rockwell Automation drew on more than 20 years of OT compliance work to make the case for the unglamorous fundamentals — contextual risk scoring, asset visibility, and a programmatic mindset instead of one-off fixes.
- Hitesh Chhabra of Zscaler showed how zero trust — privileged remote access, east-west segmentation, and OT deception — can retire the aging VPN and shrink the attack surface that remote maintenance quietly widens every year.
- Dino DiMarino and Dan Hewitt of Tenable used real-world OT breaches to argue for holistic exposure management across converged IT/OT environments, from asset discovery all the way through to identity governance.
The consensus wasn’t a product. It was that visibility — knowing exactly what’s on the floor and who can reach it — is most of the job.
The New Risk
Then the conversation turned to the threats that didn’t exist the last time these plants were designed.
- Christian Moreira of McKesson opened the closet on shadow AI in OT — the unsanctioned tools creeping into industrial environments — and laid out the governance needed to keep them from becoming the next incident report.
- Manoj Tiwary, Abu Thomas, Razi Farooqui and Inamullah Siddiqui looked ahead to Industry 5.0, where IIoT devices multiply the connections faster than anyone can inventory them — and legacy risk doesn’t disappear just because the marketing moved on.
Every efficiency gain — a new AI assistant, another connected sensor — arrives as a new attack surface. The bill for that convenience comes due later.
The Watch
Knowing what’s on the floor only matters if you know who’s touching it — and whether anyone’s watching when something goes sideways.
- Leonardo Ovidio of Brookfield Renewable Energy Group walked through IAM architecture, access control, and deployment practices built for OT’s peculiarities rather than borrowed wholesale from the IT playbook.
- Ivan Sestak of the Toronto Transit Commission shared hard-won lessons from standing up an OT SOC — bilingual analysts, OT-specific playbooks, asset discovery, and why responding to an OT incident is a genuinely different animal from its IT cousin.
IT security assumes you can isolate a box and reboot it. On the plant floor, “turn it off and on again” can mean stopping the line — so the watching has to be engineered differently.
The Rulebook
And then the part that decides whether any of it sticks — the boardroom, the regulator, and the people in between.
- Moazzam Jafri, Ivan Sestak, Christian Moreira and Debbie Clarke turned IT/OT convergence into an actual business strategy, weighing board buy-in, change management, and the geopolitical disruptions no security plan gets to ignore anymore.
- Shri Kulkarni, Jeffrey De Sarno, Leonardo Ovidio and Jean-François Boucher dug into Canadian cyber regulation — Bill C-8, the patchwork of provincial rules, and the case for enforceable, OT-specific standards along the lines of a Canadian NIS2.
- Gord Howells of Sofina Foods brought it back to people, showing how career-stage profiling and plain-spoken C-suite communication build a security culture that outlasts any single tool.
The through-line of the whole event: industrial security is finally becoming a business discipline, not a bolt-on — and tools and rules only hold when someone actually owns them.
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