But what do you feel, and, and I'll put this first question to Christian, the importance of doing a, uh, tabletop exercise in general?

The, uh, thanks for that question.

Tabletops, they make all the difference in the world, right? Uh, if you can make that tabletop relevant and get the right folks in the room, it, uh, it changes what the dynamic is.

I remember the very first tabletop that I ever went to, and, uh, I was a substitute for a substitute for a substitute for a substitute in there, and it was meant to be a major emergency response team, uh, style event.

I went, thought it was fantastic, thought it was a great experience, but my senior leadership at that time, they never got that experience.

So when a real world event happened, they didn't even know the correct room to go to at that point.

So I'm really getting down to the point of relevance there.

You did

I wanted to drill in because I know Christian undersold himself a little earlier there, but what do you feel, and, and I'll put this first question to Christian, the importance of doing a, uh, tabletop exercise in general?

The, uh, thanks for that question.

Tabletops, they make all the difference in the world, right? Uh, if you can make that tabletop relevant and get the right folks in the room, it, uh, it changes what the dynamic is.

I remember the very first tabletop that I ever went to, and, uh, I was a substitute for a substitute for a substitute for a substitute in there, and it was meant to be a major emergency response team, uh, style event.

I went, thought it was fantastic, thought it was a great experience, but my senior leadership at that time, they never got that experience.

So when a real-world event happened, they didn't even know the correct room to go to at that point.

So I'm really getting down to the point of relevance there.

You did

What does that mean in practice, or is that just theoretical?

Derek, I'd love to take that one on.

I think you are spot on.

You need to understand the multiple disciplines, and I think you need to understand where you're coming from.

That's probably the biggest thing that I could say to anybody that's looking to get into OT security as a whole.

If you're coming from IT security, You understand security, but I am sure you only have a cursory understanding of what operations need may look like, what the safety need of things looks like, and what the engineering need looks like.

My recommendation, and this is what we do, we do have IT security professionals that we bring into the team.

Yay,

[laughs]

... to defend against.

Um, you know, we were, we weren't, we didn't think of ourselves as, uh, as breaking into things as much as trying to bend things to make them work for our, what we wanted to do.

Uh, so I kind of came into the, the enterprise with that mindset of, uh, try to protect against that which you don't want to occur.

So for me, it started relatively early on, uh, but security was always just a part of the job.

It was, uh, similar to safety, uh, when, uh, the way we, the way we were, IT and OT, what today is IT and OT, we were definitely in a battle with one another.

And I would say that we were trying to protect what we had from IT, and we were trying to bend whatever IT had to, uh, do what we wanted it to do.

Um, w- what is, you know, what does that mean in, in, you know, in practice, in practice, or is that just theoretical?