Accenture announced Thursday it would acquire a majority stake in industrial cybersecurity firm Dragos for $3.25 billion and purchase two smaller security companies outright, essentially making a $4.18 billion bet that defending the IT networks of power grids, pipelines, factories and critical infrastructure sectors will become one of the defining challenges of the AI era.

The deals — which also include two Austin, Texas-based companies, runZero and NetRise —  represent a significant strategic pivot for Accenture toward operational technology (OT) security,  a segment of the cybersecurity market that has long been underfunded relative to traditional IT defenses. The announcement comes as the consulting giant faces pressure on its core business from the same AI tools reshaping the threat environment it is now moving to address.

Dragos, founded in 2016 by former intelligence specialists and based in Hanover, Maryland, has built what the industry regards as a leader detecting threats in OT environments. Its proprietary dataset of industrial threat intelligence has made it a trusted partner to critical infrastructure operators globally.

RunZero specializes in asset discovery and attack-surface intelligence — essentially mapping what is connected to a network and identifying where it is exposed. NetRise focuses on firmware-level visibility and software supply chain security, areas that have drawn increased scrutiny since high-profile incidents revealed how deeply embedded vulnerabilities can propagate through industrial device ecosystems.

Dragos co-founder and CEO Robert M. Lee will continue leading the combined entity, which will operate as an independent business under Accenture’s ownership. The CEOs of runZero and NetRise, HD Moore and Tom Pace, respectively, along with NetRise’s chief technology officer Michael Scott, will join Dragos as senior executives.

The acquisitions are not Accenture’s first move in OT security. The company acquired Cimation in 2015 and Revolutionary Security in 2020, along with several other OT-focused firms. 

Thursday’s deal, however, is of a different scale and ambition. Where previous acquisitions built out Accenture’s services capabilities, the addition of Dragos, runZero and NetRise moves the company firmly into OT cybersecurity software, a market it had not previously entered at scale.

Accenture and Dragos describe this expanding environment — which also encompasses Internet of Things devices, cloud-connected sensors and related IT infrastructure — as “xOT.” The concern is that as AI is integrated into industrial decision-making, the attack surface grows. At the same time, adversaries are using AI to shorten the window between compromising an IT network and pivoting to OT systems underneath it.

Despite that convergence, most cybersecurity budgets remain concentrated on traditional IT, leaving critical infrastructure comparatively exposed. The OT cybersecurity services market is estimated at roughly $7 billion in 2026. The broader OT cybersecurity market, which includes software, is estimated at $27 billion this year and projected to reach nearly $59 billion by 2031, growing at approximately 16% annually.

“Our energy and water systems, manufacturing plants, data centers and other operational environments need cybersecurity built from the ground up for xOT and designed to keep pace as threats evolve. The consequences of getting it wrong become societal threats,” Lee said in a release. “Organizations need solutions, not a patchwork of software and services. The addition of runZero and NetRise will allow the Dragos Platform to be a unique end-to-end platform for global defense, and Accenture will bring its decades of trusted relationships and deep expertise to help us scale and secure more critical infrastructure and physical operations globally.”

The transactions are expected to close in August or September, pending customary regulatory approvals.

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The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency is urging critical infrastructure owners and operators to plan for delivering essential services under emergency conditions – potentially for months at a time.

The federal government’s top cybersecurity agency warned that state-sponsored hackers, particularly two Chinese groups known as Salt Typhoon and Volt Typhoon, continue to threaten critical sectors like electricity, water, and internet. 

The agency is now working with the private sector to protect operational technology – the systems that control the heavy machinery and equipment that powers most critical infrastructure – from attacks that enter through business IT systems or third-party vendor products.

The initiative  — known as CI Fortify – will include CISA conducting targeted technical assessments of critical infrastructure entities and aims to create plans that “allow for safe operations for weeks to months while isolated” from IT networks and third-party tools, according to the agency’s website.

Nick Andersen, CISA’s acting director, told reporters that the goal is “service delivery [that] can still reach critical infrastructure after the asset owner has disconnected with IT and OT, disconnected from third party vendors and service provider connections and disconnected from third party telecommunications equipment.”

Over the past two years, wars in Ukraine, Gaza, Iran and elsewhere have seen water plants, power substations, data centers and other critical infrastructure targeted by kinetic or cyberattacks.

Andersen said the agency has already begun engaging with some companies to pilot the assessments and expects that work to ramp up considerably as CISA hires additional staff in the coming months.

He declined to name the entities involved in the pilot program, but said they will focus on organizations that support national security, defense, public health and safety and economic continuity. He added that CISA’s assessments will vary from sector to sector depending on their unique needs.

“Water isn’t necessarily designed to prioritize specific customer needs outside of recovery periods, while energy and transportation have more immediate tradeoffs for selecting one load or one set of cargo over another,” Andersen said as an example.

One pillar of CISA’s strategy is isolation: essentially turning off all third-party and business network connections to an OT network when facing an emergency or unknown vulnerability.

Organizations also need to develop an internal plan for what acceptable service levels look like under those conditions and reach understandings with their critical customers, like U.S. military installations and lifeline services.

The second pillar, recovery, involves best practices for organizations: backing up files, documenting systems and having manual backups for operations when normal computer systems are down.

In conversations with cybersecurity specialists who focus on critical infrastructure and operational technology, it is widely assumed that China is not the only nation to have broadly compromised Americans critical infrastructure. That hacking groups tied to other nations have almost surely noticed and exploited the same basic vulnerabilities and hygiene issues found by the Typhoons.

Agencies like the FBI and Federal Communications Commission have touted efforts to purge Chinese hackers and work voluntarily with telecoms to harden their network security. But U.S. national security officials and cybersecurity defenders have consistently said both Salt Typhoon and Volt Typhoon remain active threats to U.S. critical infrastructure.

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A joint report from the Cloud Security Alliance (CSA), the SANS Institute and the Open Worldwide Application Security Project (OWASP) concludes that in the near term, organizations are “likely to be overwhelmed” by threat actors using AI to find and exploit vulnerabilities faster than defenders can patch them.

While those organizations can use AI tools to speed up their own defenses, attackers “still face a heavier relative burden due to the inherent limitations of patching. This in turn leads to “asymmetric benefits” for attackers who can afford to adopt the technology without the same caution and bureaucracy as a multi-billion dollar business.

“The cost and capability floor to exploit discovery is dropping, the time between disclosure and weaponization is compressing toward zero, and capabilities that previously required nation-state resources are now becoming broadly accessible,” wrote Robert Lee, SANS Institute’s Chief AI Officer, Gadi Evron, CEO of Knostic and Rich Mogull, chief analyst at CSA, who served as the primary authors.

The report marks one of the first comprehensive responses to the capabilities of Claude Mythos from the U.S., boasting cybersecurity luminaries who have set policy at the highest levels as contributing authors, including Jen Easterly, former director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, Rob Joyce, a former top White House and NSA cybersecurity official, and Chris Inglis, former National Cyber Director.

It also includes private sector stalwarts like Heather Adkins, Google’s CISO, Katie Moussouris, CEO of Luta Security, and Sounil Yu, chief technology officer at Knostic. Another seventy CISOs, CTOs and other security executives are named as editors and reviewers.

Also this week, the UK’s AI Security Institute (AISI) detailed the results of tests it performed on a preview version of Claude Mythos, calling it a “step up” from past Anthropic models in the cybersecurity arena and able to “execute multi-stage attacks on vulnerable networks and discover and exploit vulnerabilities autonomously.”

Using a mix of Capture the Flag exercises and cyber range testing, AISI researchers found that Mythos not only raised the ceiling of technical non-experts and apprentice-level users, it narrowed the overall gap in hacking proficiency between the two. In other words, there’s becoming less of a distinction between the capabilities of amateur “script kiddies” and mid-level hackers with technical knowledge.

Before April 2025, no Large Language Model could complete a single expert-level CTF problem. Mythos successfully solved nearly three quarters (73%) of them.

In cyber range tests – which are meant to simulate more complex, multi-chain attacks – the results were uneven, but also represented meaningful progress over prior Claude models.

Mythos was subjected to a 32-step attack playbook modeled on corporate networks, spanning initial network access to full network takeover. In three of the 10 simulations, the model completed an average of 24 of the 32 steps. Older versions of Claude and other frontier models never averaged more than 16.

Mythos flunked its test against a simulated operational technology cooling tower, but researchers noted that this doesn’t mean AI is bad at exploiting OT: the model actually faltered during the IT section of the exercise.

UK researchers were more measured in their analysis of Mythos, noting that their testing indicates it is “at least capable” of autonomously taking down smaller, weakly defended enterprise networks.

But they also note their cyber ranges lack security features – like active defenders and defensive tooling – that would be common in many real-world networks and present additional obstacles, nor did they penalize the model for triggering security alerts.

“This means we cannot say for sure whether Mythos Preview would be able to attack well-defended systems,” the researchers concluded.

Technical debt coming due

Both the US and UK reports agree that large language models are broadly moving in a similar direction of lowering the technical barrier. The US authors call for organizations to more quickly adopt AI for cyber defense while overhauling their incident response playbooks and corporate policies to account for more automated defense postures.

For its part, Anthropic has said it is not selling Mythos commercially, and last week it announced the model would be made available to Project Glasswing, a consortium of major tech companies that will use it to root out and patch vulnerabilities in commonly used products and services.

But other experts have warned that businesses and governments are not well-positioned to either absorb the influx of expected vulnerability exploitation or deftly harness AI tools of their own to counter them.

Casey Ellis, CTO and founder of Bugcrowd, wrote that recent advances in AI cyber tools has succeeded largely by “living in the places we stopped looking a decade ago.”

While the cybersecurity community has spent years focusing on application security, vulnerability triage and other “top layer” security problems, AI tools and apex level hacking groups have been feasting on vulnerabilities in forgotten firmware, or routers whose manufacturers long went out of business.

This reality that tools like Mythos can endlessly weaponize the massive technical debt of large organizations has taken the traditional defender’s dilemma and “the knob that used to go to ten and turned it to seven hundred,” Ellis wrote.

Additionally, corporations and governments run on consensus-building, multiple layers of hierarchy and legal compliance. While those are all necessary when handing your cybersecurity over to automated tooling, it can also lead to a slower process and more asymmetry against defenders in the short term.

“Integration into actual production becomes the battlezone,” wrote Ellis. “Lag is real. Bureaucracy is real. Supply chains are real.”

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The fallout and potential exposure from Iran’s state-backed targeting of U.S. critical infrastructure extends to more than 5,200 internet-connected devices, researchers at Censys said in a threat intelligence brief Wednesday. 

 Of the programmable logic controllers manufactured by Rockwell Automation/Allen-Bradley that Censys identified as  potentially exposed to Iranian government attackers, nearly 3,900, or about 3 out of every 4, are based in the United States. 

The cybersecurity firm identified the devices based on details multiple federal agencies shared in a joint alert Tuesday, and published additional indicators of compromise, including operator IPs and other threat hunting queries.

Federal authorities earlier this week warned that Iranian government attackers have exploited devices that control industrial automation processes and disrupted multiple sectors during the past month. Some victims also experienced financial losses as a result of the attacks, officials said. 

The operational technology devices are deployed across the energy sector, water and wastewater systems, and U.S. government services and facilities. 

Censys scans spotted 5,219 internet-exposed Rockwell Automation/Allen-Bradley PLC hosts shortly after the joint alert was issued by the FBI, National Security Agency, Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, Environmental Protection Agency, Energy Department and U.S. Cyber Command. 

Researchers at Censys determined most of the exposed devices are connected via cellular systems, posing a significant risk to remote field deployments. Nearly half of the devices globally are connected to Verizon’s wireless network and 13% are connected to AT&T’s infrastructure.

“These devices are almost certainly field-deployed in physical infrastructure (pump stations, substations, municipal facilities) with cellular modems as their sole internet path,” Censys researchers wrote in the report. 

The potential attack surface is also amplified by additional services exposed in other ports on these devices, a discovery that Censys warned could allow attackers to gain direct paths to operations beyond PLC exploitation. 

Researchers fingerprinted MicroLogix and CompactLogix models exposed to the latest threat campaign and published a list of the 15 most-exposed products. Many of the most prominent devices are running end-of-life software, a compounding risk that could allow attackers to prioritize unpatched devices upon scanning, according to Censys.

The attacks date back to at least March, following the U.S. and Israel’s war against Iran, and were underway as other Iranian government-backed attackers claimed other victims, including Stryker and local governments.

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Iranian government hackers are launching disruptive cyberattacks on American energy and water infrastructure, U.S. government agencies “urgently” warned Tuesday.

The hackers are taking aim at devices and systems that control industrial processes, and have harmed victims in the last month following the onset of U.S.-Israel strikes against Iran, according to the joint alert from the FBI, National Security Agency, Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, Environmental Protection Agency, Energy Department and Cyber Command.

“Iran-affiliated advanced persistent threat (APT) actors are conducting exploitation activity targeting internet-facing operational technology (OT) devices, including programmable logic controllers (PLCs) manufactured by Rockwell Automation/Allen-Bradley,” the alert states. “This activity has led to PLC disruptions across several U.S. critical infrastructure sectors through malicious interactions with the project file and manipulation of data on human machine interface (HMI) and supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) displays.”

U.S. government agencies have warned before about Iranian hackers going after similar targets with those similar methods. The first such warning came after an Iranian government-linked group took credit for attacking a Pennsylvania water facility in late 2023.

Since March of this year, however, the agencies said they have seen new victims emerge from an advanced persistent threat group tied to Iran.

“The authoring agencies identified (through engagements with victim organizations) an Iranian-affiliated APT-group that disrupted the function of PLCs,” the alert reads. “These PLCs were deployed across multiple U.S. critical infrastructure sectors (including Government Services and Facilities, WWS, and Energy sectors) within a wide variety of industrial automation processes. Some of the victims experienced operational disruption and financial loss.”

The earlier campaign compromised at least 75 devices, the alert states.

The latest disruptions include “maliciously interacting with project files, and manipulating data displayed on HMI and SCADA displays,” according to the agencies’ warning.

After the U.S.-Israel conflict with Iran began, Tehran-connected hackers claimed victims including major medtech company Stryker, local governments and more.

The FBI warned last month that Iranian hackers were deploying malware over the Telegram app, although that campaign also predated the current Iran conflict.

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