We’re well into the 21st century, yet many semiconductor manufacturing environments are still built on frameworks conceived in a different era. If your infrastructure strategy still relies on the outdated Purdue Enterprise Reference Architecture (PERA), you’re not managing cyber risk or safeguarding your systems. In today’s global, hyper-connected manufacturing economy, aging architectures are more than just legacy—they’re liabilities. It’s time to acknowledge a critical truth: decades of underinvestment in OT cybersecurity, compounded by mounting technical debt, are placing production, revenue, and resilience at risk.
This session is a strategic deep dive into why modernizing your OT security architecture isn’t a “nice to have”—it’s a business imperative. Cybersecurity in industrial environments isn’t just about compliance or maturity metrics—it’s about protecting the process (uptime), product integrity, and the bottom line.
• We’ll begin with a look at one of the riskiest issues facing semiconductor fabs today: unsupported legacy systems that can’t be patched, replaced, or easily isolated. When entire toolchains depend on aging platforms, securing them becomes less about industry best practices and more about strategic risk management. We'll explore cost-effective approaches to mitigating these exposures without disrupting throughput or exceeding already stretched budgets. • Next, we’ll examine what sustainable cyber security really looks like in high-availability environments. We'll discuss how to design monitoring and detection strategies that prioritize operational relevance, how to embed threat detection without overwhelming staff, and what modern incident response should look like when minutes of downtime translate to millions in lost revenue. • From there, we’ll explore the increasing frequency and cost of cyber events in semiconductor manufacturing. We’ll walk through relevant attack chains and map them to architectural gaps, drawing connections between technical debt and operational disruption. Attendees will leave with a clearer understanding of how unaddressed weaknesses in system design directly correlate with increased likelihood—and cost—of compromise, and the subsequent recovery. • Finally, we’ll look ahead: as the industry embraces IoT, Industry 4.0, and cloud-enabled automation, the need for a secure, modernized architecture becomes even more pressing. Automation without a security-centric infrastructure isn't a competitive advantage—it’s a cybersecurity vulnerability with financial impact. As fabs grow more autonomous and interconnected, security must be embedded from the edge to the cloud—not tacked on as an afterthought.
If your organization is ready to confront the real financial and operational implications of aging infrastructure, and move from reactive fixes to proactive architecture, this session offers practical guidance and a strategic path forward. There's no silver bullet—only sound planning, smart investment, and the will to evolve.
