The threat to industrial environments has reached a new level. According to the IBM X-Force Threat Intelligence Index, manufacturing accounted for 27.7 percent of the incidents X-Force observed in 2025, making it the most targeted sector for the fifth consecutive year, primarily through the exploitation of exposed systems. At the same time, attackers are no longer focused only on stealing data: Some now target PLCs and industrial processes directly, seeking to shut down production lines, damage equipment, or endanger operator safety.
In industrial environments, the challenge is response time: Patching a PLC vulnerability usually means waiting for the next maintenance window, then retesting and requalifying the installation before bringing it back online.
Months can pass while the vulnerability remains exposed. It is precisely this gap between the pace of vulnerability discovery and the pace of remediation that defense in depth must close.
Stronger Relationship
To strengthen defense in depth for industrial systems, Schneider chose to deepen its collaboration with SECLAB. The two companies are combining their OT expertise to adapt SECLAB technology to Schneider automation architectures, enabling fine-grained application-level filtering of the industrial protocols exchanged between programmable logic controllers (PLCs), distributed control systems (DCS), and safety instrumented systems (SIS).
This collaboration produced a dedicated configuration for securing Schneider Electric OT protocols. Placed inline on critical communications, the appliance provides a hardware-based protocol break and allows only the communications strictly required by the process.
“As vulnerability discovery becomes industrialized, purely software-based security solutions are no longer enough: They remain exposed to the very flaws they should block. With Schneider Electric, we combine strong hardware isolation, a deep understanding of OT flows, and controlled integration as close as possible to critical processes,” said Michel Van Den Berghe, chief executive at SECLAB.
“Our responsibility as an industrial company is to protect the continuity of our operations and those of our customers, while advancing the compliance and resilience of the industrial architectures we deploy,” said Yann Bourjault, vice president digital transformation and cybersecurity Europe at Schneider. “This partnership allows us to deliver complementary OT protection proven with our automation systems, integrated by our experts, and maintained over time within existing service contracts.”