Why the Physical World Is Now the Biggest Cybersecurity Vulnerability in Most Organizations - and Why AI Changed Everything

Guest: John Gallagher, VP Viakoo Labs at Viakoo

Host: Seth Earley, CEO at Earley Information Science

Published on: September 28, 2026

In this episode, Seth Earley speaks with John Gallagher, VP of Viakoo Labs at Viakoo, a company that has spent 12 years building automated cyber hygiene for IoT and OT systems across millions of devices. They explore why the physical world - cameras, building automation, water infrastructure, manufacturing equipment - is now the most underprotected attack surface in most organizations, how AI has eliminated the obscurity that passively protected these systems for decades, why ransomware has shifted from stealing data to shutting down operations, why human-in-the-loop is a hard line that can never be crossed in OT remediation, and what it actually takes to build a digital twin of every device in an enterprise environment and use it to match the speed of AI-driven threats.

Key Takeaways:

• IT security investments do not transfer to OT and IoT environments - the 150,000 operating systems, device types, and tightly coupled application relationships require a completely separate approach.
• AI has eliminated security through obscurity - threat actors who previously could not justify the effort to attack niche OT systems can now use AI to read manuals, understand device architectures, and find vulnerabilities at scale.
• Ransomware has shifted from stealing data to shutting down operations - holding a manufacturing line or energy facility hostage is a fundamentally different and more consequential threat than data exfiltration.
• Organizations typically have 5 to 20 times more OT and IoT devices than IT systems - the attack surface is orders of magnitude larger than most executives realize.
• Threat detection in OT is now a solved problem - the unsolved problem is remediation at scale, which requires AI-assisted preparation and autonomous execution with a human in the loop for every deployment decision.
• A digital twin of every device - tracking make, model, firmware, memory state, configuration, and change over time - is the foundational knowledge layer before any security action can be taken.
• The defense is not a smarter model - it is knowing what you own, what connects to what, what breaks when you touch it, and who is accountable. That is an inventory problem, a normalization problem, and an information architecture problem.

Insightful Quotes:

"AI has brought what we call the inversion. It's taken things like remediation - firmware, password, certificate updates - and said, if you were okay updating even a few hundred devices manually a few times a year, those days are gone. It's a daily occurrence now, and you have to match AI speed." - John Gallagher

"Will we ever put AI in charge of deploying that firmware update? Never. That is a hard line. There is a strong argument that AI never should be put in a decision-making process in this environment without a human in the loop." - John Gallagher

"For decades, devices running on the physical side of business were protected by the fact that they were too obscure to be worth an attacker's time. That protection was never a strategy, and AI has erased it. The defense is not a smarter model - it is the knowledge of what you own, the firmware, what connects to it, what breaks when you touch it, who is accountable." - Seth Earley

Tune in to discover why IoT and OT security is the most consequential and most underestimated cybersecurity challenge in the enterprise today - and what the path from awareness to remediation at scale requires.

Links

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/b2bpipelinebuilder/

Website: https://www.viakoo.com/company/

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