Billington Critical Infrastructure CyberSecurity Summit 2026

Attendees, exhibitors & solutions

Who this event is for

Industry trends

Key trends shaping this market and its wider industry.

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Frequently asked

Glossary

1

Critical infrastructure

The systems and assets - energy grids, water utilities, pipelines, rail and ports, telecoms, hospitals, financial services and government networks - whose disruption would cause serious national or public harm securitized. This summit's agenda is built around defending these sectors.

2

OT (operational technology)

Hardware and software that directly control physical processes such as valves, turbines, pumps and breakers. OT security priorities differ from IT: availability and safety outrank confidentiality, and patching windows are constrained by uptime.

3

ICS (industrial control system)

The umbrella term for control architectures used in utilities and plants, including DCS, PLC-based systems and SCADA. Sessions at the summit address how ICS environments are discovered, segmented and monitored against nation-state and ransomware intrusion.

4

SCADA

Supervisory control and data acquisition: the telemetry layer that lets operators monitor and command remote field devices. Historically air-gapped, SCADA estates are now increasingly connected to enterprise IT, which is a recurring theme in critical infrastructure threat briefings.

5

IT/OT convergence

The merging of enterprise IT networks with plant-floor and grid control networks for analytics and remote operations. It widens the attack surface and makes identity, segmentation and continuous monitoring joint IT-security and engineering problems.

6

Zero Trust

An architecture that removes implicit trust from the network perimeter and verifies every user, device and session. For critical infrastructure, the practical question at the summit is how Zero Trust principles are applied to legacy OT that cannot run modern agents.

7

CISA

The US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, which issues advisories, incident guidance and sector-specific security directives. Public-sector and utility attendees typically track CISA publications as a baseline for compliance planning.

8

NERC CIP

The North American Electric Reliability Corporation's Critical Infrastructure Protection standards, the mandatory cybersecurity rule set for bulk electric system operators. Utility compliance teams use them as a reference model for audit-ready controls.

9

Ransomware

Extortion malware that encrypts or exfiltrates data and, in critical infrastructure incidents, has also targeted industrial control environments. Recovery planning, offline backups and segmentation are the countermeasures most discussed by operators.

10

Threat intelligence sharing

Structured exchange of indicators, tactics and campaign reporting between agencies, sector bodies and operators, often through ISACs. Cross-sector sharing is a frequent argument for attending a summit that mixes utilities, transport and government.

11

Incident response (IR) plan

The documented playbook covering detection, containment, escalation, regulator notification and recovery. For critical infrastructure, IR plans must also cover manual operation of physical assets if control systems are taken offline.

12

Air gap

Physical isolation of a network from external connectivity. In practice, removable media, vendor laptops and remote maintenance links erode the air gap, which is why segmentation monitoring and supply-chain assurance dominate OT security programmes.

13

SBOM (software bill of materials)

A machine-readable inventory of software components and dependencies. Buyers of grid, water and transport control systems increasingly request SBOMs to trace vulnerable libraries in vendor firmware and embedded devices.

14

ISAC (Information Sharing and Analysis Center)

Sector-specific bodies where operators share threat indicators and incident lessons with peers and government partners. Attendance at a cross-sector cyber summit is often used to build those ISAC relationships in person.