Name: Florida Water Utility Attack Demonstration
Start: 2021-03-10T01:20:00Z
End: 2021-03-10T01:20:04.000Z
Location: BrightTALK

Virsec delivers Zero Trust runtime protection for enterprise workloads with Ottoguard.AI. The platform enforces a default-deny, allow-on-trust model at runtime, ensuring only verified code paths are allowed to execute. This stops exploits, web shells, and in-memory attacks in milliseconds—without signatures, agents, or reliance on patch timing. Ottoguard.AI protects both modern and legacy systems, reduces emergency patching, and helps security teams maintain uptime while demonstrating measurable risk reduction.

As cyber threats accelerate and vulnerability volumes continue to grow, traditional security models based on scanning, ticketing, and manual remediation are no longer keeping pace. Organizations are accumulating security debt faster than human teams can realistically resolve it.

In this conversation, Tyler Shields (Omdia) and Simone Sassoli (OTTOGUARD.AI by Virsec) explore how cybersecurity is switching from vulnerability management to outcome-driven risk reduction, powered by automated, increasingly autonomous remediation.

The discussion covers how leading organizations are rethinking remediation strategies, where automation succeeds (and fails), and what it takes to build trust in systems that act at machine speed.

Key topics include:
● Why traditional vulnerability management is failing under growing security debt
● Moving from managing vulnerabilities to reducing real business risk
● What automated remediation is and how it differs from full autonomy
● Reactive patching vs. proactive runtime and memory protection
● Deterministic (rule-based) and AI-driven remediation approaches
● Why trust remains the biggest barrier to autonomous security
● The role of human feedback loops, guardrails, and identity-aware permissions
● What leaders should consider before implementing automated remediation
● The long-term vision for agent-driven security outcomes

Rather than replacing humans, automated remediation provides a controlled, measurable path toward autonomy, balancing speed, trust, and effectiveness. Building confidence in these systems is essential to keeping pace with modern, machine-scale cyberattacks.

OTTOGUARD.AI combines runtime protection, deterministic controls, and AI-driven decision-making to help organizations move beyond backlog-driven security toward autonomous security outcomes.

The future of automated remediation in cybersecurity

In this demo, the Virsec Research Lab demonstrates how the recent attack on a Florida Water Utility may have been perpetrated, through spear-phising, exploiting a vulnerability in TeamViewer, and launch remote code execution malware.

Florida Water Utility Attack Demonstration

Water cyberattack

water utility attack

Cyber Attacks

remote code execution

Runtime Protection

Oldsmar attack

Florida water attack

Critical Infrastructure

Water Management

Cyber Security

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Florida Water Utility Attack Demonstration

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About this talk

Virsec