Shawn Tierney meets up with Ashley Weckwerth of ISA to learn all about the OT Cybersecurity Summit in this episode of The Automation Podcast.

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Shawn Tierney (Host): Welcome back. My name is Shawn Tierney from Insights and Automation, and I wanna thank you for tuning back in to this episode of the automation podcast. This week on the show, I have Ashley Weckworth from ISA to talk about the OT cybersecurity summit they just held over in Europe in Brussels, and, very interesting conversation about OT cybersecurity. In addition to that, I had a couple announcements. First off, I wanted to let you know that I have rebooted the automation news podcast, and I renamed it Automation Tech Talk.

And I’m trying to do a show at least three or four times a week at lunchtime. So if you’re not already subscribed to the old automation news podcast, you should be able to find it now as Automation Tech Talk. And, I’m just trying to spend ten to twenty minutes every lunch trying to share some knowledge that I have with the community. I also wanna mention that if you are a listener, I’m running a special 20% off, sale on my courses over at the automationschool.com. You will not see that there.

It’s only for those listening. And I know most of you are already automation experts, so you don’t need to take these courses. So, really, this would be something you would pass on to the people who work for you or people you know who need to get up to speed on whether they need an introductory PLC course, so they need to get up to speed on ControlLogix, CompactLogix, s seven twelve hundred and fifteen hundred, PanelView plus, USC, and so on. So in any case, to get that discount, that 20% off any course or bundle of courses at $99 or more, All you have to do is send me the email address of the person who wants the discount. And, of course, we do do, group enrollment with, we’ve done it with a lot of Fortune 500 companies.

Actually, I got a new order that just came in I gotta process. But, when we do a group enrollment, you you enroll, like, several people at your shop, and then I enroll them all at once, and you get a discount a quantity discount and all that. So in any case, if you have any questions about that, just go to the automationschool.com. All my contact info is at the very top, my voice mail, my email. You can even fill in a form there or book a meeting with me.

But, please let me know if you know anybody who needs training. Even if you just want me to reach out to them to see if I can help them with their training needs, please let me know over there. And with that, let’s go ahead and jump into this week’s episode of the automation podcast. And, Ashley, I know this is your first time on the show. So before we jump into the summary of what what what this OT cybersecurity summit is and what it was all about and the highlights and all that good stuff, before we even get into that, could you tell the audience a little bit about yourself?

Ashley Weckwerth (ISA): Yeah. Thank you, Shawn. I appreciate being here. My name is Ashley Weckworth. I am located in Orlando, Florida.

I’ve been a volunteer for ISA for twelve years now. I actually have a day job, though. I’m a volunteer with ISA, which is the International Society of Automation. But in my day job, I’m actually a project manager for automation projects, so specifically SCADA systems projects for the electric grid right now. But our company also supports many other industries, so I actually started my career out.

I was a chemical engineer. So I like to tell people, you never know how you’re gonna find your way to automation professions. There’s so many different varying degrees and everything that kinda lead us to this place. But I graduated in chemical engineering, went into instrumentation and controls, for the oil and gas industry. So doing a lot of, you know, it was PLCs or DCS systems that we used.

But essentially, as I actually got my pro professional engineer license in control systems. So as a chemical engineer, you don’t know a lot about instrumentation controls and automation, at least I didn’t. And so I was actually recommended to join ISA right out of school. So I joined ISA in June 2012 and became a volunteer leader at the local section in 2013 and then just grew, in my volunteer roles, and I am now the ISA president-elect secretary. So what that means is in 2026, I will be the, ISA president for that calendar year.

So I’m excited to be here today, to talk to you all about the ISA OT Cyber Summit. I actually was able to attend this event this year. It’s the third year that ISA has done this event. The first year was Aberdeen, Scotland. The second year was in London.

And then this year, the first year I was able to attend was actually in Brussels, Belgium. So we’ve been all over Europe in different capacities, and I was really excited to attend this event. And I wanted to come on here today, and I’m so thankful you allowed us to come on here today to just tell your audience and community that are all very, enthusiastic about automation about this summit. So, hopefully, maybe they wanna attend in the future or maybe just can see what ISA is all about, and look into it more. So I’m really excited.

Shawn Tierney (Host): No. And thank you for coming on. You know, it’s we we all get so wrapped up in our day to day that it’s great to have people on, like, from ISA to tell us what’s going on. And, you know, maybe, you know, you’re you get in a position later in your career where you can actually spend some time after work, you know, meeting with, your colleagues from all kinds of different industries. ISA is a great place to check into and and get involved with.

But let me go ahead and turn it back to you.

Ashley Weckwerth (ISA): Yeah. No. And, Shawn, you’re so right in the sense of I tell people is even though right now I’m not really in the day to day cybersecurity or OT cyber space, this conference was actually still really beneficial because of all the diverse connections that I gained there. It was actually the first time I had been more of the minority coming from The United States in the sense that you had people from Spain. You had people from, you know, Belgium, of course.

You had France, you had Ireland, you had London in The UK. Right? You had different perspectives that everybody’s trying to come together. And ISA had this vision statement that’s create a better world through automation. Is and that’s truly what this group’s trying to do is we’re trying to protect all of our automation systems in the OT space against those vulnerabilities or those threats and how it will impact us from an operational standpoint, but also a business standpoint.

So I thought even though I’m not in it day to day, like you mentioned, is sometimes I just have my blinders on, do my job, know what I’m doing, is it was very unique to talk to these folks at the socials and in the the meetings and listen to them to really expand my knowledge of what automation can be and also what we can do to protect it, but also just, like, building those connections because you never know where your career might lead. And I really did value that. So, with that, I did wanna mention that ISA OT Cyber Summit did have two unique tracks this year. I do feel like we try to change up the tracks based on what’s happening in today’s world, what people are talking about, the trends in this area. And so this year, we had a chain a track called threat intelligence.

So really just identifying threats, knowing the vulnerabilities, knowing how to respond and