A New Alliance Fights AI with AI to Defend America's Power Grid

ORLANDO, Fla. and FOXBOROUGH, Mass. – August 11, 2026 – A fundamental shift is underway in the economics of cyber warfare. Artificial intelligence is no longer just a defensive tool; it has become a powerful engine for offense, capable of discovering software flaws at a scale and speed that is rapidly overwhelming human capacity. For the operators of the world's most critical infrastructure—the power grids, water systems, and industrial plants that form the bedrock of modern society—this is not a theoretical threat. It is the defining operational challenge of the decade.

Data from cybersecurity organizations paints a stark picture. The volume of new Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVEs) is projected to surpass 66,000 in 2026 alone, marking a roughly 44% increase over the previous year. This deluge, accelerated by AI-assisted research, is creating a dangerous gap between the discovery of a threat and the ability to respond. In this high-stakes environment, Fortress Information Security, an AI-powered risk management firm, and Industrial Defender, a 20-year veteran of industrial cybersecurity, have announced an integrated solution designed to meet this AI-speed threat head-on.

The Deluge of AI-Discovered Flaws

The core problem facing industrial operators is one of tempo. The operational technology (OT) environments that run physical processes were never designed for the rapid-fire patch cycles of the IT world. Taking a power generation turbine or a water purification system offline for a software update is a high-consequence decision, involving significant operational risk and financial cost. As a result, security programs were traditionally built to handle a few hundred relevant vulnerability disclosures per year, not thousands per month.

"Vulnerability discovery now happens at machine speed, and response has to keep pace," said Alex Santos, CEO of Fortress Information Security, in a statement. "Most OT programs were built for a world of hundreds of relevant disclosures a year. That world is ending." This statement encapsulates the crisis: the adversary's toolkit has evolved exponentially, while the defender's processes have remained largely manual and slow.

The partnership between Fortress and Industrial Defender is a direct answer to this asymmetry. It seeks to replace weeks of manual vulnerability correlation with an automated process that identifies every affected asset across an industrial enterprise in minutes.

A Strategic Union of Data and Intelligence

At the heart of the collaboration is a fusion of two distinct but complementary capabilities. Industrial Defender has spent two decades building a reputation for creating the most accurate and detailed map of what is actually running inside complex OT environments. Its platform provides the essential "asset truth"—a granular inventory of every device, its firmware, software versions, patch levels, and network configuration. Without this foundational knowledge, any attempt at cybersecurity is guesswork.

"For twenty years, Industrial Defender has built the most accurate picture of what is actually running inside industrial environments," noted George Kalavantis, CEO of Industrial Defender. "That asset truth becomes exponentially more valuable when it is correlated against vulnerability intelligence at the tempo AI-driven discovery now demands. This partnership turns deep asset visibility into prioritized, defensible action."

This is where Fortress Information Security's expertise comes into play. The Fortress Platform ingests the rich asset data from Industrial Defender and applies its AI-driven correlation engine. When a new vulnerability is disclosed anywhere in the world, the platform instantly cross-references it against the complete asset inventory, including deep-diving into the Software Bill of Materials (SBOM) of each component. This allows it to flag not just a vulnerable device, but a specific, vulnerable software library compiled into the firmware of a controller from a third-party vendor—a level of depth that is impossible to achieve manually at scale.

Beyond the Score: Prioritizing Risk in the Physical World

Perhaps the most significant innovation offered by this integrated approach is its move away from generic risk scoring. For years, cybersecurity teams have relied on the Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) to prioritize patches. However, a CVSS score is a technical measure of a flaw's severity in a vacuum; it says nothing about the context in which that flaw exists.

This new solution prioritizes risk based on operational context. It asks the questions that truly matter to an infrastructure operator: How critical is this asset to our primary mission? What other systems are connected to it? Is it exposed to the internet? What would be the physical consequence of its failure? A technically "critical" vulnerability on an isolated, non-essential sensor may be a lower real-world priority than a "medium" vulnerability on a core programmable logic controller that manages a critical process.

By grounding risk assessment in asset criticality, location, and connectivity, the platform enables operators to focus their limited resources on the threats that pose the greatest danger to safety and operational continuity. This shift from a purely technical to a mission-based view of risk is a critical evolution in OT security strategy, allowing organizations to manage the firehose of vulnerabilities without boiling the ocean.

Navigating the Gauntlet of Regulation and Compliance

The imperative to adopt such advanced systems is not just operational; it is regulatory. Across the globe, governments are imposing stricter cybersecurity mandates on critical infrastructure. In North America, the North American Electric Reliability Corporation's Critical Infrastructure Protection (NERC CIP) standards demand rigorous asset management, vulnerability assessment (CIP-010), and supply chain risk management (CIP-013). In Europe, the NIS2 Directive enforces stringent risk management and reporting obligations.

These regulations require not only that operators secure their systems, but that they can prove it to auditors. A key feature of the Fortress and Industrial Defender offering is a closed-loop remediation workflow that captures auditable evidence of every action taken. This transforms the compliance process from a frantic, manual scramble for documentation into a streamlined, automated function of the security program itself.

In a competitive market populated by established players like Dragos, Claroty, and Nozomi Networks, this partnership carves out a distinct position by uniting deep, legacy OT knowledge with cutting-edge AI and a laser focus on auditable, context-aware risk management. The strategic logic is clear: by combining their specialized strengths, the two companies are betting they can provide a more complete and actionable solution to the existential threat of AI-speed vulnerability discovery.