Episode 381 Deep Dive: Gijo Varghese | When a Cyber Attack Becomes a Public Safety Failure

Karissa Breen sits down with Gijo Varghese, Chief Security Officer at OT cyber security firm Secolve, to unpack an uncomfortable trade-off: the same connectivity and AI making power, water and transport smarter are also making them easier to break. Gijo explains how IT and OT convergence has widened the attack surface, why decades-old control systems were never built to touch the internet, and how a single IT intrusion can spill into the physical world. He walks through the incidents that prove it, from the 2015 Ukraine grid attack to Colonial Pipeline, where operators went to run the system by hand and found the people who knew how had all retired, to the Jaguar Land Rover breach that rippled through 5,000 suppliers and cost the UK economy billions. The throughline for boards and executives: a cyber incident stops being a security event the moment it becomes a public safety failure. Gijo makes the case for the kill switch, tested manual fallbacks, and treating resilience rather than compliance as the real measure of readiness.

About Gijo: Gijo Varghese is a cyber security veteran, critical infrastructure defender, and the Chief Security Officer of Secolve. His passion in life is to protect the systems society depends on – power grids, transport networks, and biomedical health systems – keeping people, communities, and businesses safe from cyberattacks. With over 25 years of experience across IT and OT security, Gijo has spent his career at the frontline of Australia’s most essential industries, most recently leading cyber resilience at Endeavour Energy for six years, with prior roles at Transport for NSW, SA Health, CyberCX and Wipro Consulting.

Secolve is Australia’s leading OT cybersecurity firm, providing cyber advisory, offensive security, and training services to mines, factories, hospitals, transport networks, and energy ecosystems. As Secolve’s first CSO, Gijo leads the firm’s consultancy and professional services team, transforming complex OT cyber risks into practical action across executive, engineering, and operational teams.

Keywords: critical infrastructure security, OT security, IT/OT convergence, SCADA, ICS, cyber resilience, kill switch, Colonial Pipeline, Jaguar Land Rover, SOCI Act, CI45, incident response, operational technology, AI cybersecurity, public safety, board governance, cyber warfare, business continuity