Banker Group is introducing OreKeep Cyber, its venture for cyber defence, intelligence and operational resilience in critical industry. The focus is the operations that produce water and critical minerals: mines, mineral-processing and process plants, water and wastewater utilities, and the vendors and integrators connected to them.
The problem: plants that are connected, but not mapped
Industrial operations now depend on connected control systems, remote vendor access and data flowing between the plant floor and the corporate network. Many operators still cannot answer, with confidence, the three questions on which all OT cybersecurity rests: what is connected, who can reach it, and what stops if it fails.
The threat is not abstract. In its year-in-review report published in 2026, the industrial security firm Dragos tracked 119 ransomware groups targeting industrial organisations in 2025, up from 80 the year before, collectively affecting some 3,300 organisations. The same report found that organisations with comprehensive visibility of their operational technology (OT) detected and contained OT ransomware incidents in five days on average, against an industry-wide average of 42.
Why IT methods alone are not enough
Security practices designed for office networks can do harm on the plant floor. An aggressive scan can take down an older controller; a patch applied without the process engineer can stop a line. In OT, safety and availability come first, and every protective measure has to be planned around the process it protects. The same applies to a newer layer: AI models and autonomous agents that already read plant data and, in some cases, recommend or take actions. They bring risks of their own, from manipulated inputs to excessive permissions.
In a plant, security that causes the outage has failed at its first task.
One team, planned with operations
OreKeep Cyber brings IT, OT and AI security into a single programme, from assessment and hardening to monitoring, incident response and authorised testing. Its scope is set per site, against the systems actually installed, and the work is planned with the engineers who run the plant, so that security does not become the cause of the outage it was meant to prevent. Tests on production systems are carried out only with separate written approval.
The work is aligned with recognised references, including the NIST Cybersecurity Framework 2.0, the ISA/IEC 62443 series for industrial automation and control systems, CISA guidance for operational technology and OWASP guidance for AI applications.
Part of the group’s industrial focus
Cybersecurity is increasingly part of the licence to operate for water and mineral operations, and a condition for bringing AI safely into the control room. OreKeep Cyber gives industrial operators in Brazil, Latin America and other markets a single, accountable point of contact for that work.
Sources
- Dragos, OT Cybersecurity Year in Review, 2026
- NIST, Cybersecurity Framework (CSF) 2.0, 2024
- ISA/IEC, 62443 series, security for industrial automation and control systems
- CISA, operational technology security guidance
- OWASP, Top 10 for LLM Applications, 2025 edition
