Concrete ways an agent goes wrong here without governance, and the control that catches each one.
01A setpoint moves from the wrong place
A controller receives a setpoint change from an unauthorized source, outside any maintenance window, the pattern behind a water-treatment tampering attempt. Source validation refuses the change and records it, instead of the process drifting while operators see nothing wrong.
02Sensor readings are replayed while equipment is harmed
An attacker feeds normal-looking sensor data to operators while the physical process is pushed past its limits, the pattern that once destroyed centrifuges. Statistical checks catch frozen values and impossible jumps and raise the alarm.
03A safety system is bypassed
A safety instrumented system is put into bypass outside an approved procedure, the setup behind an attack on a petrochemical plant. The bypass is caught against the controller's behavioral baseline and flagged, with the agent that issued it named in the record, before the safeguard is gone when it is needed.
04Lateral movement crosses into control systems
An agent begins reaching from the corporate network toward the control zone, the uncertainty that once forced a multi-day pipeline shutdown. The session's traversal cap refuses the crossing that would take it past the registered number of distinct systems, and the denial is logged, so isolation is provable rather than hoped for.
05Shut down safely across connected units
A fault threatens to cascade across interconnected process units. Repeated emergency shutdowns inside the registered cascade window are blocked before the next one lands, and one command halts every governed controller, confirmed, so a single failure does not propagate into physical damage.