Case Study: North Carolina Electric Cooperatives achieves continuous IT/OT cyber resilience with Horizon3.ai's NodeZero

Building Cyber Resilience Across a Distributed Network

North Carolina Electric Cooperatives (NCEC) — a network of 26 independent, member-owned cooperatives serving 2.5 million people across 93 counties — faced the challenge of protecting diverse IT and OT environments with uneven cybersecurity resources and a rising threat landscape. To move from periodic assessments to continuous, scalable testing, NCEC turned to Horizon3.ai and its NodeZero platform for ongoing visibility and risk prioritization.

Horizon3.ai deployed NodeZero to run monthly autonomous penetration tests, validate patches, simulate phishing-driven credential compromise, and perform on-demand scans for zero-day threats. The NodeZero rollout gave NCEC centralized, continuous visibility across all 26 co-ops, prioritized high-risk vulnerabilities (reducing manual reporting effort), enabled smaller co-ops to access advanced testing, and is now being validated with bi-annual third-party tests — strengthening resilience across North Carolina’s critical energy infrastructure.

North Carolina Electric Cooperatives

Brian Burnett

Director of Cybersecurity