Rockwell Automation

What they make

1 input Rockwell Automation supplies

Click an input to see every good that depends on it, every country that produces it, and every other company in the supply chain.

Where they make it

1 facility

Intelligence

What's known

Sourced claims about this company's role in supply chains, chokepoints, concentration, incidents, dual-use connections.

• Did you know2023

  In 2023, DOJ, DoD Inspector General, and DOE investigators began examining whether Rockwell Automation's R&D facility in Dalian, China — staffed exclusively by Chinese nationals — posed a national security risk. A whistleblower alleged that code development, firmware patches, and technical support for Allen-Bradley PLCs embedded in US Navy shore installations, water treatment plants, and power grid substations are written by Chinese engineers at the Dalian facility. Dominion Energy (a major US power utility) specifically requested contract language restricting Chinese-origin code in its Rockwell systems. Rockwell's response was that "all code written in China is checked by US employees." The investigation concerns not a hack but a supply chain access risk at the firmware level: Chinese engineers who write patches for critical infrastructure PLCs could identify unpatched vulnerabilities before US operators are protected, or introduce subtle vulnerabilities indistinguishable from legitimate code. As of late 2025, no public findings have been announced.

  SC Media ↗

• Chokepoint2023

  In July 2023, CISA and Dragos jointly disclosed CVE-2023-3595 (CVSS 9.8/10) and CVE-2023-3596 in Rockwell ControlLogix 1756 EN2*/EN3* communication modules — the backbone PLC family in US critical infrastructure. Dragos attributed the novel exploit capability to an unnamed government-sponsored APT group and explicitly compared it to TRISIS/TRITON — the 2017 Russian state attack on a Saudi petrochemical plant's safety instrumented system. The exploit allows an attacker to: take control of controllers remotely, exfiltrate operational data, or cause physical process disruption with no preceding alert. Separately, the IRGC Cyber-Electronic Command (CyberAv3ngers) has deployed custom ICS malware called IOCONTROL exploiting separate Rockwell authentication bypass vulnerabilities against US water, energy, and government facilities as recently as 2026. The combination of a TRISIS-class capability in the wild against the dominant North American critical infrastructure PLC represents a documented potential mechanism for physical infrastructure attacks.

  The Record ↗

• Origin2025

  Rockwell Automation was founded in 1903 in Milwaukee as Compression Rheostat Company, acquired Allen-Bradley Co. in 1985, and spent the following decades building the dominant North American industrial PLC brand — to the point where 80% of wartime WWII production orders at Allen-Bradley were for defense equipment. The company's 2021-2023 buying spree transformed it from a hardware PLC maker into a software-driven platform: Plex Systems ($2.22B, cloud MES, September 2021), Fiix (CMMS), Verve Industrial Protection (OT cybersecurity, November 2023), and Clearpath Robotics (~$600M, autonomous robots, October 2023). In FY2025, software revenues were growing 9% annually at 29.7% operating margins while hardware was flat — the company's strategic center of gravity has shifted to controlling the software layer of the OT infrastructure it already dominates physically.

  Rockwell Automation ↗