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January 9, 2024

Three Ways AI Secures OT & ICS from Cyber Attacks

Explore the three challenges facing industries that manage OT and ICS Systems, the benefits of adopting AI technology, and Darktrace / OT’s unique role!
Inside the SOC
Darktrace cyber analysts are world-class experts in threat intelligence, threat hunting and incident response, and provide 24/7 SOC support to thousands of Darktrace customers around the globe. Inside the SOC is exclusively authored by these experts, providing analysis of cyber incidents and threat trends, based on real-world experience in the field.
Written by
Oakley Cox
Director of Product
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09
Jan 2024

What is OT and ICS?

Operational technologies and industrial control systems are the networked technologies used for the automation of physical processes. These are the technologies that allow operators to control processes and retrieve real time process data from a factory, rail system, pipeline, and other industrial processes.  

The role of AI in defending OT/ICS networks  

While largely adopted by industrial organizations, OT is utilized by Critical Infrastructures, these being the industries that directly affect the health, safety, and welfare of the public. As these organizations expand and adopt new networked industrial technologies, they are simultaneously expanding their attack surface.  

With a larger attack surface, more attacks targeting OT/ICS, and focused coordination around cyber security from regulatory authorities, security personnel have increasing workloads that make it difficult to keep pace with threats and vulnerabilities. Defenders are managing growing attack surfaces due to IT and OT convergence. Thus, the adoption of AI technology to protect, detect, respond, and recover from cyber incidents in industrial systems is paramount for keeping critical infrastructure safe.

This blog will explore three challenges facing industries managing OT/ICS, the perceived benefits of adopting AI technology to address these challenges, and Darktrace/OT’s unique role in this process.  

Darktrace also delivers complete AI-powered solutions to defend US federal government customers from cyber disruptions and ensure mission resilience. Learn more about high fidelity detection in Darktrace Federal’s TAC report.

Figure 1: AI statistics from Gartner and Deloitte

Three ways AI helps improves OT/ICS security  

1. Anomaly detection and response

In this heightened security landscape, OT/ICS environments face a spectrum of external cyber threats that demand vigilant defense. From the looming risk of industrial ransomware to the threat of insiders, yet another dimension is added to security challenge, meaning security professionals must be equipped to detect and respond to internal and external threats.  

While threats are eminent from both inside and outside the organization, many organizations rely on Indicator of Compromises (IOCs) for threat detection. By definition, these solutions can only detect network activity they recognize as an indicator of compromise; therefore, often miss insider threats and novel (zero-day) attacks because the tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) and attack toolkits have never been seen in practice.  

Anomaly-based detection is best suited to combat never-before-seen threats and signatureless threats from the inside. However, not all detection methods are equal. Most anomaly-based detection solutions that leverage AI rely on a combination of supervised machine learning, deep learning, and transformers to train and inform their systems. This entails shipping your company’s data out to a large data lake housed somewhere in the cloud where it gets blended with attack data from thousands of other organizations. This data set gets used to train AI systems — yours and everyone else’s — to recognize patterns of attack based on previously encountered threats.  

While this method reduces the workload for security teams who would have to input attack data otherwise manually, it runs the same risk of only detecting known threats and has potential privacy concerns when shipping this data externally.  

To improve the quality and speed of anomaly detection, Darktrace/OT uses Self-Learning AI that leverages Bayesian Probabilistic Methodologies, Graph Theory, and Deep Neural Networks to learn your organization from the ground up in real time. By learning your unique organization, Darktrace/OT develops a sophisticated baseline knowledge of your network and assets, identifying abnormal activity that indicates a threat based on your unique network data at machine speed. Because the AI engine is local to the organization and/or assets, concerns of data residency and privacy are reduced, and the result is faster time to detect and triage incidents.  

Leveraging Self-Learning AI, Darktrace/OT uses autonomous response that severs only the anomalous or risky behaviors allowing the assets to continue to operate as normal. Organizations work with Darktrace to customize how they want Darktrace’s autonomous response to be applied. These options vary from on a device- by-device basis, device type by device type, or subnet by subnet basis and can be done completely autonomously or in human confirmation mode. This gives security teams more time to respond to an incident and reduces operational downtime when facing a threat.  

Darktrace leverages a combination of AI methods:

  • Self-Learning AI
  • Bayesian classification probabilistic models  
  • Deep neural networks
  • Transformers
  • Graph theory models
  • Clustering models  
  • Anomaly detection models
  • Generative and applied AI  
  • Natural language processing  
  • Supervised machine learning for investigation process of alerts

2. Vulnerability & Asset Management

At present, managing OT cyber risk is labor and resource intensive. Many organizations use third-party auditors to identify assets and vulnerabilities, grade compliance, and recommend improvements.  

At best, these exercises become tick-box exercises for companies to stay in compliance with little measurable reduction in cyber risk. At worst, asset owners can be left with a mountain of vulnerability information to work through, much of it irrelevant to the security risks Engineering and Operations teams deal with day to day, and increasingly out of date each passing day after the annual or biannual audit has been completed.  

In both cases, organizations are left using a patchwork of point products to address different aspects of preventative OT cyber security, most of which lack wider business context and lead to costly inefficiencies with no real impact to vulnerability or risk exposure.  

Darktrace’s technology helps in three unique ways:

  1. AI populates asset inventories: Self-Learning AI technology listens and learns from network traffic to populate or update asset inventories. It does this not just by identifying simple IPs, mac addresses, and hostnames, it learns from what it sees and automatically classifies or tags specific types of assets with the function that they perform. For example, if a specific device is performing functions like a PLC, sending commands to and from an HMI, it can appropriately tag and label these systems.
  2. AI prioritizes risk: Leveraging Bayesian Probabilistic Methodologies, Graph Theory, and Deep Neural Networks, Darktrace/OT assesses the strategic risks facing your organization in real time. Using knowledge of data points on all your networked assets, data flow topology, your assets vulnerabilities and OSINT, Darktrace identifies and prioritizes high-value assets, potential attack pathways based on an existing vulnerabilities targetability and impact.
  3. AI explains remediation tactics: Many OT devices run 24/7 operations and cannot be taken offline to apply a patch, assuming a patch is even available. Darktrace/OT uses natural language processing to provide and explain prioritized remediation and mitigation associated with a given cyber risk across all MITRE ATT&CK techniques. Thus, where a CVE exists but a patch cannot be applied, a different technical mitigation can be recommended to remove a potential attack path before it can be exploited, preemptively securing vital internal systems and assets.
Figure 2: A critical attack path which starts with the compromise of a PC in the internal IT network, and ends with a PLC in the OT network. Each step is mapped out to the real world TTPs including abuse of SSH sessions and the modifications of ICS programs

3. Simplify compliance and reporting

Organizations, regardless of size or resources, have compliance regulations they need to adhere to. What this creates is an increased workload for security professionals. For smaller organizations, security teams might lack the manpower or resources to report in the short time frame that is required. For large organizations, keeping track of a massive amount of assets proves to be a challenge. Both cases emanate the risk of reporting fatigue where organizations might be hesitant to report incidents due to the complexity and time requirements they demand.  

An AI engine within the Darktrace/OT platform, Cyber AI analyst autonomously investigates incidents, summarize findings in natural language, and provides comprehensive insights into the nature and scope of cyber threats to improve the time it takes to triage and report on incidents. The ability to stitch together and present related security events provides a holistic understanding of the incident, enabling security analysts to identify patterns, assess the scope of potential threats, and prioritize responses effectively.  

Darktrace's detection capabilities identify every stage of an intrusion, from a compromised domain controller to network reconnaissance and privilege escalation. The AI technology is capable of detecting infections across several devices and generating incident reports that piece together disparate events to give a clear security narrative containing details of the attack, bridging the communication gap between IT and OT specialists.  

Post-incident, the technology assists in outlining timelines, discerning compromised data, pinpointing unusual activities, and aiding security teams in proactive threat mitigation.  

With its capabilities, organizations can swiftly understand the attack timeline, affected assets, unauthorized accesses, compromised data points, and malicious interactions, facilitating appropriate communication and action. For example, when Cyber AI Analyst shows an attack path, the security team gains insight on the segmentation or lack thereof between two subnets allowing the security team to appropriately segment the subnets.  

Cyber AI improves critical infrastructure operators’ ability to report major cyber-attacks to regulatory authorities. Considering that 72 hours is the reporting period for most significant incidents — and 24 hours for ransomware payments — Cyber AI Analyst is no longer a nice-to-have but a must-have for critical infrastructure.

Figure 3: The tabs labeled 1-4 denote model breaches, each with a specific action and severity indicated by color dots. Darktrace integrates these breaches, offering the security team a unified view of interconnected security events.  

The right AI for the right challenge

Incident Phase:

Protect

Role of AI:

Cyber risk prioritization

Attack path modelling

Compliance reporting

Darktrace Product:

PREVENT/OT

Incident Phase:

Detect

Role of AI:

Anomaly detection

Triaging and investigating

Darktrace Product:

Cyber AI analyst

DETECT/OT

Incident Phase:

Respond

Role of AI: 

Autonomous response  

Incident reporting

Darktrace Product:

RESPOND/OT

Incident Phase:

Recover

Role of AI:

Incident preparedness

Incident simulations

Darktrace Product:

HEAL

Credit to: Nicole Carignan, VP of Strategic Cyber AI - Kendra Gonzalez Duran, Director of Technology Innovation - & Daniel Simonds, Director of Operational Technology for their contribution to this blog.

Inside the SOC
Darktrace cyber analysts are world-class experts in threat intelligence, threat hunting and incident response, and provide 24/7 SOC support to thousands of Darktrace customers around the globe. Inside the SOC is exclusively authored by these experts, providing analysis of cyber incidents and threat trends, based on real-world experience in the field.
Written by
Oakley Cox
Director of Product

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September 9, 2025

The benefits of bringing together network and email security

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In many organizations, network and email security operate in isolation. Each solution is tasked with defending its respective environment, even though both are facing the same advanced, multi-domain threats.  

This siloed approach overlooks a critical reality: email remains the most common vector for initiating cyber-attacks, while the network is the primary stage on which those attacks progress. Without direct integration between these two domains, organizations risk leaving blind spots that adversaries can exploit.  

A modern security strategy needs to unify email and network defenses, not just in name, but in how they share intelligence, conduct investigations, and coordinate response actions. Let’s take a look at how this joined-up approach delivers measurable technical, operational, and commercial benefits.

Technical advantages

Pre-alert intelligence: Gathering data before the threat strikes

Most security tools start working when something goes wrong – an unusual login, a flagged attachment, a confirmed compromise. But by then, attackers may already be a step ahead.

By unifying network and email security under a single AI platform (like the Darktrace Active AI Security Platform), you can analyze patterns across both environments in real time, even when there are no alerts. This ongoing monitoring builds a behavioral understanding of every user, device, and domain in your ecosystem.

That means when an email arrives from a suspicious domain, the system already knows whether that domain has appeared on your network before – and whether its behavior has been unusual. Likewise, when new network activity involves a domain first spotted in an email, it’s instantly placed in the right context.

This intelligence isn’t built on signatures or after-the-fact compromise indicators – it’s built on live behavioral baselines, giving your defenses the ability to flag threats before damage is done.

Alert-related intelligence: Connecting the dots in real time

Once an alert does fire, speed and context matter. The Darktrace Cyber AI Analyst can automatically investigate across both environments, piecing together network and email evidence into a single, cohesive incident.

Instead of leaving analysts to sift through fragmented logs, the AI links events like a phishing email to suspicious lateral movement on the recipient’s device, keeping the full attack chain intact. Investigations that might take hours – or even days – can be completed in minutes, with far fewer false positives to wade through.

This is more than a time-saver. It ensures defenders maintain visibility after the first sign of compromise, following the attacker as they pivot into network infrastructure, cloud services, or other targets. That cross-environment continuity is impossible to achieve with disconnected point solutions or siloed workflows.

Operational advantages

Streamlining SecOps across teams

In many organizations, email security is managed by IT, while network defense belongs to the SOC. The result? Critical information is scattered between tools and teams, creating blind spots just when you need clarity.

When email and network data flow into a single platform, everyone is working from the same source of truth. SOC analysts gain immediate visibility into email threats without opening another console or sending a request to another department. The IT team benefits from the SOC’s deeper investigative context.

The outcome is more than convenience: it’s faster, more informed decision-making across the board.

Reducing time-to-meaning and enabling faster response

A unified platform removes the need to manually correlate alerts between tools, reducing time-to-meaning for every incident. Built-in AI correlation instantly ties together related events, guiding analysts toward coordinated responses with higher confidence.

Instead of relying on manual SIEM rules or pre-built SOAR playbooks, the platform connects the dots in real time, and can even trigger autonomous response actions across both environments simultaneously. This ensures attacks are stopped before they can escalate, regardless of where they begin.

Commercial advantages

While purchasing “best-of-breed" for all your different tools might sound appealing, it often leads to a patchwork of solutions with overlapping costs and gaps in coverage. However good a “best-in-breed" email security solution might be in the email realm, it won't be truly effective without visibility across domains and an AI analyst piecing intelligence together. That’s why we think “best-in-suite" is the only “best-in-breed" approach that works – choosing a high-quality platform ensures that every new capability strengthens the whole system.  

On top of that, security budgets are under constant pressure. Managing separate vendors for email and network defense means juggling multiple contracts, negotiating different SLAs, and stitching together different support models.

With a single provider for both, procurement and vendor management become far simpler. You deal with one account team, one support channel, and one unified strategy for both environments. If you choose to layer on managed services, you get consistent expertise across your whole security footprint.

Even more importantly, an integrated AI platform sets the stage for growth. Once email and network are under the same roof, adding coverage for other attack surfaces – like cloud or identity – is straightforward. You’re building on the same architecture, not bolting on new point solutions that create more complexity.

Check out the white paper, The Modern Security Stack: Why Your NDR and Email Security Solutions Need to Work Together, to explore these benefits in more depth, with real-world examples and practical steps for unifying your defenses.

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About the author
Mikey Anderson
Product Marketing Manager, Network Detection & Response

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September 9, 2025

Unpacking the Salesloft Incident: Insights from Darktrace Observations

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Introduction

On August 26, 2025, Google Threat intelligence Group released a report detailing a widespread data theft campaign targeting the sales automation platform Salesloft, via compromised OAuth tokens used by the third-party Drift AI chat agent [1][2].  The attack has been attributed to the threat actor UNC6395 by Google Threat Intelligence and Mandiant [1].

The attack is believed to have begun in early August 2025 and continued through until mid-August 2025 [1], with the threat actor exporting significant volumes of data from multiple Salesforce instances [1]. Then sifting through this data for anything that could be used to compromise the victim’s environments such as access keys, tokens or passwords. This had led to Google Threat Intelligence Group assessing that the primary intent of the threat actor is credential harvesting, and later reporting that it was aware of in excess of 700 potentially impacted organizations [3].

Salesloft previously stated that, based on currently available data, customers that do not integrate with Salesforce are unaffected by this campaign [2]. However, on August 28, Google Threat Intelligence Group announced that “Based on new information identified by GTIG, the scope of this compromise is not exclusive to the Salesforce integration with Salesloft Drift and impacts other integrations” [2]. Google Threat Intelligence has since advised that any and all authentication tokens stored in or connected to the Drift platform be treated as potentially compromised [1].

This campaign demonstrates how attackers are increasingly exploiting trusted Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) integrations as a pathway into enterprise environment.

By abusing these integrations, threat actors were able to exfiltrate sensitive business data at scale, bypassing traditional security controls. Rather than relying on malware or obvious intrusion techniques, the adversaries leveraged legitimate credentials and API traffic that resembled legitimate Salesforce activity to achieve their goals. This type of activity is far harder to detect with conventional security tools, since it blends in with the daily noise of business operations.

The incident underscores the escalating significance of autonomous coverage within SaaS and third-party ecosystems. As businesses increasingly depend on interconnected platforms, visibility gaps become evident that cannot be managed by conventional perimeter and endpoint defenses.

By developing a behavioral comprehension of each organization's distinct use of cloud services, anomalies can be detected, such as logins from unexpected locations, unusually high volumes of API requests, or unusual document activity. These indications serve as an early alert system, even when intruders use legitimate tokens or accounts, enabling security teams to step in before extensive data exfiltration takes place

What happened?

The campaign is believed to have started on August 8, 2025, with malicious activity continuing until at least August 18. The threat actor, tracked as UNC6395, gained access via compromised OAuth tokens associated with Salesloft Drift integrations into Salesforce [1]. Once tokens were obtained, the attackers were able to issue large volumes of Salesforce API requests, exfiltrating sensitive customer and business data.

Initial Intrusion

The attackers first established access by abusing OAuth and refresh tokens from the Drift integration. These tokens gave them persistent access into Salesforce environments without requiring further authentication [1]. To expand their foothold, the threat actor also made use of TruffleHog [4], an open-source secrets scanner, to hunt for additional exposed credentials. Logs later revealed anomalous IAM updates, including unusual UpdateAccessKey activity, which suggested attempts to ensure long-term persistence and control within compromised accounts.

Internal Reconnaissance & Data Exfiltration

Once inside, the adversaries began exploring the Salesforce environments. They ran queries designed to pull sensitive data fields, focusing on objects such as Cases, Accounts, Users, and Opportunities [1]. At the same time, the attackers sifted through this information to identify secrets that could enable access to other systems, including AWS keys and Snowflake credentials [4]. This phase demonstrated the opportunistic nature of the campaign, with the actors looking for any data that could be repurposed for further compromise.

Lateral Movement

Salesloft and Mandiant investigations revealed that the threat actor also created at least one new user account in early September. Although follow-up activity linked to this account was limited, the creation itself suggested a persistence mechanism designed to survive remediation efforts. By maintaining a separate identity, the attackers ensured they could regain access even if their stolen OAuth tokens were revoked.

Accomplishing the mission

The data taken from Salesforce environments included valuable business records, which attackers used to harvest credentials and identify high-value targets. According to Mandiant, once the data was exfiltrated, the actors actively sifted through it to locate sensitive information that could be leveraged in future intrusions [1]. In response, Salesforce and Salesloft revoked OAuth tokens associated with Drift integrations on August 20 [1], a containment measure aimed at cutting off the attackers’ primary access channel and preventing further abuse.

How did the attack bypass the rest of the security stack?

The campaign effectively bypassed security measures by using legitimate credentials and OAuth tokens through the Salesloft Drift integration. This rendered traditional security defenses like endpoint protection and firewalls ineffective, as the activity appeared non-malicious [1]. The attackers blended into normal operations by using common user agents and making queries through the Salesforce API, which made their activity resemble legitimate integrations and scripts. This allowed them to operate undetected in the SaaS environment, exploiting the trust in third-party connections and highlighting the limitations of traditional detection controls.

Darktrace Coverage

Anomalous activities have been identified across multiple Darktrace deployments that appear associated with this campaign. This included two cases on customers based within the United States who had a Salesforce integration, where the pattern of activities was notably similar.

On August 17, Darktrace observed an account belonging to one of these customers logging in from the rare endpoint 208.68.36[.]90, while the user was seen active from another location. This IP is a known indicator of compromise (IoC) reported by open-source intelligence (OSINT) for the campaign [2].

Cyber AI Analyst Incident summarizing the suspicious login seen for the account.
Figure 1: Cyber AI Analyst Incident summarizing the suspicious login seen for the account.

The login event was associated with the application Drift, further connecting the events to this campaign.

Advanced Search logs showing the Application used to login.
Figure 2: Advanced Search logs showing the Application used to login.

Following the login, the actor initiated a high volume of Salesforce API requests using methods such as GET, POST, and DELETE. The GET requests targeted endpoints like /services/data/v57.0/query and /services/data/v57.0/sobjects/Case/describe, where the former is used to retrieve records based on a specific criterion, while the latter provides metadata for the Case object, including field names and data types [5,6].

Subsequently, a POST request to /services/data/v57.0/jobs/query was observed, likely to initiate a Bulk API query job for extracting large volumes of data from the Ingest Job endpoint [7,8].

Finally, a DELETE request to remove an ingestion job batch, possibly an attempt to obscure traces of prior data access or manipulation.

A case on another US-based customer took place a day later, on August 18. This again began with an account logging in from the rare IP 208.68.36[.]90 involving the application Drift. This was followed by Salesforce GET requests targeting the same endpoints as seen in the previous case, and then a POST to the Ingest Job endpoint and finally a DELETE request, all occurring within one minute of the initial suspicious login.

The chain of anomalous behaviors, including a suspicious login and delete request, resulted in Darktrace’s Autonomous Response capability suggesting a ‘Disable user’ action. However, the customer’s deployment configuration required manual confirmation for the action to take effect.

An example model alert for the user, triggered due to an anomalous API DELETE request.
Figure 3: An example model alert for the user, triggered due to an anomalous API DELETE request.
Figure 4: Model Alert Event Log showing various model alerts for the account that ultimately led to an Autonomous Response model being triggered.

Conclusion

In conclusion, this incident underscores the escalating risks of SaaS supply chain attacks, where third-party integrations can become avenues for attacks. It demonstrates how adversaries can exploit legitimate OAuth tokens and API traffic to circumvent traditional defenses. This emphasizes the necessity for constant monitoring of SaaS and cloud activity, beyond just endpoints and networks, while also reinforcing the significance of applying least privilege access and routinely reviewing OAuth permissions in cloud environments. Furthermore, it provides a wider perspective into the evolution of the threat landscape, shifting towards credential and token abuse as opposed to malware-driven compromise.

Credit to Emma Foulger (Global Threat Research Operations Lead), Calum Hall (Technical Content Researcher), Signe Zaharka (Principal Cyber Analyst), Min Kim (Senior Cyber Analyst), Nahisha Nobregas (Senior Cyber Analyst), Priya Thapa (Cyber Analyst)

Appendices

Darktrace Model Detections

·      SaaS / Access / Unusual External Source for SaaS Credential Use

·      SaaS / Compromise / Login From Rare Endpoint While User Is Active

·      SaaS / Compliance / Anomalous Salesforce API Event

·      SaaS / Unusual Activity / Multiple Unusual SaaS Activities

·      Antigena / SaaS / Antigena Unusual Activity Block

·      Antigena / SaaS / Antigena Suspicious Source Activity Block

Customers should consider integrating Salesforce with Darktrace where possible. These integrations allow better visibility and correlation to spot unusual behavior and possible threats.

IoC List

(IoC – Type)

·      208.68.36[.]90 – IP Address

References

1.     https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/threat-intelligence/data-theft-salesforce-instances-via-salesloft-drift

2.     https://trust.salesloft.com/?uid=Drift+Security+Update%3ASalesforce+Integrations+%283%3A30PM+ET%29

3.     https://thehackernews.com/2025/08/salesloft-oauth-breach-via-drift-ai.html

4.     https://unit42.paloaltonetworks.com/threat-brief-compromised-salesforce-instances/

5.     https://developer.salesforce.com/docs/atlas.en-us.api_rest.meta/api_rest/resources_query.htm

6.     https://developer.salesforce.com/docs/atlas.en-us.api_rest.meta/api_rest/resources_sobject_describe.htm

7.     https://developer.salesforce.com/docs/atlas.en-us.api_asynch.meta/api_asynch/get_job_info.htm

8.     https://developer.salesforce.com/docs/atlas.en-us.api_asynch.meta/api_asynch/query_create_job.htm

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About the author
Emma Foulger
Global Threat Research Operations Lead
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