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July 7, 2021

How Cyber-Attacks Take Down Critical Infrastructure | Darktrace

Cyber-attacks can bypass IT/OT security barriers and threaten your organization's infrastructure. Here's how you can stay protected in today's threat landscape.
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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07
Jul 2021

Balancing Operational Continuity and Safety in Critical Infrastructure

The recent high-profile attacks against Colonial Pipeline and JBS Foods highlight that operational technology (OT) — the devices that drive gas flows and food processing, along with essentially all other machine-driven physical processes — does not need to be directly targeted in order to be shut down as the result of a cyber-attack.

Indeed, in the Colonial Pipeline incident, the information technology (IT) systems were reportedly compromised, with operations shut down intentionally out of an abundance of caution, that is, so as to not risk the attack spreading to OT and threatening safety. This highlights that threats to both human and environmental safety, along with uncertainty as to the scope of infection, present risk factors for these sensitive industrial environments.

Continuity through availability and integrity

In most countries, critical infrastructure (CI) — ranging from power grids and pipelines to transportation and health care — must maintain continuous activity. The recent ransomware attack against Colonial Pipeline demonstrates why this is the case, where gas shortages due to the compromise led to dangerous panic buys and long lines at the pumps.

Ensuring continuous operation of critical infrastructure requires safeguarding the availability and integrity of machinery. This means that organizations overseeing critical infrastructure must foresee any possible risks and implement systems, procedures, and technologies that mitigate or remove these risks so as to keep their operations running.

Operational demand versus safety

Alongside this requirement for operational continuity, and often in opposition to it, is the requirement for operational safety. These requirements can be in opposition because operational continuity demands that devices remain up and running at all costs, and operational safety demands that humans and the environment be protected at all costs.

Safety measures in critical infrastructure have improved and become increasingly prioritized over the last 50 years following numerous high-profile incidents, such as the Bhopal chemical disaster, the Texas City refinery explosion, and the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. Appropriate safety precautions could have likely prevented these incidents, but at the expense of operational continuity.

Consequently, administrators of critical infrastructure have to balance the very real threat that an incident may pose to both human life and the environment with the demand to remain operational at all times. More often than not, the final decision regarding what constitutes an acceptable risk is determined by budgets and cost-benefit analyses.

Cyber-attack: A rising risk profile for critical infrastructure

In 2010, the discovery of the Stuxnet malware — which resulted in a nuclear facility in Iran having its centrifuges ruined via compromised programmable logic controllers (PLCs) — demonstrated that critical infrastructure could be targeted by a cyber-attack.

At the time of Stuxnet, critical infrastructure industries used computers designed to ensure operational continuity with little regard for cyber security, as at the time the risk of a cyber-attack seemed either non-existent or vanishingly low. Since then, a number of attacks targeting industrial environments that have emerged on the global threat landscape.

Figure 1: An overview of distinctive methods used in attacks against industrial environments

Classic strains of industrial malware, such as Stuxnet, Triton, and Industroyer, have historically been installed via removable media, such as USB. This is because OT networks are traditionally segregated from the Internet in what is known as an ‘air gap.’ And this remains a prevalent vector of attack, with a study recently finding that cyber-threats installed via USB and other external media doubled in 2021, with 79% of these holding the potential to disrupt OT.

In many ways, operational demands in the subsequent 10 years have made critical infrastructure even more vulnerable. These include the convergence of information technology and operational technology (IT/OT convergence), the adoption of devices in the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), and the deprecation of manual back-up systems. This means that OT can be disrupted by cyber-attacks that first target IT systems, rather than having to be installed manually via external media.

At the same time, recent government initiatives — such as the Department of Energy’s 100-day ‘cyber sprint’ to protect electricity operations and President Biden’s Executive Order on Improving the Nation’s Cybersecurity — and regulatory frameworks and directives such as the EU’s NIS directive have either encouraged or mandated that critical infrastructure industries start addressing this new risk.

With the severe and persistent threat that cyber-attacks pose to critical infrastructure, including maritime cybersecurity, and the increasing calls to address the issue, the question remains as to how to best achieve robust cyber defense.

Assessing the risk

To claim administrators of critical infrastructure are ignorant or oblivious to the threat posed by cyber-attacks would be unfair. Many organizations have implemented changes to mitigate or remove the risk either as a result of regulation or their own forward thinking.

However, these projects can take years, even decades. High costs and ever-changing operational demand also mean that these projects may never fully remove the risk.

As a result, many operators may understand the threat of a cyber-attack but not be in a position to do anything about it in the short or medium term. Instead, procedures have to be put in place to minimize risk even if this threatens operational continuity.

For example, a risk assessment may decide it is best to shut down all OT operations in the event of a cyber-attack in order to avoid a major accident. This abundance of caution is forced upon operators, who do not have the ability to immediately confirm the boundaries of a compromise. The prevalence of cyber insurance provides this option with further appeal. Any losses incurred by stopping operations can theoretically be recouped and the risk is therefore transferred.

While the full details of the Colonial Pipeline ransomware incident are still to be determined, the sequence of events outlined below provides a plausible explanation for how a cyber-attack could take down critical infrastructure, even when that cyber-attack does not reach or even target OT systems. Indeed, the CEO of Colonial Pipeline, in a testimony to congress, confirmed “the imperative to isolate and contain the attack to help ensure the malware did not spread to the operational technology network, which controls our pipeline operations, if it had not already.”

Figure 2: A sequence of events which may lead to critical infrastructure being shut down by a cyber-attack, even when that cyber-attack doesn’t directly impact OT networks

The limits of securing IT or OT in isolation

The emergence of OT cyber security solutions in the last five years demonstrates that critical infrastructure industries are trying to find a way to address the risks posed by cyber-attacks. But these solutions have limited scope, as they assume IT and OT are separated and use legacy security techniques such as malware signatures and patch management.

The 2021 SANS ICS Security Summit highlighted how the OT security community suffers from a lack of visibility in knowing and understanding their networks. For many organizations, simply determining whether an unusual incident is an attack or the result of a software error is a challenge.

Given that most OT cyber-attacks actually start in IT networks before pivoting into OT, investing in an IT security solution rather than an OT-specific solution may at first seem like a better business decision. But IT solutions fall short if an attacker successfully pivots into the OT network, or if the attacker is a rogue insider who already has direct access to the OT network. A siloed approach to securing either IT or OT in isolation will thus fall short of the full scope needed to safeguard industrial systems.

It is clear that a mature security posture for critical infrastructure would include security solutions for both IT and OT. Even then, using separate solutions to protect the IT and OT networks is limited, as it presents challenges when defending network boundaries and detecting incidents when an attacker pivots from IT to OT. Under time pressure, a security team does not want changes in visibility, detection, language or interface while trying to determine whether a threat crossed the ‘boundary’ between IT and OT.

Separate solutions can also make detecting an attacker abusing traditional IT attack TTPs within an OT network much harder if the security team is relying on a purely OT solution to defend the OT environment. Examples of this include the abuse of IT remote management tools to affect industrial environments, such as in the suspected cyber-attack at the Florida water facility earlier this year. Cybersecurity for utilities is becoming increasingly important as these sectors face growing cyber threats that can disrupt essential services.

Using AI to minimize cyber risk and maximize cyber safety

In contrast, Darktrace AI is able to defend an entire cyber ecosystem estate, building a ‘pattern of life’ across IT and OT, as well as the points at which they converge. Consequently, cyber security teams can use a single pane of glass to detect and respond to cyber-attacks as they emerge and develop, regardless of where they are in the environment.

Use cases for Darktrace’s Self-Learning AI include containing pre-existing threats to maintain continuous operations. This was seen when Darktrace’s AI detected pre-existing infections and acted autonomously to contain the threat, allowing the operator to leave infected IIoT devices active while waiting for replacements. Darktrace can also thwart ransomware in IT before it can spread into OT, as when Darktrace detected a ransomware attack targeting a supplier for critical infrastructure in North America at its earliest stages.

Darktrace’s unified protection, including visibility and early detection of zero-days, empowers security teams to overcome uncertainty and make a confident decision not to shut down operations. Darktrace has already demonstrated this ability in the wild, and allows organizations to understand normal machine and human behavior in order to enforce this behavior, even in the face of an emerging cyber-attack.

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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October 23, 2025

Patch Smarter, Not Harder: Now Empowering Security Teams with Business-Aligned Threat Context Agents

Patch Smarter, Not Harder: Now Empowering Security Teams with Business-Aligned Threat Context Agents Default blog imageDefault blog image

Most risk management programs remain anchored in enumeration: scanning every asset, cataloging every CVE, and drowning in lists that rarely translate into action. Despite expensive scanners, annual pen tests, and countless spreadsheets, prioritization still falters at two critical points.

Context gaps at the device level: It’s hard to know which vulnerabilities actually matter to your business given existing privileges, what software it runs, and what controls already reduce risk.

Business translation: Even when the technical priority is clear, justifying effort and spend in financial terms—especially across many affected devices—can delay action. Especially if it means halting other areas of the business that directly generate revenue.

The result is familiar: alert fatigue, “too many highs,” and remediation that trails behind the threat landscape. Darktrace / Proactive Exposure Management addresses this by pairing precise, endpoint‑level context with clear, financial insight so teams can prioritize confidently and mobilize faster.

A powerful combination: No-Telemetry Endpoint Agent + Cost-Benefit Analysis

Darktrace / Proactive Exposure Management now uniquely combines technical precision with business clarity in a single workflow.  With this release, Darktrace / Proactive Exposure Management delivers a more holistic approach, uniting technical context and financial insight to drive proactive risk reduction. The result is a single solution that helps security teams stay ahead of threats while reducing noise, delays, and complexity.

  • No-Telemetry Endpoint: Collects installed software data and maps it to known CVEs—without network traffic—providing device-level vulnerability context and operational relevance.
  • Cost-Benefit Analysis for Patching: Calculates ROI by comparing patching effort with potential exploit impact, factoring in headcount time, device count, patch difficulty, and automation availability.

Introducing the No-Telemetry Endpoint Agent

Darktrace’s new endpoint agent inventories installed software on devices and maps it to known CVEs without collecting network data so you can prioritize using real device context and available security controls.

By grounding vulnerability findings in the reality of each endpoint, including its software footprint and existing controls, teams can cut through generic severity scores and focus on what matters most. The agent is ideal for remote devices, BYOD-adjacent fleets, or environments standardizing on Darktrace, and is available without additional licensing cost.

Darktrace / Proactive Exposure Management user interface
Figure 1: Darktrace / Proactive Exposure Management user interface

Built-In Cost-Benefit Analysis for Patching

Security teams often know what needs fixing but stakeholders need to understand why now. Darktrace’s new cost-benefit calculator compares the total cost to patch against the potential cost of exploit, producing an ROI for the patch action that expresses security action in clear financial terms.

Inputs like engineer time, number of affected devices, patch difficulty, and automation availability are factored in automatically. The result is a business-aligned justification for every patching decision—helping teams secure buy-in, accelerate approvals, and move work forward with one-click ticketing, CSV export, or risk acceptance.

Darktrace / Proactive Exposure Management Cost Benefit Analysis
Figure 2: Darktrace / Proactive Exposure Management Cost Benefit Analysis

A Smarter, Faster Approach to Exposure Management

Together, the no-telemetry endpoint and Cost–Benefit Analysis advance the CTEM motion from theory to practice. You gain higher‑fidelity discovery and validation signals at the device level, paired with business‑ready justification that accelerates mobilization. The result is fewer distractions, clearer priorities, and faster measurable risk reduction. This is not from chasing every alert, but by focusing on what moves the needle now.

  • Smarter Prioritization: Device‑level context trims noise and spotlights the exposures that matter for your business.
  • Faster Decisions: Built‑in ROI turns technical urgency into executive clarity—speeding approvals and action.
  • Practical Execution: Privacy‑conscious endpoint collection and ticketing/export options fit neatly into existing workflows.
  • Better Outcomes: Close the loop faster—discover, prioritize, validate, and mobilize—on the same operating surface.

Committed to innovation

These updates are part of the broader Darktrace release, which also included:

1. Major innovations in cloud security with the launch of the industry’s first fully automated cloud forensics solution, reinforcing Darktrace’s leadership in AI-native security.

2. Darktrace Network Endpoint eXtended Telemetry (NEXT) is revolutionizing NDR with the industry’s first mixed-telemetry agent using Self-Learning AI.

3. Improvements to our OT product, purpose built for industrial infrastructure, Darktrace / OT now brings dedicated OT dashboard, segmentation-aware risk modeling, and expanded visibility into edge assets and automation protocols.

Join our Live Launch Event

When? 

December 9, 2025

What will be covered?

Join our live broadcast to experience how Darktrace is eliminating blind spots for detection and response across your complete enterprise with new innovations in Agentic AI across our ActiveAI Security platform. Industry leaders from IDC will join Darktrace customers to discuss challenges in cross-domain security, with a live walkthrough reshaping the future of Network Detection & Response, Endpoint Detection & Response, Email Security, and SecOps in novel threat detection and autonomous investigations.

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October 23, 2025

Darktrace Announces Extended Visibility Between Confirmed Assets and Leaked Credentials from the Deep and Dark Web

Darktrace Announces Extended Visibility Between Confirmed Assets and Leaked Credentials from the Deep and Dark Web Default blog imageDefault blog image

Why exposure management needs to evolve beyond scans and checklists

The modern attack surface changes faster than most security programs can keep up. New assets appear, environments change, and adversaries are increasingly aided by automation and AI. Traditional approaches like periodic scans, static inventories, or annual pen tests are no longer enough. Without a formal exposure program, many businesses are flying blind, unaware of where the next threat may emerge.

This is where Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM) becomes essential. Introduced by Gartner, CTEM helps organizations continuously assess, validate, and improve their exposure to real-world threats. It reframes the problem: scope your true attack surface, prioritize based on business impact and exploitability, and validate what attackers can actually do today, not once a year.

With two powerful new capabilities, Darktrace / Attack Surface Management helps organizations evolve their CTEM programs to meet the demands of today’s threat landscape. These updates make CTEM a reality, not just a strategy.

Too much data, not enough direction

Modern Attack Surface Management tools excel at discovering assets such as cloud workloads, exposed APIs, and forgotten domains. But they often fall short when it comes to prioritization. They rely on static severity scores or generic CVSS ratings, which do not reflect real-world risk or business impact.

This leaves security teams with:

  • Alert fatigue from hundreds of “critical” findings
  • Patch paralysis due to unclear prioritization
  • Blind spots around attacker intent and external targeting

CISOs need more than visibility. They need confidence in what to fix first and context to justify those decisions to stakeholders.

Evolving Attack Surface Management

Attack Surface Management (ASM) must evolve from static lists and generic severity scores to actionable intelligence that helps teams make the right decision now.

Joining the recent addition of Exploit Prediction Assessment, which debuted in late June 2025, today we’re introducing two capabilities that push ASM into that next era:

  • Exploit Prediction Assessment: Continuously validates whether top-priority exposures are actually exploitable in your environment without waiting for patch cycles or formal pen tests.  
  • Deep & Dark Web Monitoring: Extends visibility across millions of sources in the deep and dark web to detect leaked credentials linked to your confirmed domains.
  • Confidence Score: our newly developed AI classification platform will compare newly discovered assets to assets that are known to belong to your organization. The more these newly discovered assets look similar to assets that belong to your organization, the higher the score will be.

Together, these features compress the window from discovery to decision, so your team can act with precision, not panic. The result is a single solution that helps teams stay ahead of attackers without introducing new complexities.

Exploit Prediction Assessment

Traditional penetration tests are invaluable, but they’re often a snapshot of that point-in-time, are potentially disruptive, and compliance frameworks still expect them. Not to mention, when vulnerabilities are present, teams can act immediately rather than relying solely on information from CVSS scores or waiting for patch cycles.  

Unlike full pen tests which can be obtrusive and are usually done only a couple times per year, Exploit Prediction Assessment is surgical, continuous, and focused only on top issues Instead of waiting for vendor patches or the next pen‑test window. It helps confirm whether a top‑priority exposure is actually exploitable in your environment right now.  

For more information on this visit our blog: Beyond Discovery: Adding Intelligent Vulnerability Validation to Darktrace / Attack Surface Management

Deep and Dark Web Monitoring: Extending the scope

Customers have been asking for this for years, and it is finally here. Defense against the dark web. Darktrace / Attack Surface Management’s reach now spans millions of sources across the deep and dark web including forums, marketplaces, breach repositories, paste sites, and other hard‑to‑reach communities to detect leaked credentials linked to your confirmed domains.  

Monitoring is continuous, so you’re alerted as soon as evidence of compromise appears. The surface web is only a fraction of the internet, and a sizable share of risk hides beyond it. Estimates suggest the surface web represents roughly ~10% of all online content, with the rest gated or unindexed—and the TOR-accessible dark web hosts a high proportion of illicit material (a King’s College London study found ~57% of surveyed onion sites contained illicit content), underscoring why credential leakage and brand abuse often appear in places traditional monitoring doesn’t reach. Making these spaces high‑value for early warning signals when credentials or brand assets appear. Most notably, this includes your company’s reputation, assets like servers and systems, and top executives and employees at risk.

What changes for your team

Before:

  • Hundreds of findings, unclear what to start with
  • Reactive investigations triggered by incidents

After:

  • A prioritized backlog based on confidence score or exploit prediction assessment verification
  • Proactive verification of exposure with real-world risk without manual efforts

Confidence Score: Prioritize based on the use-case you care most about

What is it?

Confidence Score is a metric that expresses similarity of newly discover assets compared to the confirmed asset inventory. Several self-learning algorithms compare features of assets to be able to calculate a score.

Why it matters

Traditional Attack Surface Management tools treat all new discovery equally, making it unclear to your team how to identify the most important newly discovered assets, potentially causing you to miss a spoofing domain or shadow IT that could impact your business.

How it helps your team

We’re dividing newly discovered assets into separate insight buckets that each cover a slightly different business case.

  • Low scoring assets: to cover phishing & spoofing domains (like domain variants) that are just being registered and don't have content yet.
  • Medium scoring assets: have more similarities to your digital estate, but have better matching to HTML, brand names, keywords. Can still be phishing but probably with content.
  • High scoring assets: These look most like the rest of your confirmed digital estate, either it's phishing that needs the highest attention, or the asset belongs to your attack surface and requires asset state confirmation to enable the platform to monitor it for risks.

Smarter Exposure Management for CTEM Programs

Recent updates to Darktrace / Attack Surface Management directly advance the core phases of Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM): scope, discover, prioritize, validate, and mobilize. The new Exploit Prediction Assessment helps teams validate and prioritize vulnerabilities based on real-world exploitability, while Deep & Dark Web Monitoring extends discovery into hard-to-reach areas where stolen data and credentials often surface. Together, these capabilities reduce noise, accelerate remediation, and help organizations maintain continuous visibility over their expanding attack surface.

Building on these innovations, Darktrace / Attack Surface Management empowers security teams to focus on what truly matters. By validating exploitability, it cuts through the noise of endless vulnerability lists—helping defenders concentrate on exposures that represent genuine business risk. Continuous monitoring for leaked credentials across the deep and dark web further extends visibility beyond traditional asset discovery, closing critical blind spots where attackers often operate. Crucially, these capabilities complement, not replace, existing security controls such as annual penetration tests, providing continuous, low-friction validation between formal assessments. The result is a more adaptive, resilient security posture that keeps pace with an ever-evolving threat landscape.

If you’re building or maturing a CTEM program—and want fewer open exposures, faster remediation, and better outcomes, Darktrace / Attack Surface Management’s new Exploit Prediction Assessment and Deep & Dark Web Monitoring are ready to help.

  • Want a more in-depth look at how Exploit Prediction Assessment functions? Read more here

Committed to innovation

These updates are part of the broader Darktrace release, which also included:

1. Major innovations in cloud security with the launch of the industry’s first fully automated cloud forensics solution, reinforcing Darktrace’s leadership in AI-native security.

2. Darktrace Network Endpoint eXtended Telemetry (NEXT) is revolutionizing NDR with the industry’s first mixed-telemetry agent using Self-Learning AI.

3. Improvements to our OT product, purpose built for industrial infrastructure, Darktrace / OT now brings dedicated OT dashboard, segmentation-aware risk modeling, and expanded visibility into edge assets and automation protocols.

Join our Live Launch Event

When? 

December 9, 2025

What will be covered?

Join our live broadcast to experience how Darktrace is eliminating blind spots for detection and response across your complete enterprise with new innovations in Agentic AI across our ActiveAI Security platform. Industry leaders from IDC will join Darktrace customers to discuss challenges in cross-domain security, with a live walkthrough reshaping the future of Network Detection & Response, Endpoint Detection & Response, Email Security, and SecOps in novel threat detection and autonomous investigations.

Continue reading
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