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April 9, 2024

Managing Risk Beyond CVE Scores With the Latest Innovations to Darktrace / OT

Announcing the launch of our new innovation to Darktrace/OT. This industry leading innovation for Darktrace/OT moves beyond CVE scores to redefine vulnerability management for critical infrastructure, tackling the full breadth of risks not limited by traditional controls.
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
Mitchell Bezzina
VP, Product and Solutions Marketing
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09
Apr 2024

Identifying Cyber Risk in Industrial Organizations

Compromised OT devices in ICS and SCADA environments pose significant physical risks, even endangering lives. However, identifying CVEs in the multitude of complex OT devices is labor-intensive and time-consuming, draining valuable resources.

Even after identifying a vulnerability, implementing a patch presents its own challenges limited maintenance windows and the need for uninterrupted operations strain IT and OT teams often leading organizations to prioritize availability over security leading vulnerabilities remaining unresolved for over 5 years on average. (1)

Darktrace’s New Innovation

Darktrace is an industry leader in cybersecurity with 10+ years of experience securing OT environments where we take a fundamentally different approach using Self-Learning AI to enhance threat detection and response.

Continuing to combat the expanding threat landscape, Darktrace is excited to announce new capabilities that enable a contextualized and proactive approach to managing cyber risk at industrial organizations.

Today we launch an innovation to our OT Cybersecurity solution, Darktrace / OT, that will add a layer of proactivity, enabling a comprehensive approach to risk management. This industry leading innovation for Darktrace / OT moves beyond CVE scores to redefine vulnerability management for critical infrastructure, tackling the full breadth of risks not limited by traditional controls.  

Darktrace / OT is the only OT security solution with comprehensive Risk Management which includes:

  • Contextualized risk analysis unique to your organization
  • The most realistic evaluation and prioritization of OT risk
  • Effectively mitigate risk across your OT infrastructure, with and without patching.
  • The only OT security solution that evaluates your defenses against Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) Groups.

The most comprehensive prevention, detection, and response solution purpose built for Critical Infrastructures

Darktrace’s Self-Learning AI technology is a cutting-edge innovation that implements real time prevention, detection, response, and recovery for operational technologies and enables a fundamental shift from the traditional approach to cyber defense by learning a ‘pattern of life’ for every network, device, and user.  

Rather than relying on knowledge of past attacks, AI technology learns what is ‘normal’ for its environment, discovering previously unknown threats by detecting subtle shifts in behavior. Through identifying these unexpected anomalies, security teams can investigate novel attacks, discover blind spots, have live time visibility across all their physical and digital assets, and reduce time to detect, respond to, and triage security events.  

  • Achieve greater visibility of OT and IT devices across all levels of the Purdue Model.
  • The industry's only OT security to scale threat detection and response, with a 92% time saving from triage to recovery.  
  • The only OT focused security solution to provide bespoke Risk Management.

To learn more about how Darktrace/OT approaches unique use cases for industrial organizations visit the Darktrace/OT Webpage or join us LIVE at a city near you.

Read more below to discover how new innovations to Darktrace/OT are bringing a new, contextualized approach to Risk Management for Industrial organizations.

For more information on the entire Darktrace/OT Solution read our solution brief here.

Darktrace / OT and New Risk Management

Risk Identification

Leveraging the visibility of Darktrace/OT which identifies individual systems throughout the Purdue Model and the relationship between them, Darktrace/OT identifies high-risk CVEs and presents potential attack routes that go beyond techniques requiring a known exploit, such as misuse of legitimate services. Each attack path will have a mathematical evaluation of difficulty and impact from initial access to the high value objectives.  

Together this gives comprehensive coverage over your real and potential risks from both an attacker and known vulnerability perspectives. OT attack paths as seen here even leverage insights between the industrial and corporate communications to reveal ways threat actors may take advantage of IT-OT convergence. This revelation of imperceptible risks fills gaps in traditional risk analysis like remote access and insider threats.

Figure 1: Darktrace/OT visualizing the most critical attack paths at an organization
Figure 1: Darktrace/OT visualizing the most critical attack paths at an organization
Figure 2: A specific Attack Path identified by Darktrace / OT

Risk Prioritization

Darktrace / OT prioritizes remediations and mitigations based on difficulty and damage to your unique organization, using the established Attack Paths.

We ascertain the priorities that apply to your organization beyond pure theoretical damage answering questions like:

  • How difficult is a particular vulnerability to exploit considering the steps an attacker would require to reach it?
  • And, how significant would the impact be if it was exploited within this particular network?

This expanded approach to risk prioritization has a much more comprehensive evaluation of your organization's unique risk than has ever been possible before. Traditional approaches of ranking only known vulnerabilities with isolated scores using CVSS and exploitability metrics, often leaves gaps in IT-OT risks and is blind to legitimate service exploitation.

Figure 3: Darktrace / OT leverages its contextual understand of the organization’s network to prioritize remediation that will have the positive impact on the risk score

Darktrace provides mitigation strategies associated with each identified risk and the relevant impact it has on your overall risk posture, across all MITRE ATT&CK techniques.

What sets Darktrace apart is our ability to contextualize these mitigations within the broader business. When patching vulnerabilities directly isn’t possible, Darktrace identifies alternative actions that harden attack paths leading to critical assets. Hardening the surrounding attack path increases the difficulty and therefore reduces the likelihood and impact of a breach.

That means unpatched vulnerabilities and vulnerable devices aren’t left unprotected. This also has an added bonus, those hardening techniques work for all devices in that network segment, so apply one change, secure many.

Figure 4: Darktrace prioritizes mitigation reducing accessibility of vulnerability and the overall risk score when patches aren’t available

Communicate Board Level Risk with APT Threat Mapping

Darktrace / OT bridges theory and practice as the only security solution that maps MITRE techniques, frequently used by APT Groups, onto AI-assessed critical Attack Paths. This unique solution provides unparalleled insights including sector and location intelligence, possible operating platforms, common techniques, exploited CVEs, and the number of potential devices affected in your environment, supporting holistic risk assessment and proactive defense measures.

Ultimately, this becomes a power dashboard to communicate board level risk, using both metric based evidence and industry standard threat mapping.

Conclusion

Darktrace / OT is part of the Darktrace ActiveAI Security Platform a native, holistic, AI-driven platform built on over ten years of AI research. It helps security teams shift to more a productive mode, finding the known and the unknown attacks and transforming the SOC with the various Darktrace products to drive efficiency gains. It does this across the whole incident lifecycle to lower risk, reduce time spent on active incidents, and drive return on investment.

Discover more about Darktrace's ever-strengthening platform with the upcoming changes coming to our Darktrace / EMAIL product and other launch day blogs.

Join Darktrace LIVE half-day event to understand the reality versus the hype surrounding AI and how to achieve cyber resilience.

Learn about the intersection of cyber and AI by downloading the State of AI Cyber Security 2024 report to discover global findings that may surprise you, insights from security leaders, and recommendations for addressing today’s top challenges that you may face, too.  

References

1. https://research-information.bris.ac.uk/ws/portalfiles/portal/313646831/Catch_Me_if_You_Can.pdf

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
Mitchell Bezzina
VP, Product and Solutions Marketing

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May 20, 2026

Prompt Security in Enterprise AI: Strengths, Weaknesses, and Common Approaches

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How enterprise AI Agents are changing the risk landscape  

Generative AI Agents are changing the way work gets done inside enterprises, and subsequently how security risks may emerge. Organizations have quickly realized that providing these agents with wider access to tooling, internal information, and granting permissions for the agent to perform autonomous actions can greatly increase the efficiency of employee workflows.

Early deployments of Generative AI systems led many organizations to scope individual components as self-contained applications: a chat interface, a model, and a prompt, with guardrails placed at the boundary. Research from Gartner has shown that while the volume and scope of Agentic AI deployments in enterprise environments is rapidly accelerating, many of the mechanisms required to manage risk, trust, and cost are still maturing.

The issue now resides on whether an agent can be influenced, misdirected, or manipulated in ways that leads to unsafe behavior across a broader system.

Why prompt security matters in enterprise AI

Prompt security matters in enterprise AI because prompts are the primary way users and systems interact with Agentic AI models, making them one of the earliest and most visible indicators of how these systems are being used and where risk may emerge.

For security teams, prompt monitoring is a logical starting point for understanding enterprise AI usage, providing insight into what types of questions are being asked and tasks are being given to AI Agents, how these systems are being guided, and whether interactions align with expected behavior. Complete prompt security takes this one step further, filtering out or blocking sensitive or dangerous content to prevent risks like prompt injection and data leakage.

However, visibility only at the prompt layer can create a false sense of security. Prompts show what was asked, but not always why it was asked, or what downstream actions were triggered by the agent across connected systems, data sources, or applications.

What prompt security reveals  

The primary function of prompt security is to minimize risks associated with generative and agentic AI use, but monitoring and analysis of prompts can also grant insight into use cases for particular agents and model. With comprehensive prompt security, security teams should be able to answer the following questions for each prompt:

  • What task was the user attempting to complete?
  • What data was included in the request, and was any of the data high-risk or confidential?
  • Was the interaction high-risk, potentially malicious, or in violation of company policy?
  • Was the prompt anomalous (in comparison to previous prompts sent to the agent / model)?

Improving visibility at this layer is a necessary first step, allowing organizations to establish a baseline for how AI systems are being used and where potential risks may exist.  

Prompt security alone does not provide a complete view of risk. Further data is needed to understand how the prompt is interpreted, how context is applied, what autonomous actions the agent takes (if any), or what downstream systems are affected. Understanding the outcome of a query is just as important for complete prompt security as understanding the input prompt itself – for example, a perfectly normal, low-risk prompt may inadvertently result in an agent taking a high-risk action.

Comprehensive AI security systems like Darktrace / SECURE AI can monitor and analyze both the prompt submitted to a Generative AI system, as well as the responses and chain-of-thought of the system, providing greater insight into the behavior of the system. Darktrace / SECURE AI builds on the core Darktrace methodology, learning the expected behaviors of your organization and identifying deviations from the expected pattern of life.

How organizations address prompt security today

As prompt-level visibility has become a focus, a range of approaches have emerged to make this activity more observable and controllable. Various monitoring and logging tools aim to capture prompt inputs to be analyzed after the fact.  

Input validation and filtering systems attempt to intervene earlier, inspecting prompts before they reach the model. These controls look for known jailbreak patterns, language indicative of adversarial attacks, or ambiguous instructions which could push the system off course.

Importantly, for a prompt security solution to be accurate and effective, prompts must be continually observed and governed, rather than treated as a point-in-time snapshot.  

Where prompt security breaks down in real environments

In more complex environments, especially those involving multiple agents or extensive tool use, AI security becomes harder to define and control.

Agent-to-Agent communications can be harder to monitor and trace as these happen without direct user interaction. Communication between agents can create routes for potential context leakage between agents, unintentional privilege escalation, or even data leakage from a higher privileged agent to a lower privileged one.

Risk is shaped not just by what is asked, but by the conditions in which that prompt operates and the actions an agent takes. Controls at the orchestration layer are starting to reflect this reality. Techniques such as context isolation, scoped memory, and role-based boundaries aim to limit how far a prompt’s influence can extend.  

Furthermore, Shadow AI usage can be difficult to monitor. AI systems that are deployed outside of formal governance structures and Generative AI systems hosted on unknown endpoints can fly under the radar and can go unseen by monitoring tools, leaving a critical opening where adversarial prompts may go undetected. Darktrace / SECURE AI features comprehensive detection of Shadow AI usage, helping organizations identify potential risk areas.

How prompt security fits in a broader AI risk model

Prompt security is an important starting point, but it is not a complete security strategy. As AI systems become more integrated into enterprise environments, the risks extend to what resources the system can access, how it interprets context, and what actions it is allowed to take across connected tools and workflows.

This creates a gap between visibility and control. Prompt security alone allows security teams to observe prompt activity but falls short of creating a clear understanding of how that activity translates into real-world impact across the organization.

Closing that gap requires a broader approach, one that connects signals across human and AI agent identities, SaaS, cloud, and endpoint environments. It means understanding not just how an AI system is being used, but how that usage interacts with the rest of the digital estate.

Prompt security, in that sense, is less of a standalone solution and more of an entry point into a larger problem: securing AI across the enterprise as a whole.

Explore how Darktrace / SECURE AI brings prompt security to enterprises

Darktrace brings more than a decade of AI expertise, built on an enterprise‑wide platform designed to operate in and understand the behaviors of the complex, ambiguous environments where today’s AI now lives. With Darktrace / SECURE AI, enterprises can safely adopt, manage, monitor, and build AI within their business.  

Learn about Darktrace / SECURE AI here.

Sign up today to stay informed about innovations across securing AI.

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Jamie Bali
Technical Author (AI) Developer

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May 20, 2026

State of AI Cybersecurity 2026: 77% of security stacks include AI, but trust is lagging

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Findings in this blog are taken from Darktrace’s annual State of AI Cybersecurity Report 2026.

AI is a contributing member of nearly every modern cybersecurity team. As we discussed earlier in this blog series, rapid AI adoption is expanding the attack surface in ways that security professionals have never before experienced while also empowering attackers to operate at unprecedented speed and scale. It’s only logical that defenders are harnessing the power of AI to fight back.

After all, AI can help cybersecurity teams spot the subtle signs of novel threats before humans can, investigate events more quickly and thoroughly, and automate response. But although AI has been widely adopted, this technology is also frequently misunderstood, and occasionally viewed with suspicion.

For CISOs, the cybersecurity marketplace can be noisy. Making sense of competing vendors’ claims to distinguish the solutions that truly deliver on AI’s full potential from those that do not isn’t always easy. Without a nuanced understanding of the different types of AI used across the cybersecurity stack, it is difficult to make informed decisions about which vendors to work with or how to gain the most value from their solutions. Many security leaders are turning to Managed Security Service Providers (MSSPs) for guidance and support.

The right kinds of AI in the right places?

Back in 2024, when we first conducted this annual survey, more than a quarter of respondents were only vaguely familiar with generative AI or hadn’t heard of it at all. Today, GenAI plays a role in 77% of security stacks. This percentage marks a rapid increase in both awareness and adoption over a relatively short period of time.

According to security professionals, different types of AI are widely integrated into cybersecurity tooling:

  • 67% report that their organization’s security stack uses supervised machine learning
  • 67% report that theirs uses agentic AI
  • 58% report that theirs uses natural language processing (NLP)
  • 35% report that theirs uses unsupervised machine learning

But their responses suggest that organizations aren’t always using the most valuable types of AI for the most relevant use cases.

Despite all the recent attention AI has gotten, supervised machine learning isn’t new. Cybersecurity vendors have been experimenting with models trained on hand-labeled datasets for over a decade. These systems are fed large numbers of examples of malicious activity – for instance, strains of ransomware – and use these examples to generalize common indicators of maliciousness – such as the TTPs of multiple known ransomware strains – so that the models can identify similar attacks in the future. This approach is more effective than signature-based detection, since it isn’t tied to an individual byte sequence or file hash. However, supervised machine learning models can miss patterns or features outside the training data set. When adversarial behavior shifts, these systems can’t easily pivot.

Unsupervised machine learning, by contrast, can identify key patterns and trends in unlabeled data without human input. This enables it to classify information independently and detect anomalies without needing to be taught about past threats. Unsupervised learning can continuously learn about an environment and adapt in real time.

One key distinction between supervised and unsupervised machine learning is that supervised learning algorithms require periodic updating and re-training, whereas unsupervised machine learning trains itself while it works.

The question of trust

Even as AI moves into the mainstream, security professionals are eyeing it with a mix of enthusiasm and caution. Although 89% say they have good visibility into the reasoning behind AI-generated outputs, 74% are limiting AI’s ability to take autonomous action in their SOC until explainability improves. 86% do not allow AI to take even small remediation actions without human oversight.

This model, commonly known as “human in the loop,” is currently the norm across the industry. It seems like a best-of-both-worlds approach that allows teams to experience the benefits of AI-accelerated response without relinquishing control – or needing to trust an AI system.

Keeping humans somewhat in the loop is essential for getting the best out of AI. Analysts will always need to review alerts, make judgement calls, and set guardrails for AI's behavior. Their input helps AI models better understand what “normal” looks like, improving their accuracy over time.

However, relying on human confirmation has real costs – it delays response, increases the cognitive burden analysts must bear, and creates potential coverage gaps when security teams are overwhelmed or unavailable. The traditional model, in which humans monitor and act on every alert, is no longer workable at scale.

If organizations depend too heavily on in-the-loop humans, they risk recreating the very problem AI is meant to solve: backlogs of alerts waiting for analyst review. Removing the human from the loop can buy back valuable time, which analysts can then invest in building a proactive security posture. They can also focus more closely on the most critical incidents, where human attention is truly needed.

Allowing AI to operate autonomously requires trust in its decision-making. This trust can be built gradually over time, with autonomous operations expanding as trust grows. But it also requires knowledge and understanding of AI — what it is, how it works, and how best to deploy it at enterprise scale.

Looking for help in all the right places

To gain access to these capabilities in a way that’s efficient and scalable, growing numbers of security leaders are looking for outsourced support. In fact, 85% of security professionals prefer to obtain new SOC capabilities in the form of a managed service.

This makes sense: Managed Security Service Providers (MSSPs) can deliver deep, continuously available expertise without the cost and complexity of building an in-house team. Outsourcing also allows organizations to scale security coverage up or down as needs change, stay current with evolving threats and regulatory requirements, and leverage AI-native detection and response without needing to manage the AI tools themselves.

Preferences for MSSP-delivered security operations are particularly strong in the education, energy (87%), and healthcare sectors. This makes sense: all are high-value targets for threat actors, and all tend to have limited cybersecurity budgets, so the need for a partner who can deliver affordable access to expertise at scale is strong. Retailers also voiced a strong preference for MSSP-delivered services. These companies are tasked with managing large volumes of consumer personal and financial data, and with transforming an industry traditionally thought of as a late adopter to a vanguard of cyber defense. Technology companies, too, have a marked preference for SOC capabilities delivered by MSSPs. This may simply be because they understand the complexity of the threat landscape – and the advantages of specialized expertise — so well.

In order to help as many organizations as possible – from major enterprises to small and midmarket companies – benefit from enterprise-grade, AI-native security, Darktrace is making it easier for MSSPs to deliver its technology. The ActiveAI Security Portal introduces an alert dashboard designed to increase the speed and efficiency of alert triage, while a new AI-powered managed email security solution is giving MSSPs an edge in the never-ending fight against advanced phishing attacks – helping partners as well as organizations succeed on the frontlines of cyber defense.

Explore the full State of AI Cybersecurity 2026 report for deeper insights into how security leaders are responding to AI-driven risks.

Learn more about securing AI in your enterprise.

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