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February 18, 2025

Unifying IT & OT With AI-Led Investigations for Industrial Security

Discover how AI-led investigations unify IT and OT security, reducing alert fatigue and accelerating alert investigation in industrial environments.
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
Daniel Simonds
Director of Operational Technology
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18
Feb 2025

As industrial environments modernize, IT and OT networks are converging to improve efficiency, but this connectivity also creates new attack paths. Previously isolated OT systems are now linked to IT and cloud assets, making them more accessible to attackers.

While organizations have traditionally relied on air gaps, firewalls, data diodes, and access controls to separate IT and OT, these measures alone aren’t enough. Threat actors often infiltrate IT/Enterprise networks first then exploit segmentation, compromising credentials, or shared IT/OT systems to move laterally, escalate privileges, and ultimately enter the OT network.

To defend against these threats, organizations must first ensure they have complete visibility across IT and OT environments.

Visibility: The first piece of the puzzle

Visibility is the foundation of effective industrial cybersecurity, but it’s only the first step. Without visibility across both IT and OT, security teams risk missing key alerts that indicate a threat targeting OT at their earliest stages.

For Attacks targeting OT, early stage exploits often originate in IT environments, adversaries perform internal reconnaissance among other tactics and procedures but then laterally move into OT first affecting IT devices, servers and workstations within the OT network. If visibility is limited, these threats go undetected. To stay ahead of attackers, organizations need full-spectrum visibility that connects IT and OT security, ensuring no early warning signs are missed.

However, visibility alone isn’t enough. More visibility also means more alerts, this doesn’t just make it harder to separate real threats from routine activity, but bogs down analysts who have to investigate all these alerts to determine their criticality.

Investigations: The real bottleneck

While visibility is essential, it also introduces a new challenge: Alert fatigue. Without the right tools, analysts are often occupied investigating alerts with little to no context, forcing them to manually piece together information and determine if an attack is unfolding. This slows response times and increases the risk of missing critical threats.

Figure 1: Example ICS attack scenario

With siloed visibility across IT and OT each of these events shown above would be individually alerted by a detection engine with little to no context nor correlation. Thus, an analyst would have to try to piece together these events manually. Traditional security tools struggle to keep pace with the sophistication of these threats, resulting in an alarming statistic: less than 10% of alerts are thoroughly vetted, leaving organizations vulnerable to undetected breaches. As a result, incidents inevitably follow.

Darktrace’s Cyber AI Analyst uses AI-led investigations to improve workflows for analysts by automatically correlating alerts wherever they occur across both IT and OT. The multi-layered AI engine identifies high-priority incidents, and provides analysts with clear, actionable insights, reducing noise and highlighting meaningful threats. The AI significantly alleviates workloads, enabling teams to respond faster and more effectively before an attack escalates.

Overcoming organizational challenges across IT and OT

Beyond technical challenges like visibility and alert management, organizational dynamics further complicate IT-OT security efforts. Fundamental differences in priorities, workflows, and risk perspectives create challenges that can lead to misalignment between teams:

Non-transferable practices: IT professionals might assume that cybersecurity practices from IT environments can be directly applied to OT environments. This can lead to issues, as OT systems and workflows may not handle IT security processes as expected. It's crucial to recognize and respect the unique requirements and constraints of OT environments.

Segmented responsibilities: IT and OT teams often operate under separate organizational structures, each with distinct priorities, goals, and workflows. While IT focuses on data security, network integrity, and enterprise applications, OT prioritizes uptime, reliability, and physical processes.

Different risk perspectives: While IT teams focus on preventing cyber threats and regulatory violations, OT teams prioritize uptime and operational reliability making them drawn towards asset inventory tools that provide no threat detection capability.

Result: A combination of disparate and ineffective tools and misaligned teams can make any progress toward risk reduction at an organization seem impossible. The right tools should be able to both free up time for collaboration and prompt better communication between IT and OT teams where it is needed. However, different size operations structure their IT and OT teams differently which impacts the priorities for each team.

In real-world scenarios, small IT teams struggle to manage security across both IT and OT, while larger organizations with OT security teams face alert fatigue and numerous false positives slowing down investigations and hindering effective communication with the IT security teams.

By unifying visibility and investigations, Darktrace / OT helps organizations of all sizes detect threats earlier, streamline workflows, and enhance security across both IT and OT environments. The following examples illustrate how AI-driven investigations can transform security operations, improving detection, investigation, and response.

Before and after AI-led investigation

Before: Small manufacturing company

At a small manufacturing company, a 1-3 person IT team juggles everything from email security to network troubleshooting. An analyst might see unusual traffic through the firewall:

  • Unusual repeated outbound traffic from an IP within their OT network destined to an unidentifiable external IP.

With no dedicated OT security tools and limited visibility into the industrial network, they don’t know what the internal device in question is, if it is beaconing to a malicious external IP, and what it may be doing to other devices within the OT network. Without a centralized dashboard, they must manually check logs, ask operators about changes, and hunt for anomalies across different systems.

After a day of investigation, they concluded the traffic was not to be expected activity. They stop production within their smaller OT network, update their firewall rules and factory reset all OT devices and systems within the blast radius of the IP device in question.

After: Faster, automated response with Cyber AI Analyst

With Darktrace / OT and Cyber AI Analyst, the IT team moves from reactive, manual investigations to proactive, automated threat detection:

  • Cyber AI Analyst connects alerts across their IT and OT infrastructure temporally mapping them to attack frameworks and provides contextual analysis of how alerts are linked, revealing in real time attackers attempting lateral movement from IT to OT.
  • A human-readable incident report explains the full scope of the incident, eliminating hours of manual investigation.
  • The team is faster to triage as they are led directly to prioritized high criticality alerts, now capable of responding immediately instead of wasting valuable time hunting for answers.

By reducing noise, providing context, and automating investigations, Cyber AI Analyst transforms OT security, enabling small IT teams to detect, understand, and respond to threats—without deep OT cybersecurity expertise.

Before: Large critical infrastructure organization

In large critical infrastructure operations, OT and IT teams work in separate silos. The OT security team needs to quickly assess and prioritize alerts, but their system floods them with notifications:

  • Multiple new device connected to the ICS network alerts
  • Multiple failed logins to HMI detected
  • Multiple Unusual Modbus/TCP commands detected
  • Repeated outbound OT traffic to IT destinations

At first glance, these alerts seem important, but without context, it’s unclear whether they indicate a routine error, a misconfiguration, or an active cyber-attack. They might ask:

  • Are the failed logins just a mistake, or a brute-force attempt?
  • Is the outbound traffic part of a scheduled update, or data exfiltration?

Without correlation across events, the engineer must manually investigate each one—checking logs, cross-referencing network activity, and contacting operators—wasting valuable time. Meanwhile, if it’s a coordinated attack, the adversary may already be disrupting operations.

After: A new workflow with Cyber AI Analyst

With Cyber AI Analyst, the OT security team gets clear, automated correlation of security events, making investigations faster and more efficient:

  • Automated correlation of OT threats: Instead of isolated alerts, Cyber AI Analyst stitches together related events, providing a single, high-confidence incident report that highlights key details.
  • Faster time to meaning: The system connects anomalous behaviors (e.g., failed logins, unusual traffic from an HMI, and unauthorized PLC modifications) into a cohesive narrative, eliminating hours of manual log analysis.
  • Prioritized and actionable alerts: OT security receives clear, ranked incidents, immediately highlighting what matters most.
  • Rapid threat understanding: Security teams know within minutes whether an event is a misconfiguration or a cyber-attack, allowing for faster containment.

With Cyber AI Analyst, large organizations cut through alert noise, accelerate investigations, and detect threats faster—without disrupting OT operations.

An AI-led approach to industrial cybersecurity

Security vendors with a primary focus on IT may lack insight into OT threats. Even OT-focused vendors have limited visibility into IT device exploitation within OT networks, leading to failed ability to detect early indicators of compromise. A comprehensive solution must account for the unique characteristics of various OT environments.

In a world where industrial security is no longer just about protecting OT but securing the entire digital-physical ecosystem as it interacts with the OT network, Darktrace / OT is an AI-driven solution that unifies visibility across IT, IoT and OT, Cloud into one cohesive defense strategy.

Whether an attack originates from an external breach, an insider threat, a supply chain compromise, in the Cloud, OT, or IT domains Cyber AI Analyst ensures that security teams see the full picture - before disruption occurs.

[related-resource]

Learn more about Darktrace / OT 

Unify IT and OT security under a single platform, ensuring seamless communication and protection for all interconnected devices.

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
Daniel Simonds
Director of Operational Technology

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October 20, 2025

Salty Much: Darktrace’s view on a recent Salt Typhoon intrusion

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What is Salt Typhoon?

Salt Typhoon represents one of the most persistent and sophisticated cyber threats targeting global critical infrastructure today. Believed to be linked to state-sponsored actors from the People’s Republic of China (PRC), this advanced persistent threat (APT) group has executed a series of high-impact campaigns against telecommunications providers, energy networks, and government systems—most notably across the United States.

Active since at least 2019, the group—also tracked as Earth Estries, GhostEmperor, and UNC2286—has demonstrated advanced capabilities in exploiting edge devices, maintaining deep persistence, and exfiltrating sensitive data across more than 80 countries. While much of the public reporting has focused on U.S. targets, Salt Typhoon’s operations have extended into Europe, the Middle East, and Africa (EMEA) where it has targeted telecoms, government entities, and technology firms. Its use of custom malware and exploitation of high-impact vulnerabilities (e.g., Ivanti, Fortinet, Cisco) underscores the strategic nature of its campaigns, which blend intelligence collection with geopolitical influence [1].

Leveraging zero-day exploits, obfuscation techniques, and lateral movement strategies, Salt Typhoon has demonstrated an alarming ability to evade detection and maintain long-term access to sensitive environments. The group’s operations have exposed lawful intercept systems, compromised metadata for millions of users, and disrupted essential services, prompting coordinated responses from intelligence agencies and private-sector partners worldwide. As organizations reassess their threat models, Salt Typhoon serves as a stark reminder of the evolving nature of nation-state cyber operations and the urgent need for proactive defense strategies.

Darktrace’s coverage

In this case, Darktrace observed activity in a European telecommunications organisation consistent with Salt Typhoon’s known tactics, techniques and procedures (TTPs), including dynamic-link library (DLL) sideloading and abuse of legitimate software for stealth and execution.

Initial access

The intrusion likely began with exploitation of a Citrix NetScaler Gateway appliance in the first week of July 2025. From there, the actor pivoted to Citrix Virtual Delivery Agent (VDA) hosts in the client’s Machine Creation Services (MCS) subnet. Initial access activities in the intrusion originated from an endpoint potentially associated with the SoftEther VPN service, suggesting infrastructure obfuscation from the outset.

Tooling

Darktrace subsequently observed the threat actor delivering a backdoor assessed with high confidence to be SNAPPYBEE (also known as Deed RAT) [2][3] to multiple Citrix VDA hosts. The backdoor was delivered to these internal endpoints as a DLL alongside legitimate executable files for antivirus software such as Norton Antivirus, Bkav Antivirus, and IObit Malware Fighter. This pattern of activity indicates that the attacker relied on DLL side-loading via legitimate antivirus software to execute their payloads. Salt Typhoon and similar groups have a history of employing this technique [4][5], enabling them to execute payloads under the guise of trusted software and bypassing traditional security controls.

Command-and-Control (C2)

The backdoor delivered by the threat actor leveraged LightNode VPS endpoints for C2, communicating over both HTTP and an unidentified TCP-based protocol. This dual-channel setup is consistent with Salt Typhoon’s known use of non-standard and layered protocols to evade detection. The HTTP communications displayed by the backdoor included POST requests with an Internet Explorer User-Agent header and Target URI patterns such as “/17ABE7F017ABE7F0”. One of the C2 hosts contacted by compromised endpoints was aar.gandhibludtric[.]com (38.54.63[.]75), a domain recently linked to Salt Typhoon [6].

Detection timeline

Darktrace produced high confidence detections in response to the early stages of the intrusion, with both the initial tooling and C2 activities being strongly covered by both investigations by Darktrace Cyber AI AnalystTM investigations and Darktrace models. Despite the sophistication of the threat actor, the intrusion activity identified and remediated before escalating beyond these early stages of the attack, with Darktrace’s timely high-confidence detections likely playing a key role in neutralizing the threat.

Cyber AI Analyst observations

Darktrace’s Cyber AI Analyst autonomously investigated the model alerts generated by Darktrace during the early stages of the intrusion. Through its investigations, Cyber AI Analyst discovered the initial tooling and C2 events and pieced them together into unified incidents representing the attacker’s progression.

Cyber AI Analyst weaved together separate events from the intrusion into broader incidents summarizing the attacker’s progression.
Figure 1: Cyber AI Analyst weaved together separate events from the intrusion into broader incidents summarizing the attacker’s progression.

Conclusion

Based on overlaps in TTPs, staging patterns, infrastructure, and malware, Darktrace assesses with moderate confidence that the observed activity was consistent with Salt Typhoon/Earth Estries (ALA GhostEmperor/UNC2286). Salt Typhoon continues to challenge defenders with its stealth, persistence, and abuse of legitimate tools. As attackers increasingly blend into normal operations, detecting behavioral anomalies becomes essential for identifying subtle deviations and correlating disparate signals. The evolving nature of Salt Typhoon’s tradecraft, and its ability to repurpose trusted software and infrastructure, ensures it will remain difficult to detect using conventional methods alone. This intrusion highlights the importance of proactive defense, where anomaly-based detections, not just signature matching, play a critical role in surfacing early-stage activity.

Credit to Nathaniel Jones (VP, Security & AI Strategy, FCISO), Sam Lister (Specialist Security Researcher), Emma Foulger (Global Threat Research Operations Lead), Adam Potter (Senior Cyber Analyst)

Edited by Ryan Traill (Analyst Content Lead)

Appendices

Indicators of Compromise (IoCs)

IoC-Type-Description + Confidence

89.31.121[.]101 – IP Address – Possible C2 server

hxxp://89.31.121[.]101:443/WINMM.dll - URI – Likely SNAPPYBEE download

b5367820cd32640a2d5e4c3a3c1ceedbbb715be2 - SHA1 – Likely SNAPPYBEE download

hxxp://89.31.121[.]101:443/NortonLog.txt - URI - Likely DLL side-loading activity

hxxp://89.31.121[.]101:443/123.txt - URI - Possible DLL side-loading activity

hxxp://89.31.121[.]101:443/123.tar - URI - Possible DLL side-loading activity

hxxp://89.31.121[.]101:443/pdc.exe - URI - Possible DLL side-loading activity

hxxp://89.31.121[.]101:443//Dialog.dat - URI - Possible DLL side-loading activity

hxxp://89.31.121[.]101:443/fltLib.dll - URI - Possible DLL side-loading activity

hxxp://89.31.121[.]101:443/DisplayDialog.exe - URI - Possible DLL side-loading activity

hxxp://89.31.121[.]101:443/DgApi.dll - URI - Likely DLL side-loading activity

hxxp://89.31.121[.]101:443/dbindex.dat - URI - Likely DLL side-loading activity

hxxp://89.31.121[.]101:443/1.txt - URI - Possible DLL side-loading activity

hxxp://89.31.121[.]101:443/imfsbDll.dll – Likely DLL side-loading activity

hxxp://89.31.121[.]101:443/imfsbSvc.exe - URI – Likely DLL side-loading activity

aar.gandhibludtric[.]com – Hostname – Likely C2 server

38.54.63[.]75 – IP – Likely C2 server

156.244.28[.]153 – IP – Possible C2 server

hxxp://156.244.28[.]153/17ABE7F017ABE7F0 - URI – Possible C2 activity

MITRE TTPs

Technique | Description

T1190 | Exploit Public-Facing Application - Citrix NetScaler Gateway compromise

T1105 | Ingress Tool Transfer – Delivery of backdoor to internal hosts

T1665 | Hide Infrastructure – Use of SoftEther VPN for C2

T1574.001 | Hijack Execution Flow: DLL – Execution of backdoor through DLL side-loading

T1095 | Non-Application Layer Protocol – Unidentified application-layer protocol for C2 traffic

T1071.001| Web Protocols – HTTP-based C2 traffic

T1571| Non-Standard Port – Port 443 for unencrypted HTTP traffic

Darktrace Model Alerts during intrusion

Anomalous File::Internal::Script from Rare Internal Location

Anomalous File::EXE from Rare External Location

Anomalous File::Multiple EXE from Rare External Locations

Anomalous Connection::Possible Callback URL

Antigena::Network::External Threat::Antigena Suspicious File Block

Antigena::Network::Significant Anomaly::Antigena Significant Server Anomaly Block

Antigena::Network::Significant Anomaly::Antigena Controlled and Model Alert

Antigena::Network::Significant Anomaly::Antigena Alerts Over Time Block

Antigena::Network::External Threat::Antigena File then New Outbound Block  

References

[1] https://www.cisa.gov/news-events/cybersecurity-advisories/aa25-239a

[2] https://www.trendmicro.com/en_gb/research/24/k/earth-estries.html

[3] https://www.trendmicro.com/content/dam/trendmicro/global/en/research/24/k/earth-estries/IOC_list-EarthEstries.txt

[4] https://www.trendmicro.com/en_gb/research/24/k/breaking-down-earth-estries-persistent-ttps-in-prolonged-cyber-o.html

[5] https://lab52.io/blog/deedrat-backdoor-enhanced-by-chinese-apts-with-advanced-capabilities/

[6] https://www.silentpush.com/blog/salt-typhoon-2025/

The content provided in this blog is published by Darktrace for general informational purposes only and reflects our understanding of cybersecurity topics, trends, incidents, and developments at the time of publication. While we strive to ensure accuracy and relevance, the information is provided “as is” without any representations or warranties, express or implied. Darktrace makes no guarantees regarding the completeness, accuracy, reliability, or timeliness of any information presented and expressly disclaims all warranties.

Nothing in this blog constitutes legal, technical, or professional advice, and readers should consult qualified professionals before acting on any information contained herein. Any references to third-party organizations, technologies, threat actors, or incidents are for informational purposes only and do not imply affiliation, endorsement, or recommendation.

Darktrace, its affiliates, employees, or agents shall not be held liable for any loss, damage, or harm arising from the use of or reliance on the information in this blog.

The cybersecurity landscape evolves rapidly, and blog content may become outdated or superseded. We reserve the right to update, modify, or remove any content.

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Nathaniel Jones
VP, Security & AI Strategy, Field CISO

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October 15, 2025

How a Major Civil Engineering Company Reduced MTTR across Network, Email and the Cloud with Darktrace

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Asking more of the information security team

“What more can we be doing to secure the company?” is a great question for any cyber professional to hear from their Board of Directors. After successfully defeating a series of attacks and seeing the potential for AI tools to supercharge incoming threats, a UK-based civil engineering company’s security team had the answer: Darktrace.

“When things are coming at you at machine speed, you need machine speed to fight it off – it’s as simple as that,” said their Information Security Manager. “There were incidents where it took us a few hours to get to the bottom of what was going on. Darktrace changed that.”

Prevention was also the best cure. A peer organization in the same sector was still in business continuity measures 18 months after an attack, and the security team did not want to risk that level of business disruption.

Legacy tools were not meeting the team’s desired speed or accuracy

The company’s native SaaS email platform took between two and 14 days to alert on suspicious emails, with another email security tool flagging malicious emails after up to 24 days. After receiving an alert, responses often took a couple of days to coordinate. The team was losing precious time.

Beyond long detection and response times, the old email security platform was no longer performing: 19% of incoming spam was missed. Of even more concern: 6% of phishing emails reached users’ inboxes, and malware and ransomware email was also still getting through, with 0.3% of such email-borne payloads reaching user inboxes.

Choosing Darktrace

“When evaluating tools in 2023, only Darktrace had what I was looking for: an existing, mature, AI-based cybersecurity solution. ChatGPT had just come out and a lot of companies were saying ‘AI this’ and ‘AI that’. Then you’d take a look, and it was all rules- and cases-based, not AI at all,” their Information Security Manager.

The team knew that, with AI-enabled attacks on the horizon, a cybersecurity company that had already built, fielded, and matured an AI-powered cyber defense would give the security team the ability to fend off machine-speed attacks at the same pace as the attackers.

Darktrace accomplishes this with multi-layered AI that learns each organization’s normal business operations. With this detailed level of understanding, Darktrace’s Self-Learning AI can recognize unusual activity that may indicate a cyber-attack, and works to neutralize the threat with precise response actions. And it does this all at machine speed and with minimal disruption.

On the morning the team was due to present its findings, the session was cancelled – for a good reason. The Board didn’t feel further discussion was necessary because the case for Darktrace was so conclusive. The CEO described the Darktrace option as ‘an insurance policy we can’t do without’.

Saving time with Darktrace / EMAIL

Darktrace / EMAIL reduced the discovery, alert, and response process from days or weeks to seconds .

Darktrace / EMAIL automates what was originally a time-consuming and repetitive process. The team has recovered between eight and 10 working hours a week by automating much of this process using / EMAIL.

Today, Darktrace / EMAIL prevents phishing emails from reaching employees’ inboxes. The volume of hostile and unsolicited email fell to a third of its original level after Darktrace / EMAIL was set up.

Further savings with Darktrace / NETWORK and Darktrace / IDENTITY

Since its success with Darktrace / EMAIL, the company adopted two more products from the Darktrace ActiveAI Security Platform – Darktrace / NETWORK and Darktrace / IDENTITY.

These have further contributed to cost savings. An initial plan to build a 24/7 SOC would have required hiring and retaining six additional analysts, rather than the two that currently use Darktrace, costing an additional £220,000 per year in salary. With Darktrace, the existing analysts have the tools needed to become more effective and impactful.

An additional benefit: Darktrace adoption has lowered the company’s cyber insurance premiums. The security team can reallocate this budget to proactive projects.

Detection of novel threats provides reassurance

Darktrace’s unique approach to cybersecurity added a key benefit. The team’s previous tool took a rules-based approach – which was only good if the next attack featured the same characteristics as the ones on which the tool was trained.

“Darktrace looks for anomalous behavior, and we needed something that detected and responded based on use cases, not rules that might be out of date or too prescriptive,” their Information Security Manager. “Our existing provider could take a couple of days to update rules and signatures, and in this game, speed is of the essence. Darktrace just does everything we need - without delay.”

Where rules-based tools must wait for a threat to emerge before beginning to detect and respond to it, Darktrace identifies and protects against unknown and novel threats, speeding identification, response, and recovery, minimizing business disruption as a result.

Looking to the future

With Darktrace in place, the UK-based civil engineering company team has reallocated time and resources usually spent on detection and alerting to now tackle more sophisticated, strategic challenges. Darktrace has also equipped the team with far better and more regularly updated visibility into potential vulnerabilities.

“One thing that frustrates me a little is penetration testing; our ISO accreditation mandates a penetration test at least once a year, but the results could be out of date the next day,” their Information Security Manager. “Darktrace / Proactive Exposure Management will give me that view in real time – we can run it daily if needed - and that’s going to be a really effective workbench for my team.”

As the company looks to further develop its security posture, Darktrace remains poised to evolve alongside its partner.

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