Blog
/
/
September 23, 2020

Detecting OT Threats: ICS Attack at International Airport

Learn how Darktrace's OT Threat Detection technology identified a sophisticated ICS attack on an international airport. Read more on Darktrace's blog.
No items found.
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.
No items found.
Default blog imageDefault blog imageDefault blog imageDefault blog imageDefault blog imageDefault blog image
23
Sep 2020

As Industrial Control Systems (ICS) and traditional IT networks converge, the number of cyber-attacks that start in the corporate network before spreading to operational technology has increased dramatically in the last 12 months. From North Korean hackers targeting a nuclear power plant in India to ransomware shutting down operations at a US gas facility, and across Honda’s manufacturing sites, 2020 has been the year OT attacks have become mainstream.

Darktrace recently detected a simulation of a state-of-the-art attack at an international airport, identifying ICS reconnaissance, lateral movement, vulnerability scanning and protocol fuzzing – a technique in which the attacker sends nonsensical commands over an ICS communication channel in order to confuse the target device, causing it to fail or reboot.

Darktrace’s Industrial Immune System detected every stage of the sophisticated attack, using AI-powered anomaly detection to identify ICS attack vectors without a list of known exploits, company assets, or firmware versions. The attacker leveraged tools at every stage of the ICS kill chain, including ICS-specific attack techniques.

Any unusual attempts to read or reprogram single coils, objects, or other data blocks were detected by Cyber AI, and Darktrace’s Cyber AI Analyst also automatically identified the activity and created summary reports detailing the key actions taken.

The attack spanned multiple days and targeted the Building Management System (BMS) and the Baggage Reclaim network, with attackers utilizing two common ICS protocols (BacNet and S7Comm) and leveraging legitimate tools (such as ICS reprogramming commands and connections through SMB service pipes) to evade traditional, signature-based security tools.

Attack details

Figure 1: Timeline of the attack

In the first stage of the attack, a new device was introduced to the network, using ARP spoofing to evade detection from traditional security tools. At 11.40am, the attacker scanned a target device and attempted to bruteforce open services. Once the target device had been hijacked, the attacker then sought to establish an external connection to the Internet. External connections should not be possible in ICS networks, but attackers often seek to bypass firewalls and network segregation rules in order to create a command and control (C2) channel.

Figure 2: Darktrace Threat Tray 15 minutes after the pentest commenced. High level model breaches have already alerted the analyst team to the attack device.

The hijacked device then began performing ICS reconnaissance using Discover and Read commands. Darktrace identified new objects and data blocks being targeted as part of this reconnaissance, and detected ICS devices targeted with unusual BacNet and Siemens S7Comm protocol commands.

Figure 3: Model alerts associated with ICS reconnaissance over BacNet. Machine learning at the ICS command level detected new and unusual BacNet objects being targeted by the attacker.

The attacker enumerated through multiple ICS devices in order to perform lateral movement throughout the ICS system. Once they had learned device settings and configurations, they used ICS Reprogram and Write commands to reconfigure machines. The attacker attempted to use known vulnerabilities to exploit the target devices, such as the use of SMB, SMBv1, HTTP, RDP, and ICS protocol fuzzing.

Figure 4: Visualization of the device enumeration performed by the attacker against multiple ICS controllers. The attacker used ICS Discover commands as part of the initial reconnaissance.

The attacker took deliberate actions to evade the airport’s cyber security stack, including making connections using ICS protocols commonly used on the network to devices which commonly use those protocols. While legacy security tools failed to pick up on this activity, Darktrace’s deep packet inspection was able to identify unusual commands used by the attacker within those ‘normal’ connections.

The attacker used ARP spoofing to slow any investigation using asset management-based security tools – including two other solutions being trialed by the airport at the time of the attack. They also used multiple devices throughout the intrusion to throw defense teams off the scent.

Darktrace’s AI technology also launched an automated investigation into the incident. The Cyber AI Analyst identified all of the attack devices and produced summary reports for each, showcasing its ability to not only save crucial time for security teams, but bridge the skills gap between IT teams and ICS engineers.

Figure 5: The Cyber AI Analyst threat tray at the end of day 1. Both devices used by the attacker have been identified.

The Cyber AI Analyst immediately began investigating after the first model breach, and continued to stitch together disparate events across the network to produce a natural language summary of the incident, including recommendations for action.

Figure 6: AIA incident summary at the end of day 2, detailing the use of SMB exploits as part of the attack chain against one of the ICS devices.

Potential ramifications

Had the attack been allowed to continue, the attackers – potentially activist groups, terrorist organizations, and organized criminals – could have caused significant operational disruption to the airport. For example, the BMS is likely to manage temperature settings, the sprinkler system, fire alarms and fire exits, lighting, and doors in and out of secure access areas. Meddling with any one of these could cause severe disruption at an airport, with significant financial and reputational effects. Similarly, access to baggage reclaim networks could be used by criminals seeking to smuggle illegal goods or steal valuable cargo.

This simulation showcases the possibilities for an advanced cyber-criminal looking to compromise integrated IT and OT networks. The majority of leading ICS ‘security’ vendors are signature-based, and fail to pick up on novel techniques and utilization of common protocols to pursue malicious ends – this is why ICS attacks have continued to hit the headlines this year.

The incident showcases the extent of Cyber AI’s detections in a real-world ICS environment, and the level of detail Darktrace can provide following an attack. As Industrial Control Systems become increasingly integrated with the wider IT network, the importance of securing these critical systems is paramount. Darktrace provides a unified security umbrella with visibility and detection across the entire digital environment.

Thanks to Darktrace analyst Oakley Cox for his insights on the above investigation.

Learn more about the Industrial Immune System

Darktrace model detections:

  • ICS / Unusual ICS Commands
  • ICS / Multiple New Reprograms
  • ICS / Multiple New Discover Commands
  • ICS / Rare External from OT Device
  • ICS / Uncommon ICS Protocol Warning
  • ICS / Multiple Failed Connections to ICS Device
  • ICS / Anomalous IT to ICS Connection
No items found.
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.
No items found.

More in this series

No items found.

Blog

/

/

July 17, 2025

Introducing the AI Maturity Model for Cybersecurity

Default blog imageDefault blog image

AI adoption in cybersecurity: Beyond the hype

Security operations today face a paradox. On one hand, artificial intelligence (AI) promises sweeping transformation from automating routine tasks to augmenting threat detection and response. On the other hand, security leaders are under immense pressure to separate meaningful innovation from vendor hype.

To help CISOs and security teams navigate this landscape, we’ve developed the most in-depth and actionable AI Maturity Model in the industry. Built in collaboration with AI and cybersecurity experts, this framework provides a structured path to understanding, measuring, and advancing AI adoption across the security lifecycle.

Overview of AI maturity levels in cybersecurity

Why a maturity model? And why now?

In our conversations and research with security leaders, a recurring theme has emerged:

There’s no shortage of AI solutions, but there is a shortage of clarity and understanding of AI uses cases.

In fact, Gartner estimates that “by 2027, over 40% of Agentic AI projects will be canceled due to escalating costs, unclear business value, or inadequate risk controls. Teams are experimenting, but many aren’t seeing meaningful outcomes. The need for a standardized way to evaluate progress and make informed investments has never been greater.

That’s why we created the AI Security Maturity Model, a strategic framework that:

  • Defines five clear levels of AI maturity, from manual processes (L0) to full AI Delegation (L4)
  • Delineating the outcomes derived between Agentic GenAI and Specialized AI Agent Systems
  • Applies across core functions such as risk management, threat detection, alert triage, and incident response
  • Links AI maturity to real-world outcomes like reduced risk, improved efficiency, and scalable operations

[related-resource]

How is maturity assessed in this model?

The AI Maturity Model for Cybersecurity is grounded in operational insights from nearly 10,000 global deployments of Darktrace's Self-Learning AI and Cyber AI Analyst. Rather than relying on abstract theory or vendor benchmarks, the model reflects what security teams are actually doing, where AI is being adopted, how it's being used, and what outcomes it’s delivering.

This real-world foundation allows the model to offer a practical, experience-based view of AI maturity. It helps teams assess their current state and identify realistic next steps based on how organizations like theirs are evolving.

Why Darktrace?

AI has been central to Darktrace’s mission since its inception in 2013, not just as a feature, but the foundation. With over a decade of experience building and deploying AI in real-world security environments, we’ve learned where it works, where it doesn’t, and how to get the most value from it. This model reflects that insight, helping security leaders find the right path forward for their people, processes, and tools

Security teams today are asking big, important questions:

  • What should we actually use AI for?
  • How are other teams using it — and what’s working?
  • What are vendors offering, and what’s just hype?
  • Will AI ever replace people in the SOC?

These questions are valid, and they’re not always easy to answer. That’s why we created this model: to help security leaders move past buzzwords and build a clear, realistic plan for applying AI across the SOC.

The structure: From experimentation to autonomy

The model outlines five levels of maturity :

L0 – Manual Operations: Processes are mostly manual with limited automation of some tasks.

L1 – Automation Rules: Manually maintained or externally-sourced automation rules and logic are used wherever possible.

L2 – AI Assistance: AI assists research but is not trusted to make good decisions. This includes GenAI agents requiring manual oversight for errors.

L3 – AI Collaboration: Specialized cybersecurity AI agent systems  with business technology context are trusted with specific tasks and decisions. GenAI has limited uses where errors are acceptable.

L4 – AI Delegation: Specialized AI agent systems with far wider business operations and impact context perform most cybersecurity tasks and decisions independently, with only high-level oversight needed.

Each level reflects a shift, not only in technology, but in people and processes. As AI matures, analysts evolve from executors to strategic overseers.

Strategic benefits for security leaders

The maturity model isn’t just about technology adoption it’s about aligning AI investments with measurable operational outcomes. Here’s what it enables:

SOC fatigue is real, and AI can help

Most teams still struggle with alert volume, investigation delays, and reactive processes. AI adoption is inconsistent and often siloed. When integrated well, AI can make a meaningful difference in making security teams more effective

GenAI is error prone, requiring strong human oversight

While there is a lot of hype around GenAI agentic systems, teams will need to account for inaccuracy and hallucination in Agentic GenAI systems.

AI’s real value lies in progression

The biggest gains don’t come from isolated use cases, but from integrating AI across the lifecycle, from preparation through detection to containment and recovery.

Trust and oversight are key initially but evolves in later levels

Early-stage adoption keeps humans fully in control. By L3 and L4, AI systems act independently within defined bounds, freeing humans for strategic oversight.

People’s roles shift meaningfully

As AI matures, analyst roles consolidate and elevate from labor intensive task execution to high-value decision-making, focusing on critical, high business impact activities, improving processes and AI governance.

Outcome, not hype, defines maturity

AI maturity isn’t about tech presence, it’s about measurable impact on risk reduction, response time, and operational resilience.

[related-resource]

Outcomes across the AI Security Maturity Model

The Security Organization experiences an evolution of cybersecurity outcomes as teams progress from manual operations to AI delegation. Each level represents a step-change in efficiency, accuracy, and strategic value.

L0 – Manual Operations

At this stage, analysts manually handle triage, investigation, patching, and reporting manually using basic, non-automated tools. The result is reactive, labor-intensive operations where most alerts go uninvestigated and risk management remains inconsistent.

L1 – Automation Rules

At this stage, analysts manage rule-based automation tools like SOAR and XDR, which offer some efficiency gains but still require constant tuning. Operations remain constrained by human bandwidth and predefined workflows.

L2 – AI Assistance

At this stage, AI assists with research, summarization, and triage, reducing analyst workload but requiring close oversight due to potential errors. Detection improves, but trust in autonomous decision-making remains limited.

L3 – AI Collaboration

At this stage, AI performs full investigations and recommends actions, while analysts focus on high-risk decisions and refining detection strategies. Purpose-built agentic AI systems with business context are trusted with specific tasks, improving precision and prioritization.

L4 – AI Delegation

At this stage, Specialized AI Agent Systems performs most security tasks independently at machine speed, while human teams provide high-level strategic oversight. This means the highest time and effort commitment activities by the human security team is focused on proactive activities while AI handles routine cybersecurity tasks

Specialized AI Agent Systems operate with deep business context including impact context to drive fast, effective decisions.

Join the webinar

Get a look at the minds shaping this model by joining our upcoming webinar using this link. We’ll walk through real use cases, share lessons learned from the field, and show how security teams are navigating the path to operational AI safely, strategically, and successfully.

Continue reading
About the author

Blog

/

/

July 17, 2025

Forensics or Fauxrensics: Five Core Capabilities for Cloud Forensics and Incident Response

Default blog imageDefault blog image

The speed and scale at which new cloud resources can be spun up has resulted in uncontrolled deployments, misconfigurations, and security risks. It has had security teams racing to secure their business’ rapid migration from traditional on-premises environments to the cloud.

While many organizations have successfully extended their prevention and detection capabilities to the cloud, they are now experiencing another major gap: forensics and incident response.

Once something bad has been identified, understanding its true scope and impact is nearly impossible at times. The proliferation of cloud resources across a multitude of cloud providers, and the addition of container and serverless capabilities all add to the complexities. It’s clear that organizations need a better way to manage cloud incident response.

Security teams are looking to move past their homegrown solutions and open-source tools to incorporate real cloud forensics capabilities. However, with the increased buzz around cloud forensics, it can be challenging to decipher what is real cloud forensics, and what is “fauxrensics.”

This blog covers the five core capabilities that security teams should consider when evaluating a cloud forensics and incident response solution.

[related-resource]

1. Depth of data

There have been many conversations among the security community about whether cloud forensics is just log analysis. The reality, however, is that cloud forensics necessitates access to a robust dataset that extends far beyond traditional log data sources.

While logs provide valuable insights, a forensics investigation demands a deeper understanding derived from multiple data sources, including disk, network, and memory, within the cloud infrastructure. Full disk analysis complements log analysis, offering crucial context for identifying the root cause and scope of an incident.

For instance, when investigating an incident involving a Kubernetes cluster running on an EC2 instance, access to bash history can provide insights into the commands executed by attackers on the affected instance, which would not be available through cloud logs alone.

Having all of the evidence in one place is also a capability that can significantly streamline investigations, unifying your evidence be it disk images, memory captures or cloud logs, into a single timeline allowing security teams to reconstruct an attacks origin, path and impact far more easily. Multi–cloud environments also require platforms that can support aggregating data from many providers and services into one place. Doing this enables more holistic investigations and reduces security blind spots.

There is also the importance of collecting data from ephemeral resources in modern cloud and containerized environments. Critical evidence can be lost in seconds as resources are constantly spinning up and down, so having the ability to capture this data before its gone can be a huge advantage to security teams, rather than having to figure out what happened after the affected service is long gone.

darktrace / cloud, cado, cloud logs, ost, and memory information. value of cloud combined analysis

2. Chain of custody

Chain of custody is extremely critical in the context of legal proceedings and is an essential component of forensics and incident response. However, chain of custody in the cloud can be extremely complex with the number of people who have access and the rise of multi-cloud environments.

In the cloud, maintaining a reliable chain of custody becomes even more complex than it already is, due to having to account for multiple access points, service providers and third parties. Having automated evidence tracking is a must. It means that all actions are logged, from collection to storage to access. Automation also minimizes the chance of human error, reducing the risk of mistakes or gaps in evidence handling, especially in high pressure fast moving investigations.

The ability to preserve unaltered copies of forensic evidence in a secure manner is required to ensure integrity throughout an investigation. It is not just a technical concern, its a legal one, ensuring that your evidence handling is documented and time stamped allows it to stand up to court or regulatory review.

Real cloud forensics platforms should autonomously handle chain of custody in the background, recording and safeguarding evidence without human intervention.

3. Automated collection and isolation

When malicious activity is detected, the speed at which security teams can determine root cause and scope is essential to reducing Mean Time to Response (MTTR).

Automated forensic data collection and system isolation ensures that evidence is collected and compromised resources are isolated at the first sign of malicious activity. This can often be before an attacker has had the change to move latterly or cover their tracks. This enables security teams to prevent potential damage and spread while a deeper-dive forensics investigation takes place. This method also ensures critical incident evidence residing in ephemeral environments is preserved in the event it is needed for an investigation. This evidence may only exist for minutes, leaving no time for a human analyst to capture it.

Cloud forensics and incident response platforms should offer the ability to natively integrate with incident detection and alerting systems and/or built-in product automation rules to trigger evidence capture and resource isolation.

4. Ease of use

Security teams shouldn’t require deep cloud or incident response knowledge to perform forensic investigations of cloud resources. They already have enough on their plates.

While traditional forensics tools and approaches have made investigation and response extremely tedious and complex, modern forensics platforms prioritize usability at their core, and leverage automation to drastically simplify the end-to-end incident response process, even when an incident spans multiple Cloud Service Providers (CSPs).

Useability is a core requirement for any modern forensics platform. Security teams should not need to have indepth knowledge of every system and resource in a given estate. Workflows, automation and guidance should make it possible for an analyst to investigate whatever resource they need to.

Unifying the workflow across multiple clouds can also save security teams a huge amount of time and resources. Investigations can often span multiple CSP’s. A good security platform should provide a single place to search, correlate and analyze evidence across all environments.

Offering features such as cross cloud support, data enrichment, a single timeline view, saved search, and faceted search can help advanced analysts achieve greater efficiency, and novice analysts are able to participate in more complex investigations.

5. Incident preparedness

Incident response shouldn't just be reactive. Modern security teams need to regularly test their ability to acquire new evidence, triage assets and respond to threats across both new and existing resources, ensuring readiness even in the rapidly changing environments of the cloud.  Having the ability to continuously assess your incident response and forensics workflows enables you to rapidly improve your processes and identify and mitigate any gaps identified that could prevent the organization from being able to effectively respond to potential threats.

Real forensics platforms deliver features that enable security teams to prepare extensively and understand their shortcomings before they are in the heat of an incident. For example, cloud forensics platforms can provide the ability to:

  • Run readiness checks and see readiness trends over time
  • Identify and mitigate issues that could prevent rapid investigation and response
  • Ensure the correct logging, management agents, and other cloud-native tools are appropriately configured and operational
  • Ensure that data gathered during an investigation can be decrypted
  • Verify that permissions are aligned with best practices and are capable of supporting incident response efforts

Cloud forensics with Darktrace

Darktrace delivers a proactive approach to cyber resilience in a single cybersecurity platform, including cloud coverage. Darktrace / CLOUD is a real time Cloud Detection and Response (CDR) solution built with advanced AI to make cloud security accessible to all security teams and SOCs. By using multiple machine learning techniques, Darktrace brings unprecedented visibility, threat detection, investigation, and incident response to hybrid and multi-cloud environments.

Darktrace’s cloud offerings have been bolstered with the acquisition of Cado Security Ltd., which enables security teams to gain immediate access to forensic-level data in multi-cloud, container, serverless, SaaS, and on-premises environments.

[related-resource]

Continue reading
About the author
Your data. Our AI.
Elevate your network security with Darktrace AI