Protecting Manufacturing IP Leaks with Darktrace AI Security
17
Sep 2017
Learn how a cloud server mishap almost exposed sensitive IP at a leading manufacturing firm and how Darktrace helped mitigate this leak.
4 million customers had their information exposed in the Time Warner compromise. In the Verizon breach, that number rose to 14 million. Third-party cloud vulnerabilities were responsible for both.
Signature-based security tools consistently fail to detect cloud-based threats like these, which are often subtle and unique from threats found on the physical network.
At a leading manufacturing company in Europe, Darktrace detected a similar cloud vulnerability, only instead of customer data at risk, it was sensitive intellectual property.
The company was using a third-party cloud server to store files containing product details and sales projections. The files on the server and the root IP were gated with a username and password.
After entering their credentials, however, the files contained on the server were left unencrypted. Darktrace detected this vulnerability when a device downloaded a ZIP file from a rare external IP address that Darktrace deemed highly anomalous compared to the device’s normal behavior.
94:65:9c:a6:XX:XX made an HTTP connection to XX[.]23.0.23 on TCP port 80
Ordinarily, this activity would indicate unauthorized content entering the network, but in this case, the anomaly revealed a critical security flaw. Darktrace’s AI algorithms and mathematical models immediately recognized this activity as a deviation from the device’s normal ‘pattern of life’.
Upon investigation of the anomaly, it was discovered that the ZIP file wasn’t access restricted. In other words, anybody could have downloaded the ZIP file if they knew the URL, which could have been obtained by simply intercepting network traffic, either internally or externally. More dedicated attackers could have even brute-forced the file ‘key’ parameter of the URL.
The files in question included product specs, market research, and other sensitive data. The loss or leakage of such information could have placed the entire product line at risk.
A sample of the file names in the ZIP file included:
By reporting this incident as soon as it was detected, the company prevented the loss of valuable intellectual property and internal documents. Darktrace assisted the security team in revising their data storage practices in order to better protect their product information moving forward.
Too often, subtle anomalies like these are obscured by the cloud or lost in the noise of the network. Traditional security tools tend to have limited visibility of cloud activity, and even then, they only look for known threats. This vulnerability was unique and would have gone undetected by signature-based controls.
To learn more, check out our Threat Use Cases page which details some of the most interesting recent threats we’ve found.
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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.
Author
Andrew Tsonchev
VP, Security & AI Strategy, Field CISO
Andrew is VP, Security & AI Strategy, Field CISO and advises Darktrace’s strategic customers on advanced threat defense, AI and autonomous response. He has a background in threat analysis and research, and holds a first-class degree in physics from Oxford University and a first-class degree in philosophy from King’s College London. His comments on cyber security and the threat to critical national infrastructure have been reported in international media, including CNBC and the BBC World.
Darktrace Named as Market Leader in the 2025 Omdia Market Radar for OT Cybersecurity Platforms
We are pleased to announce that Darktrace / OT has been named a Market Leader in Omdia’s 2025 Market Radar for OT Cybersecurity Platforms. We believe this highlights our unique capabilities in the OT security market and follows similar recognition from Gartner who recently named Darktrace / OT as the sole Visionary in in the Magic Quadrant for Cyber Physical Systems (CPS) Protection Platforms market.
Historically, IT and OT systems have been managed separately, creating challenges due to the differences of priorities between the two domains. While both value availability, IT emphasizes confidentiality and integrity whereas OT focuses on safety and reliability. Organizations are increasingly converging these systems to reap the benefits of automation, efficiency, and productivity (1).
Omdia’s research highlights that decision makers are increasingly prioritizing comprehensive security coverage, centralized management, and advanced cybersecurity capabilities when selecting OT security solutions (1).
Rising productivity demands have driven the convergence of OT, IT, and cloud-connected systems, expanding attack surfaces and exposing vulnerabilities. Darktrace / OT provides a comprehensive OT security solution, purpose-built for critical infrastructure, offering visibility across OT, IoT, and IT assets, bespoke risk management, and industry-leading threat detection and response powered by Self-Learning AITM.
Figure 1: Omdia vendor overview for OT cybersecurity platforms
An AI-first approach to OT security
Many OT security vendors have integrated AI into their offerings, often leveraging machine learning for anomaly detection and threat response. However, only a few have a deep-rooted history in AI, with longstanding expertise shaping their approach beyond surface-level adoption.
The Omdia Market Radar recognizes that Darktrace has extensive background in the AI space:
“Darktrace has invested extensively in AI research to fuel its capabilities since 2013 with 200-plus patent applications, providing anomaly detection with a significant level of customization, helping with SOC productivity and efficiency, streamlining to show what matters for OT.” (1)
Unlike other security approaches that rely on existing threat data, Darktrace / OT achieves this through Self-Learning AI that understands normal business operations, detecting and containing known and unknown threats autonomously, thereby reducing Sec Ops workload and ensuring minimal downtime
This approach extends to incident investigations where an industry-first Cyber AI AnalystTM automatically investigates all relevant threats across IT and OT, prioritizes critical incidents, and then summarizes findings in an easily understandable view—bringing production engineers and security analysts together to communicate and quickly take appropriate action.
Balancing autonomous response with human oversight
In OT environments where uptime is essential, autonomous response technology can be approached with apprehension. However, Darktrace offers customizable response actions that can be set to “human confirmation mode.”
Omdia recognizes that our approach provides customizable options for autonomous response:
“Darktrace’s autonomous response functionality enforces normal, expected behavior. This can be automated but does not need to be from the beginning, and it can be fine-tuned. Alternative step-by-step mitigations are clearly laid out step-by-step and updated based on organizational risk posture and current level of progress.” (1)
This approach allows security and production to keep humans-in-the-loop with pre-defined actions for potential attacks, enforcing normal to contain a threat, and allowing production to continue without disruption.
Bespoke vulnerability and risk management
In the realm of OT security, asset management takes precedent as one of the key focus points for organizations. With a large quantity of assets to manage, practitioners are overwhelmed with information with no real way to prioritize or apply them to their unique environment.
Darktrace / OT is recognized by Omdia as having:
“Advanced risk management capabilities that showcase metrics on impact, exploit difficulty, and estimated cost of an attack […] Given the nascency of this capability (April 2024), it is remarkably granular in depth and insight.” (1)
Enabling this is Darktrace’s unique approach to AI extends to risk management capabilities for OT. Darktrace / OT understands customers’ unique risks by building a comprehensive and contextualized picture that goes beyond isolated CVE scoring. It combines attack path modeling with MITRE ATT&CK techniques to provide hardening recommendations regardless of patching availability and gives you a clearer view of the potential impact of an attack from APT groups.
Modular, scalable security for industrial environments
Organizations need flexibility when it comes to OT security, some want a fully integrated IT-OT security stack, while others prefer a segregated approach due to compliance or operational concerns. The Darktrace ActiveAI Security Platform offers integrated security across multiple domains, allowing flexibility and unification across IT and OT security. The platform combines telemetry from all areas of your digital estate to detect and respond to threats, including OT, network, cloud, email, and user identities.
Omdia recognizes Darktrace’s expansive coverage across multiple domains as a key reason why organizations should consider Darktrace / OT:
“Darktrace’s modular and platform, approach offer’s integrated security across multiple domains. It offers the option of Darktrace / OT as a separate platform product for those that want to segregate IT and OT cybersecurity or are not yet in a position to secure both domains in tandem. The deployment of Darktrace’s platform is flexible—with nine different deployment options, including physical on-premises, virtual, cloud, and hybrid.” (1)
With flexible deployment options, Darktrace offers security teams the ability to choose a model that works best for their organization, ensuring that security doesn’t have to be a “one-size-fits-all” approach.
Conclusion: Why Darktrace / OT stands out in Omdia’s evaluation
Omdia’s 2025 Market Radar for OT Cybersecurity Platforms provides a technical-first, vendor-agnostic evaluation, offering critical insights for organizations looking to strengthen their OT security posture. Darktrace’s recognition as a Market Leader reinforces its unique AI-driven approach, flexible deployment options, and advanced risk management capabilities as key differentiators in an evolving threat landscape.
By leveraging Self-Learning AI, autonomous response, and real-world risk analysis, Darktrace / OT enables organizations to detect, investigate, and mitigate threats before they escalate, without compromising operational uptime.
Product Marketing Manager, OT Security & Compliance
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April 2, 2025
Fusing Vulnerability and Threat Data: Enhancing the Depth of Attack Analysis
Cado Security, recently acquired by Darktrace, is excited to announce a significant enhancement to its data collection capabilities, with the addition of a vulnerability discovery feature for Linux-based cloud resources. According to Darktrace’s Annual Threat Report 2024, the most significant campaigns observed in 2024 involved the ongoing exploitation of significant vulnerabilities in internet-facing systems. Cado’s new vulnerability discovery capability further deepens its ability to provide extensive context to security teams, enabling them to make informed decisions about threats, faster than ever.
Deep context to accelerate understanding and remediation
Context is critical when understanding the circumstances surrounding a threat. It can also take many forms – alert data, telemetry, file content, business context (for example asset criticality, core function of the resource), and risk context, such as open vulnerabilities.
When performing an investigation, it is common practice to understand the risk profile of the resource impacted, specifically determining open vulnerabilities and how they may relate to the threat. For example, if an analyst is triaging an alert related to an internet-facing Webserver running Apache, it would greatly benefit the analyst to understand open vulnerabilities in the Apache version that is running, if any of them are exploitable, whether a fix is available, etc. This dataset also serves as an invaluable source when developing a remediation plan, identifying specific vulnerabilities to be prioritised for patching.
Data acquisition in Cado
Cado is the only platform with the ability to perform full forensic captures as well as utilize instant triage collection methods, which is why fusing host-based artifact data with vulnerability data is such an exciting and compelling development.
The vulnerability discovery feature can be run as part of an acquisition – full or triage – as well as independently using a fast ‘Scan only’ mode.
Figure 1: A fast vulnerability scan being performed on the acquired evidence
Once the acquisition has completed, the user will have access to a ‘Vulnerabilities’ table within their investigation, where they are able to view and filter open vulnerabilities (by Severity, CVE ID, Resource, and other properties), as well as pivot to the full Event Timeline. In the Event Timeline, the user will be able to identify whether there is any malicious, suspicious or other interesting activity surrounding the vulnerable package, given the unified timeline presents a complete chronological dataset of all evidence and context collected.
Figure 2: Vulnerabilities discovered on the acquired evidence
Figure 3: Pivot from the Vulnerabilities table to the Event Timeline provides an in-depth view of file and process data associated with the vulnerable package selected. In this example, Apache2.
Future work
In the coming months, we’ll be releasing initial versions of highly anticipated integrations between Cado and Darktrace, including the ability to ingest Darktrace / CLOUD alerts which will automatically trigger a forensic capture (as well as a vulnerability discovery) of the impacted assets.