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May 12, 2021

How AI Protects Critical Infrastructure From Ransomware

Explore the role of AI in safeguarding critical infrastructure from ransomware, as revealed by Darktrace's latest insights.
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
David Masson
VP, Field CISO
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12
May 2021

Modern Threats to OT Environments

At the 2021 RSA cyber security conference, US Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas made an era-defining statement regarding the cyber security landscape: “Let me be clear: ransomware now poses a national security threat.”

Last weekend, Mayorkas’ words rang true. A ransomware attack on the Colonial Pipeline – responsible for nearly half of the US East Coast’s diesel, gasoline, and jet fuel – resulted in the shutdown of a critical fuel network supplying a number of Eastern states.

The fallout from the attack demonstrated how widespread and damaging the consequences of ransomware can be. Against critical infrastructure and utilities, cyber-attacks have the potential to disrupt supplies, harm the environment, and even threaten human lives.

Though full details remain to be confirmed, the attack is reported to have been conducted by an affiliate of the cyber-criminal group called DarkSide, and likely leveraged common remote desktop tools. Remote access has been enabled as an exploitable vulnerability within critical infrastructure by the shift to remote work that many organizations made last year, including those with Industrial Control Systems (ICS) and Operational Technology (OT).

The rise of industrial ransomware

Ransomware against industrial environments is on the rise, with a reported 500% increase since 2018. Oftentimes, these threats leverage the convergence of IT and OT systems, first targeting IT before pivoting to OT. This was seen with the EKANS ransomware that included ICS processes in its ‘kill list’, as well as the Cring ransomware that compromised ICS after first exploiting a vulnerability in a virtual private network (VPN).

It remains to be seen whether the initial attack vector in the Colonial Pipeline compromise exploited a technical vulnerability, compromised credentials, or a targeted spear phishing campaign. It has been reported that the attack first impacted IT systems, and that Colonial then shut down OT operations as a safety precaution. Colonial confirms that the ransomware “temporarily halted all pipeline operations and affected some of our IT systems,” showing that, ultimately, both OT and IT were affected. This is a great example of how many OT systems depend on IT, such that an IT cyber-attack has the ability to take down OT and ICS processes.

In addition to locking down systems, the threat actors also stole 100GB of sensitive data from Colonial. This kind of double extortion attack — in which data is exfiltrated before files are encrypted — has unfortunately become the norm rather than the exception, with over 70% of ransomware attacks involving exfiltration. Some ransomware gangs have even announced that they are dropping encryption altogether in favor of data theft and extortion methods.

Earlier this year, Darktrace defended against a double extortion ransomware attack waged against a critical infrastructure organization, which also leveraged common remote access tools. This blog will outline the threat find in depth, showing how Darktrace’s self-learning AI responded autonomously to an attack strikingly similar to the Colonial Pipeline incident.

Darktrace threat find

Ransomware against electric utilities equipment supplier

In an attack against a North American equipment supplier for electrical utilities earlier this year, Darktrace/OT demonstrated its ability to protect critical infrastructure against double extortion ransomware that targeted organizations with ICS and OT.

The ransomware attack initially targeted IT systems, and, thanks to self-learning Cyber AI, was stopped before it could spill over into OT and disrupt operations.

The attacker first compromised an internal server in order to exfiltrate data and deploy ransomware over the course of 12 hours. The short amount of time between initial compromise and deployment is unusual, as ransomware threat actors often wait several days to spread stealthily as far across the cyber ecosystem as possible before striking.

Figure 1: A timeline of the attack

How did the attack bypass the rest of the security stack?

The attacker leveraged ‘Living off the Land’ techniques to blend into the business’ normal ‘patterns of life’, using a compromised admin credential and a remote management tool approved by the organization, in its attempts to remain undetected.

Darktrace commonly sees the abuse of legitimate remote management software in attackers’ arsenal of techniques, tactics, and procedures (TTPs). Remote access is also becoming an increasingly common vector of attack in ICS attacks in particular. For example, in the cyber-incident at the Florida water treatment facility last February, attackers exploited a remote management tool in attempts to manipulate the treatment process.

The specific strain of ransomware deployed by this attacker also successfully evaded detection by anti-virus by using a unique file extension when encrypting files. These forms of ‘signatureless’ ransomware easily slip past legacy approaches to security that rely on rules, signatures, threat feeds, and lists of documented Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVEs), as these are methods that can only detect previously documented threats.

The only way to detect never-before-seen threats like signatureless ransomware is for a technology to find anomalous behavior, rather than rely on lists of ‘known bads’. This can be achieved with self-learning technology, which spots even the most subtle deviations from the normal ‘patterns of life’ for all devices, users, and all the connections between them.

Darktrace insights

Initial compromise and establishing foothold

Despite the abuse of a legitimate tool and the absence of known signatures, Darktrace/OT was able to use a holistic understanding of normal activity to detect the malicious activity at multiple points in the attack lifecycle.

The first clear sign of an emerging threat that was alerted by Darktrace was the unusual use of a privileged credential. The device also served an unusual remote desktop protocol (RDP) connection from a Veeam server shortly before the incident, indicating that the attacker may have moved laterally from elsewhere in the network.

Three minutes later, the device initiated a remote management session which lasted 21 hours. This allowed the attacker to move throughout the broader cyber ecosystem while remaining undetected by traditional defences. Darktrace, however, was able to detect unusual remote management usage as another early warning indicative of an attack.

Double threat part one: Data exfiltration

One hour after the initial compromise, Darktrace detected unusual volumes of data being sent to a 100% rare cloud storage solution, pCloud. The outbound data was encrypted using SSL, but Darktrace created multiple alerts relating to large internal downloads and external uploads that were a significant deviation from the device’s normal ‘pattern of life’.

The device continued to exfiltrate data for nine hours. Analysis of the files downloaded by the device, which were transferred using the unencrypted SMB protocol, suggests that they were sensitive in nature. Fortunately, Darktrace was able to pinpoint the specific files that were exfiltrated so that the customer could immediately evaluate the potential implications of the compromise.

Double threat part two: File encryption

A short time later, at 01:49 local time, the compromised device began encrypting files in a SharePoint back-up share drive. Over the next three and a half hours, the device encrypted over 13,000 files on at least 20 SMB shares. In total, Darktrace produced 23 alerts for the device in question, which amounted to 48% of all the alerts produced in the corresponding 24-hour period.

Darktrace’s Cyber AI Analyst then automatically launched an investigation, identifying the internal data transfers and the file encryption over SMB. From this, it was able to present incident reports that connected the dots among these disparate anomalies, piecing them together into a coherent security narrative. This put the security team in a position to immediately take remediating action.

If the customer had been using Darktrace’s autonomous response technology, there is no doubt the activity would have been halted before significant volumes of data could have been exfiltrated or files encrypted. Fortunately, after seeing both the alerts and Cyber AI Analyst reports, the customer was able to use Darktrace’s ‘Ask the Expert’ (ATE) service for incident response to mitigate the impact of the attack and assist with disaster recovery.

Figure 2: AI Analyst Incident reporting an unusual reprogram command using the MODBUS protocol. The incident includes a plain English summary, relevant technical information, and the investigation process used by the AI.  

Detecting the threat before it could disrupt critical infrastructure

The targeted supplier was overseeing OT and had close ties to critical infrastructure. By facilitating the early-stage response, Darktrace prevented the ransomware from spreading further onto the factory floor. Crucially, Darktrace also minimized operational disruption, helping to avoid the domino effect which the attack could have had, affecting not only the supplier itself, but also the electric utilities that this supplier supports.

As both the recent Colonial Pipeline incident and the above threat find reveal, ransomware is a pressing concern for organizations overseeing industrial operations across all forms of critical infrastructure, from pipelines to the power grid and its suppliers. With self-learning AI, these attack vectors can be dealt with before the damage is done through real-time threat detection, autonomous investigations, and — if activated — targeted machine-speed response.

Looking forward: Using Self-Learning AI to protect critical infrastructure across the board

In late April, the Biden administration announced an ambitious effort to “safeguard US critical infrastructure from persistent and sophisticated threats.” The Department of Energy’s (DOE) 100-day plan specifically seeks technologies “that will provide cyber visibility, detection, and response capabilities for industrial control systems of electric utilities.”

The Biden administration’s cyber sprint clearly calls for a technology that protects critical energy infrastructure, rather than merely best practice measures and regulations. As seen in the above threat find, Darktrace AI is a powerful technology that leverages unsupervised machine learning to autonomously safeguard critical infrastructure and its suppliers with machine speed and precision.

Darktrace enhances detection, mitigation, and forensic capabilities to detect  sophisticated and novel attacks, along with insider threats and pre-existing infections, using Self-Learning Cyber AI, without rules, signatures, or lists of CVEs. Incident investigations provided in real time by Cyber AI Analyst jumpstart remediation with actionable insights, containing emerging attacks at their early stages, before they escalate into crisis.

Enable near real-time situational awareness and response capabilities

Darktrace immediately understands, identifies, and investigates all anomalous activity in ICS/OT networks, whether human or machine driven. Additionally, Darktrace actions targeted response where appropriate to neutralize threats, either actively or in human confirmation mode. Because Self-learning AI adapts alongside evolutions in the ecosystem, organizations benefit from real-time awareness with no tuning or human input necessary

Deploy technologies to increase visibility of threats in ICS and OT systems

Darktrace contextualizes security events, adapts to novel techniques, and translates findings into a security narrative that can be actioned by humans in minutes. Delivering a unified view across IT and OT systems.

Darktrace detects, investigates, and responds to threats at higher Purdue levels and in IT systems before they ‘spill over’ into OT. ‘Plug and play’ deployment seamlessly integrates with technological architecture, presenting 3D network topology with granular visibility into all users, devices, and subnets.

Darktrace's asset identification continuously catalogues all ICS/OT devices and identifies and investigates all threatening activity indicative of emerging attacks – be it ICS ransomware, APTs, zero-day exploits, insider threats, pre-existing infections, DDoS, crypto-mining, misconfigurations, or never-before-seen attacks.

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

Darktrace model detections:

  • Initial compromise:
  • User / New Admin Credential on Client
  • Data exfiltration:
  • Anomalous Connection / Uncommon 1 GiB Outbound
  • Anomalous Connection / Low and Slow Exfiltration
  • Device / Anomalous SMB Followed by Multiple Model Breaches
  • Anomalous Connection / Download and Upload
  • File encryption:
  • Compromise / Ransomware / Suspicious SMB Activity
  • Anomalous Connection / SMB Enumeration
  • Device / Anomalous RDP Followed by Multiple Model Breaches
  • Anomalous File / Internal / Additional Extension Appended to SMB File
  • Anomalous Connection / Sustained MIME Type Conversion
  • Anomalous Connection / Suspicious Read Write Ratio
  • Device / Multiple Lateral Movement Model Breaches

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
David Masson
VP, Field CISO

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May 8, 2025

Anomaly-based threat hunting: Darktrace's approach in action

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What is threat hunting?

Threat hunting in cybersecurity involves proactively and iteratively searching through networks and datasets to detect threats that evade existing automated security solutions. It is an important component of a strong cybersecurity posture.

There are several frameworks that Darktrace analysts use to guide how threat hunting is carried out, some of which are:

  • MITRE Attack
  • Tactics, Techniques, Procedures (TTPs)
  • Diamond Model for Intrusion Analysis
  • Adversary, Infrastructure, Victims, Capabilities
  • Threat Hunt Model – Six Steps
  • Purpose, Scope, Equip, Plan, Execute, Feedback
  • Pyramid of Pain

These frameworks are important in baselining how to run a threat hunt. There are also a combination of different methods that allow defenders diversity– regardless of whether it is a proactive or reactive threat hunt. Some of these are:

  • Hypothesis-based threat hunting
  • Analytics-driven threat hunting
  • Automated/machine learning hunting
  • Indicator of Compromise (IoC) hunting
  • Victim-based threat hunting

Threat hunting with Darktrace

At its core, Darktrace relies on anomaly-based detection methods. It combines various machine learning types that allows it to characterize what constitutes ‘normal’, based on the analysis of many different measures of a device or actor’s behavior. Those types of learning are then curated into what are called models.

Darktrace models leverage anomaly detection and integrate outputs from Darktrace Deep Packet Inspection, telemetry inputs, and additional modules, creating tailored activity detection.

This dynamic understanding allows Darktrace to identify, with a high degree of precision, events or behaviors that are both anomalous and unlikely to be benign.  On top of machine learning models for detection, there is also the ability to change and create models showcasing the tool’s diversity. The Model Editor allows security teams to specify values, priorities, thresholds, and actions they want to detect. That means a team can create custom detection models based on specific use cases or business requirements. Teams can also increase the priority of existing detections based on their own risk assessments to their environment.

This level of dexterity is particularly useful when conducting a threat hunt. As described above, and in previous ‘Inside the SOC’ blogs such a threat hunt can be on a specific threat actor, specific sector, or a  hypothesis-based threat hunt combined with ‘experimenting’ with some of Darktrace’s models.

Conducting a threat hunt in the energy sector with experimental models

In Darktrace’s recent Threat Research report “AI & Cybersecurity: The state of cyber in UK and US energy sectors” Darktrace’s Threat Research team crafted hypothesis-driven threat hunts, building experimental models and investigating existing models to test them and detect malicious activity across Darktrace customers in the energy sector.

For one of the hunts, which hypothesised utilization of PerfectData software and multi-factor authentication (MFA) bypass to compromise user accounts and destruct data, an experimental model was created to detect a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) user performing activity relating to 'PerfectData Software’, known to allow a threat actor to exfiltrate whole mailboxes as a PST file. Experimental model alerts caused by this anomalous activity were analyzed, in conjunction with existing SaaS and email-related models that would indicate a multi-stage attack in line with the hypothesis.

Whilst hunting, Darktrace researchers found multiple model alerts for this experimental model associated with PerfectData software usage, within energy sector customers, including an oil and gas investment company, as well as other sectors. Upon further investigation, it was also found that in June 2024, a malicious actor had targeted a renewable energy infrastructure provider via a PerfectData Software attack and demonstrated intent to conduct an Operational Technology (OT) attack.

The actor logged into Azure AD from a rare US IP address. They then granted Consent to ‘eM Client’ from the same IP. Shortly after, the actor granted ‘AddServicePrincipal’ via Azure to PerfectData Software. Two days later, the actor created a  new email rule from a London IP to move emails to an RSS Feed Folder, stop processing rules, and mark emails as read. They then accessed mail items in the “\Sent” folder from a malicious IP belonging to anonymization network,  Private Internet Access Virtual Private Network (PIA VPN) [1]. The actor then conducted mass email deletions, deleting multiple instances of emails with subject “[Name] shared "[Company Name] Proposal" With You” from the  “\Sent folder”. The emails’ subject suggests the email likely contains a link to file storage for phishing purposes. The mass deletion likely represented an attempt to obfuscate a potential outbound phishing email campaign.

The Darktrace Model Alert that triggered for the mass deletes of the likely phishing email containing a file storage link.
Figure 1: The Darktrace Model Alert that triggered for the mass deletes of the likely phishing email containing a file storage link.

A month later, the same user was observed downloading mass mLog CSV files related to proprietary and Operational Technology information. In September, three months after the initial attack, another mass download of operational files occurred by this actor, pertaining to operating instructions and measurements, The observed patience and specific file downloads seemingly demonstrated an intent to conduct or research possible OT attack vectors. An attack on OT could have significant impacts including operational downtime, reputational damage, and harm to everyday operations. Darktrace alerted the impacted customer once findings were verified, and subsequent actions were taken by the internal security team to prevent further malicious activity.

Conclusion

Harnessing the power of different tools in a security stack is a key element to cyber defense. The above hypothesis-based threat hunt and custom demonstrated intent to conduct an experimental model creation demonstrates different threat hunting approaches, how Darktrace’s approach can be operationalized, and that proactive threat hunting can be a valuable complement to traditional security controls and is essential for organizations facing increasingly complex threat landscapes.

Credit to Nathaniel Jones (VP, Security & AI Strategy, Field CISO at Darktrace) and Zoe Tilsiter (EMEA Consultancy Lead)

References

  1. https://spur.us/context/191.96.106.219

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About the author
Nathaniel Jones
VP, Security & AI Strategy, Field CISO

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May 6, 2025

Combatting the Top Three Sources of Risk in the Cloud

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With cloud computing, organizations are storing data like intellectual property, trade secrets, Personally Identifiable Information (PII), proprietary code and statistics, and other sensitive information in the cloud. If this data were to be accessed by malicious actors, it could incur financial loss, reputational damage, legal liabilities, and business disruption.

Last year data breaches in solely public cloud deployments were the most expensive type of data breach, with an average of $5.17 million USD, a 13.1% increase from the year before.

So, as cloud usage continues to grow, the teams in charge of protecting these deployments must understand the associated cybersecurity risks.

What are cloud risks?

Cloud threats come in many forms, with one of the key types consisting of cloud risks. These arise from challenges in implementing and maintaining cloud infrastructure, which can expose the organization to potential damage, loss, and attacks.

There are three major types of cloud risks:

1. Misconfigurations

As organizations struggle with complex cloud environments, misconfiguration is one of the leading causes of cloud security incidents. These risks occur when cloud settings leave gaps between cloud security solutions and expose data and services to unauthorized access. If discovered by a threat actor, a misconfiguration can be exploited to allow infiltration, lateral movement, escalation, and damage.

With the scale and dynamism of cloud infrastructure and the complexity of hybrid and multi-cloud deployments, security teams face a major challenge in exerting the required visibility and control to identify misconfigurations before they are exploited.

Common causes of misconfiguration come from skill shortages, outdated practices, and manual workflows. For example, potential misconfigurations can occur around firewall zones, isolated file systems, and mount systems, which all require specialized skill to set up and diligent monitoring to maintain

2. Identity and Access Management (IAM) failures

IAM has only increased in importance with the rise of cloud computing and remote working. It allows security teams to control which users can and cannot access sensitive data, applications, and other resources.

Cybersecurity professionals ranked IAM skills as the second most important security skill to have, just behind general cloud and application security.

There are four parts to IAM: authentication, authorization, administration, and auditing and reporting. Within these, there are a lot of subcomponents as well, including but not limited to Single Sign-On (SSO), Two-Factor Authentication (2FA), Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA), and Role-Based Access Control (RBAC).

Security teams are faced with the challenge of allowing enough access for employees, contractors, vendors, and partners to complete their jobs while restricting enough to maintain security. They may struggle to track what users are doing across the cloud, apps, and on-premises servers.

When IAM is misconfigured, it increases the attack surface and can leave accounts with access to resources they do not need to perform their intended roles. This type of risk creates the possibility for threat actors or compromised accounts to gain access to sensitive company data and escalate privileges in cloud environments. It can also allow malicious insiders and users who accidentally violate data protection regulations to cause greater damage.

3. Cross-domain threats

The complexity of hybrid and cloud environments can be exploited by attacks that cross multiple domains, such as traditional network environments, identity systems, SaaS platforms, and cloud environments. These attacks are difficult to detect and mitigate, especially when a security posture is siloed or fragmented.  

Some attack types inherently involve multiple domains, like lateral movement and supply chain attacks, which target both on-premises and cloud networks.  

Challenges in securing against cross-domain threats often come from a lack of unified visibility. If a security team does not have unified visibility across the organization’s domains, gaps between various infrastructures and the teams that manage them can leave organizations vulnerable.

Adopting AI cybersecurity tools to reduce cloud risk

For security teams to defend against misconfigurations, IAM failures, and insecure APIs, they require a combination of enhanced visibility into cloud assets and architectures, better automation, and more advanced analytics. These capabilities can be achieved with AI-powered cybersecurity tools.

Such tools use AI and automation to help teams maintain a clear view of all their assets and activities and consistently enforce security policies.

Darktrace / CLOUD is a Cloud Detection and Response (CDR) solution that makes cloud security accessible to all security teams and SOCs by using AI to identify and correct misconfigurations and other cloud risks in public, hybrid, and multi-cloud environments.

It provides real-time, dynamic architectural modeling, which gives SecOps and DevOps teams a unified view of cloud infrastructures to enhance collaboration and reveal possible misconfigurations and other cloud risks. It continuously evaluates architecture changes and monitors real-time activity, providing audit-ready traceability and proactive risk management.

Real-time visibility into cloud assets and architectures built from network, configuration, and identity and access roles. In this unified view, Darktrace / CLOUD reveals possible misconfigurations and risk paths.
Figure 1: Real-time visibility into cloud assets and architectures built from network, configuration, and identity and access roles. In this unified view, Darktrace / CLOUD reveals possible misconfigurations and risk paths.

Darktrace / CLOUD also offers attack path modeling for the cloud. It can identify exposed assets and highlight internal attack paths to get a dynamic view of the riskiest paths across cloud environments, network environments, and between – enabling security teams to prioritize based on unique business risk and address gaps to prevent future attacks.  

Darktrace’s Self-Learning AI ensures continuous cloud resilience, helping teams move from reactive to proactive defense.

[related-resource]

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About the author
Pallavi Singh
Product Marketing Manager, OT Security & Compliance
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