How Cyber-Attacks Take Down Critical Infrastructure | Darktrace
Cyber-attacks can bypass IT/OT security barriers and threaten your organization's infrastructure. Here's how you can stay protected in today's threat landscape.
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
Oakley Cox
Director of Product
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07
Jul 2021
Balancing Operational Continuity and Safety in Critical Infrastructure
The recent high-profile attacks against Colonial Pipeline and JBS Foods highlight that operational technology (OT) — the devices that drive gas flows and food processing, along with essentially all other machine-driven physical processes — does not need to be directly targeted in order to be shut down as the result of a cyber-attack.
Indeed, in the Colonial Pipeline incident, the information technology (IT) systems were reportedly compromised, with operations shut down intentionally out of an abundance of caution, that is, so as to not risk the attack spreading to OT and threatening safety. This highlights that threats to both human and environmental safety, along with uncertainty as to the scope of infection, present risk factors for these sensitive industrial environments.
Continuity through availability and integrity
In most countries, critical infrastructure (CI) — ranging from power grids and pipelines to transportation and health care — must maintain continuous activity. The recent ransomware attack against Colonial Pipeline demonstrates why this is the case, where gas shortages due to the compromise led to dangerous panic buys and long lines at the pumps.
Ensuring continuous operation of critical infrastructure requires safeguarding the availability and integrity of machinery. This means that organizations overseeing critical infrastructure must foresee any possible risks and implement systems, procedures, and technologies that mitigate or remove these risks so as to keep their operations running.
Operational demand versus safety
Alongside this requirement for operational continuity, and often in opposition to it, is the requirement for operational safety. These requirements can be in opposition because operational continuity demands that devices remain up and running at all costs, and operational safety demands that humans and the environment be protected at all costs.
Safety measures in critical infrastructure have improved and become increasingly prioritized over the last 50 years following numerous high-profile incidents, such as the Bhopal chemical disaster, the Texas City refinery explosion, and the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. Appropriate safety precautions could have likely prevented these incidents, but at the expense of operational continuity.
Consequently, administrators of critical infrastructure have to balance the very real threat that an incident may pose to both human life and the environment with the demand to remain operational at all times. More often than not, the final decision regarding what constitutes an acceptable risk is determined by budgets and cost-benefit analyses.
Cyber-attack: A rising risk profile for critical infrastructure
In 2010, the discovery of the Stuxnet malware — which resulted in a nuclear facility in Iran having its centrifuges ruined via compromised programmable logic controllers (PLCs) — demonstrated that critical infrastructure could be targeted by a cyber-attack.
At the time of Stuxnet, critical infrastructure industries used computers designed to ensure operational continuity with little regard for cyber security, as at the time the risk of a cyber-attack seemed either non-existent or vanishingly low. Since then, a number of attacks targeting industrial environments that have emerged on the global threat landscape.
Figure 1: An overview of distinctive methods used in attacks against industrial environments
Classic strains of industrial malware, such as Stuxnet, Triton, and Industroyer, have historically been installed via removable media, such as USB. This is because OT networks are traditionally segregated from the Internet in what is known as an ‘air gap.’ And this remains a prevalent vector of attack, with a study recently finding that cyber-threats installed via USB and other external media doubled in 2021, with 79% of these holding the potential to disrupt OT.
In many ways, operational demands in the subsequent 10 years have made critical infrastructure even more vulnerable. These include the convergence of information technology and operational technology (IT/OT convergence), the adoption of devices in the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), and the deprecation of manual back-up systems. This means that OT can be disrupted by cyber-attacks that first target IT systems, rather than having to be installed manually via external media.
At the same time, recent government initiatives — such as the Department of Energy’s 100-day ‘cyber sprint’ to protect electricity operations and President Biden’s Executive Order on Improving the Nation’s Cybersecurity — and regulatory frameworks and directives such as the EU’s NIS directive have either encouraged or mandated that critical infrastructure industries start addressing this new risk.
With the severe and persistent threat that cyber-attacks pose to critical infrastructure, including maritime cybersecurity, and the increasing calls to address the issue, the question remains as to how to best achieve robust cyber defense.
Assessing the risk
To claim administrators of critical infrastructure are ignorant or oblivious to the threat posed by cyber-attacks would be unfair. Many organizations have implemented changes to mitigate or remove the risk either as a result of regulation or their own forward thinking.
However, these projects can take years, even decades. High costs and ever-changing operational demand also mean that these projects may never fully remove the risk.
As a result, many operators may understand the threat of a cyber-attack but not be in a position to do anything about it in the short or medium term. Instead, procedures have to be put in place to minimize risk even if this threatens operational continuity.
For example, a risk assessment may decide it is best to shut down all OT operations in the event of a cyber-attack in order to avoid a major accident. This abundance of caution is forced upon operators, who do not have the ability to immediately confirm the boundaries of a compromise. The prevalence of cyber insurance provides this option with further appeal. Any losses incurred by stopping operations can theoretically be recouped and the risk is therefore transferred.
While the full details of the Colonial Pipeline ransomware incident are still to be determined, the sequence of events outlined below provides a plausible explanation for how a cyber-attack could take down critical infrastructure, even when that cyber-attack does not reach or even target OT systems. Indeed, the CEO of Colonial Pipeline, in a testimony to congress, confirmed “the imperative to isolate and contain the attack to help ensure the malware did not spread to the operational technology network, which controls our pipeline operations, if it had not already.”
Figure 2: A sequence of events which may lead to critical infrastructure being shut down by a cyber-attack, even when that cyber-attack doesn’t directly impact OT networks
The limits of securing IT or OT in isolation
The emergence of OT cyber security solutions in the last five years demonstrates that critical infrastructure industries are trying to find a way to address the risks posed by cyber-attacks. But these solutions have limited scope, as they assume IT and OT are separated and use legacy security techniques such as malware signatures and patch management.
The 2021 SANS ICS Security Summit highlighted how the OT security community suffers from a lack of visibility in knowing and understanding their networks. For many organizations, simply determining whether an unusual incident is an attack or the result of a software error is a challenge.
Given that most OT cyber-attacks actually start in IT networks before pivoting into OT, investing in an IT security solution rather than an OT-specific solution may at first seem like a better business decision. But IT solutions fall short if an attacker successfully pivots into the OT network, or if the attacker is a rogue insider who already has direct access to the OT network. A siloed approach to securing either IT or OT in isolation will thus fall short of the full scope needed to safeguard industrial systems.
It is clear that a mature security posture for critical infrastructure would include security solutions for both IT and OT. Even then, using separate solutions to protect the IT and OT networks is limited, as it presents challenges when defending network boundaries and detecting incidents when an attacker pivots from IT to OT. Under time pressure, a security team does not want changes in visibility, detection, language or interface while trying to determine whether a threat crossed the ‘boundary’ between IT and OT.
Separate solutions can also make detecting an attacker abusing traditional IT attack TTPs within an OT network much harder if the security team is relying on a purely OT solution to defend the OT environment. Examples of this include the abuse of IT remote management tools to affect industrial environments, such as in the suspected cyber-attack at the Florida water facility earlier this year. Cybersecurity for utilities is becoming increasingly important as these sectors face growing cyber threats that can disrupt essential services.
Using AI to minimize cyber risk and maximize cyber safety
In contrast, Darktrace AI is able to defend an entire cyber ecosystem estate, building a ‘pattern of life’ across IT and OT, as well as the points at which they converge. Consequently, cyber security teams can use a single pane of glass to detect and respond to cyber-attacks as they emerge and develop, regardless of where they are in the environment.
Use cases for Darktrace’s Self-Learning AI include containing pre-existing threats to maintain continuous operations. This was seen when Darktrace’s AI detected pre-existing infections and acted autonomously to contain the threat, allowing the operator to leave infected IIoT devices active while waiting for replacements. Darktrace can also thwart ransomware in IT before it can spread into OT, as when Darktrace detected a ransomware attack targeting a supplier for critical infrastructure in North America at its earliest stages.
Darktrace’s unified protection, including visibility and early detection of zero-days, empowers security teams to overcome uncertainty and make a confident decision not to shut down operations. Darktrace has already demonstrated this ability in the wild, and allows organizations to understand normal machine and human behavior in order to enforce this behavior, even in the face of an emerging cyber-attack.
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.
Under Medusa’s Gaze: How Darktrace Uncovers RMM Abuse in Ransomware Campaigns
What is Medusa Ransomware in 2025?
In 2025, the Medusa Ransomware-as-a-Service (RaaS) emerged as one of the top 10 most active ransomware threat actors [1]. Its growing impact prompted a joint advisory from the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) [3]. As of January 2026, more than 500 organizations have fallen victim to Medusa ransomware [2].
Darktrace previously investigated Medusa in a 2024 blog, but the group’s rapid expansion and new intelligence released in late 2025 has lead Darktrace’s Threat Research team to investigate further. Recent findings include Microsoft’s research on Medusa actors exploiting a vulnerability in Fortra’s GoAnywhere MFT License Servlet (CVE-2025-10035)[4] and Zencec’s report on Medusa’s abuse of flaws in SimpleHelp’s remote support software (CVE-2024-57726, CVE-2024-57727, CVE-2024-57728) [5].
Reports vary on when Medusa first appeared in the wild. Some sources mention June 2021 as the earliest sightings, while others point to late 2022, when its developers transitioned to the RaaS model, as the true beginning of its operation [3][11].
Madusa Ransomware history and background
The group behind Medusa is known by several aliases, including Storm-1175 and Spearwing [4] [7]. Like its mythological namesake, Medusa has many “heads,” collaborating with initial access brokers (IABs) and, according to some evidence, affiliating with Big Game Hunting (BGH) groups such as Frozen Spider, as well as the cybercriminal group UNC7885 [3][6][13].
Use of Cyrillic in its scripts, activity on Russian-language cybercrime forums, slang unique to Russian criminal subcultures, and avoidance of targets in Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) countries suggest that Medusa operates from Russia or an allied state [11][12].
Medusa ransomware should not be confused with other similarly named malware, such as the Medusa Android Banking Trojan, the Medusa Botnet/Medusa Stealer, or MedusaLocker ransomware. It is easily distinguishable from these variants because it appends the extension .MEDUSA to encrypted files and drops the ransom note !!!READ_ME_MEDUSA!!!.txt on compromised systems [8].
Who does Madusa Ransomware target?
The group appears to show little restraint, indiscriminately attacking organizations across all sectors, including healthcare, and is known to employ triple extortion tactics whereby sensitive data is encrypted, victims are threatened with data leaks, and additional pressure is applied through DDoS attacks or contacting the victim’s customers, rather than the more common double extortion model [13].
Madusa Ransomware TTPs
To attain initial access, Medusa actors typically purchase access to already compromised devices or accounts via IABs that employ phishing, credential stuffing, or brute-force attacks, and also target vulnerable or misconfigured Internet-facing systems.
Between December 2023 and November 2025, Darktrace observed multiple cases of file encryption related to Medusa ransomware across its customer base. When enabled, Darktrace’s Autonomous Response capability intervened early in the attack chain, blocking malicious activity before file encryption could begin.
Some of the affected were based in Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA), others in the Americas (AMS), and the remainder in the Asia-Pacific and Japan region. The most impacted sectors were financial services and the automotive industry, followed by healthcare, and finally organizations in arts, entertainment and recreation, ICT, and manufacturing.
Remote Monitoring and Management (RMM) tool abuse
In most customer environments where Medusa file encryption attempts were observed, and in one case where the compromise was contained before encryption, unusual external HTTP connections associated with JWrapper were also detected. JWrapper is a legitimate tool designed to simplify the packaging, distribution, and management of Java applications, enabling the creation of executables that run across different operating systems. Many of the destination IP addresses involved in this activity were linked to SimpleHelp servers or associated with Atera.
Medusa actors appear to favor RMM tools such as SimpleHelp. Unpatched or misconfigured SimpleHelp RMM servers can serve as an initial access vector to the victims’ infrastructure. After gaining access to SimpleHelp management servers, the threat actors edit server configuration files to redirect existing SimpleHelp RMM agents to communicate with unauthorized servers under their control.
The SimpleHelp tool is not only used for command-and-control (C2) and enabling persistence but is also observed during lateral movement within the network, downloading additional attack tools, data exfiltration, and even ransomware binary execution. Other legitimate remote access tools abused by Medusa in a similar manner to evade detection include Atera, AnyDesk, ScreenConnect, eHorus, N-able, PDQ Deploy/Inventory, Splashtop, TeamViewer, NinjaOne, Navicat, and MeshAgent [4][5][15][16][17].
Data exfiltration
Another correlation among Darktrace customers affected by Medusa was observed during the data exfiltration phase. In several environments, data was exfiltrated to the endpoints erp.ranasons[.]com or pruebas.pintacuario[.]mx (143.110.243[.]154, 144.217.181[.]205) over ports 443, 445, and 80. erp.ranasons[.]com was seemingly active between November 2024 and September 2025, while pruebas.pintacuario[.]mx was seen from November 2024 to March 2025. Evidence suggests that pruebas.pintacuario[.]mx previously hosted a SimpleHelp server [22][23].
Apart from RMM tools, Medusa is also known to use Rclone and Robocopy for data exfiltration [3][19]. During one Medusa compromise detected in mid-2024, the customer’s data was exfiltrated to external destinations associated with the Ngrok proxy service using an SSH-2.0-rclone client.
Medusa Compromise Leveraging SimpleHelp
In Q4 2025, Darktrace assisted a European company impacted by Medusa ransomware. The organization had partial Darktrace / NETWORK coverage and had configured Darktrace’s Autonomous Response capability to require manual confirmation for all actions. Despite these constraints, data received through the customer’s security integration with CrowdStrike Falcon enabled Darktrace analysts to reconstruct the attack chain, although the initial access vector remains unclear due to limited visibility.
In late September 2025, a device out of the scope of Darktrace's visibility began scanning the network and using RDP, NTLM/SMB, DCE_RPC, and PowerShell for lateral movement.
CrowdStrike “Defense Evasion: Disable or Modify Tools” alerts related to a suspicious driver (c:\windows\[0-9a-b]{4}.exe) and a PDQ Deploy executable (share=\\<device_hostname>\ADMIN$ file=AdminArsenal\PDQDeployRunner\service-1\exec\[0-9a-b]{4}.exe) suggest that the attackers used the Bring Your Own Vulnerable Driver (BYOVD) technique to terminate antivirus processes on network devices, leveraging tools such as KillAV or AbyssWorker along with the PDQ Software Deployment solution [19][26].
A few hours later, Darktrace observed the same device that had scanned the network writing Temp\[a-z]{2}.exe over SMB to another device on the same subnet. According to data from the CrowdStrike alert, this executable was linked to an RMM application located at C:\Users\<compromised_user>\Documents\[a-z]{2}.exe. The same compromised user account later triggered a CrowdStrike “Command and Control: Remote Access Tools” alert when accessing C:\ProgramData\JWrapper-Remote Access\JWrapper-Remote Access Bundle-[0-9]{11}\JWrapperTemp-[0-9]{10}-[0-9]{1}-app\bin\windowslauncher.exe [27].
Figure 1: An executable file associated with the SimpleHelp RMM tool being written to other devices using the SMB protocol, as detected by Darktrace.
Soon after, the destination device and multiple other network devices began establishing connections to 31.220.45[.]120 and 213.183.63[.]41, both of which hosted malicious SimpleHelp RMM servers. These C2 connections continued for more than 20 days after the initial compromise.
CrowdStrike integration alerts for the execution of robocopy . "c:\windows\\" /COPY:DT /E /XX /R:0 /W:0 /NP /XF RunFileCopy.cmd /IS /IT commands on several Windows servers, suggested that this utility was likely used to stage files in preparation for data exfiltration [19].
Around two hours later, Darktrace detected another device connecting to the attacker’s SimpleHelp RMM servers. This internal server had ‘doc’ in its hostname, indicating it was likely a file server. It was observed downloading documents from another internal server over SMB and uploading approximately 70 GiB of data to erp.ranasons[.]com (143.110.243[.]154:443).
Figure 2: Data uploaded to erp.ranasons[.]com and the number of model alerts from the exfiltrating device, represented by yellow and orange dots.
Darktrace’s Cyber AI Analyst autonomously investigated the unusual connectivity, correlating the separate C2 and data exfiltration events into a single incident, providing greater visibility into the ongoing attack.
Figure 3: Cyber AI Analyst identified a file server making C2 connections to an attacker-controlled SimpleHelp server (213.183.63[.]41) and exfiltrating data to erp.ranasons[.]com.
Figure 4: The same file server that connected to 213.183.63[.]41 and exfiltrated data to erp.ranasons[.]com was also observed attempting to connect to an IP address associated with Moscow, Russia (193.37.69[.]154:7070).
One of the devices connecting to the attacker's SimpleHelp RMM servers was also observed downloading 35 MiB from [0-9]{4}.filemail[.]com. Filemail, a legitimate file-sharing service, has reportedly been abused by Medusa actors to deliver additional malicious payloads [11].
Figure 5: A device controlled remotely via SimpleHelp downloading additional tooling from the Filemail file-sharing service.
Finally, integration alerts related to the ransomware binary, such as c:\windows\system32\gaze.exe and <device_hostname>\ADMIN$ file=AdminArsenal\PDQDeployRunner\service-1\exec\gaze.exe, along with “!!!READ_ME_MEDUSA!!!.txt” ransom notes were observed on network devices. This indicates that file encryption in this case was most likely carried out directly on the victim hosts rather than via the SMB protocol [3].
Conclusion
Threat actors, including nation-state actors and ransomware groups like Medusa, have long abused legitimate commercial RMM tools, typically used by system administrators for remote monitoring, software deployment, and device configuration, instead of relying on remote access trojans (RATs).
Attackers employ existing authorized RMM tools or install new remote administration software to enable persistence, lateral movement, data exfiltration, and ingress tool transfer. By mimicking legitimate administrative behavior, RMM abuse enables attackers to evade detection, as security software often implicitly trusts these tools, allowing attackers to bypass traditional security controls [28][29][30].
To mitigate such risks, organizations should promptly patch publicly exposed RMM servers and adopt anomaly-based detection solutions, like Darktrace / NETWORK, which can distinguish legitimate administrative activity from malicious behavior, applying rapid response measures through its Autonomous Response capability to stop attacks in their tracks.
Darktrace delivers comprehensive network visibility and Autonomous Response capabilities, enabling real-time detection of anomalous activity and rapid mitigation, even if an organization fall under Medusa’s gaze.
Credit to Signe Zaharka (Principal Cyber Analyst) and Emma Foulger (Global Threat Research Operations Lead
Edited by Ryan Traill (Analyst Content Lead)
Appendices
List of Indicators of Compromise (IoCs)
IoC - Type - Description + Confidence + Time Observed
185.108.129[.]62 IP address Malicious SimpleHelp server observed during Medusa attacks (High confidence) - March 7, 2023
185.126.238[.]119 IP address Malicious SimpleHelp server observed during Medusa attacks (High confidence) - November 26-27, 2024
213.183.63[.]41 IP address Malicious SimpleHelp server observed during Medusa attacks (High confidence) - November 28, 2024 - Sep 30, 2025
213.183.63[.]42 IP address Malicious SimpleHelp server observed during Medusa attacks (High confidence) - July 4 -9 , 2024
31.220.45[.]120 IP address Malicious SimpleHelp server observed during Medusa attacks (High confidence) - September 12 - Oct 20 , 2025
91.92.246[.]110 IP address Malicious SimpleHelp server observed during Medusa attacks (High confidence) - May 24, 2024
45.9.149[.]112:15330 IP address Malicious SimpleHelp server observed during Medusa attacks (High confidence) - June 21, 2024
89.36.161[.]12 IP address Malicious SimpleHelp server observed during Medusa attacks (High confidence) - June 26-28, 2024
193.37.69[.]154:7070 IP address Suspicious RU IP seen on a device being controlled via SimpleHelp and exfiltrating data to a Medusa related endpoint - September 30 - October 20, 2025
erp.ranasons[.]com·143.110.243[.]154 Hostname Data exfiltration destination - November 27, 2024 - September 30, 2025
pruebas.pintacuario[.]mx·144.217.181[.]205 - Hostname Data exfiltration destination - November 27, 2024 - March 26, 2025
lirdel[.]com · 44.235.83[.]125/a.msi (1b9869a2e862f1e6a59f5d88398463d3962abe51e19a59) File & hash Atera related file downloaded with PowerShell - June 20, 2024
wizarr.manate[.]ch/108.215.180[.]161:8585/$/1dIL5 File Suspicious file observed on one of the devices exhibiting unusual activity during a Medusa compromise - February 28, 2024
!!!READ_ME_MEDUSA!!!.txt" File - Ransom note
*.MEDUSA - File extension File extension added to encrypted files
gaze.exe – File - Ransomware binary
Darktrace Model Coverage
Darktrace / NETWORK model detections triggered during connections to attacker controlled SimpleHelp servers:
Anomalous Connection/Anomalous SSL without SNI to New External
Anomalous Connection/Multiple Connections to New External UDP Port
Anomalous Connection/New User Agent to IP Without Hostname
How a leading bank is prioritizing risk management to power a resilient future
As one of the region’s most established financial institutions, this bank sits at the heart of its community’s economic life – powering everything from daily transactions to business growth and long-term wealth planning. Its blend of physical branches and advanced digital services gives customers the convenience they expect and the personal trust they rely on. But as the financial world becomes more interconnected and adversaries more sophisticated, safeguarding that trust requires more than traditional cybersecurity. It demands a resilient, forward-leaning approach that keeps pace with rising threats and tightening regulatory standards.
A complex risk landscape demands a new approach
The bank faced a challenge familiar across the financial sector: too many tools, not enough clarity. Vulnerability scans, pen tests, and risk reports all produced data, yet none worked together to show how exposures connected across systems or what they meant for day-to-day operations. Without a central platform to link and contextualize this data, teams struggled to see how individual findings translated into real exposure across the business.
Fragmented risk assessments: Cyber and operational risks were evaluated in silos, often duplicated across teams, and lacked the context needed to prioritize what truly mattered.
Limited executive visibility: Leadership struggled to gain a complete, real-time view of trends or progress, making risk ownership difficult to enforce.
Emerging compliance pressure: This gap also posed compliance challenges under the EU’s Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA), which requires financial institutions to demonstrate continuous oversight, effective reporting, and the ability to withstand and recover from cyber and IT disruptions.
“The issue wasn’t the lack of data,” recalls the bank’s Chief Technology Officer. “The challenge was transforming that data into a unified, contextualized picture we could act on quickly and decisively.”
As the bank advanced its digital capabilities and embraced cloud services, its risk environment became more intricate. New pathways for exploitation emerged, human factors grew harder to quantify, and manual processes hindered timely decision-making. To maintain resilience, the security team sought a proactive, AI-powered platform that could consolidate exposures, deliver continuous insight, and ensure high-value risks were addressed before they escalated.
Choosing Darktrace to unlock proactive cyber resilience
To reclaim control over its fragmented risk landscape, the bank selected Darktrace / Proactive Exposure Management™ for cyber risk insight. The solution’s ability to consolidate scanner outputs, pen test results, CVE data, and operational context into one AI-powered view made it the clear choice. Darktrace delivered comprehensive visibility the team had long been missing.
By shifting from a reactive model to proactive security, the bank aimed to:
Improve resilience and compliance with DORA
Prioritize remediation efforts with greater accuracy
Eliminate duplicated work across teams
Provide leadership with a complete view of risk, updated continuously
Reduce the overall likelihood of attack or disruption
The CTO explains: “We needed a solution that didn’t just list vulnerabilities but showed us what mattered most for our business – how risks connected, how they could be exploited, and what actions would create the biggest reduction in exposure. Darktrace gave us that clarity.”
Targeting the risks that matter most
Darktrace / Proactive Exposure Management offered the bank a new level of visibility and control by continuously analyzing misconfigurations, critical attack paths, human communication patterns, and high-value assets. Its AI-driven risk scoring allowed the team to understand which vulnerabilities had meaningful business impact, not just which were technically severe.
Unifying exposure across architectures
Darktrace aggregates and contextualizes data from across the bank’s security stack, eliminating the need to manually compile or correlate findings. What once required hours of cross-team coordination now appears in a single, continuously updated dashboard.
Revealing an adversarial view of risk
The solution maps multi-stage, complex attack paths across network, cloud, identity systems, email environments, and endpoints – highlighting risks that traditional CVE lists overlook.
Identifying misconfigurations and controlling gaps
Using Self-Learning AI, Darktrace / Proactive Exposure Management spots misconfigurations and prioritizes them based on MITRE adversary techniques, business context, and the bank’s unique digital environment.
Enhancing red-team and pen test effectiveness
By directing testers to the highest-value targets, Darktrace removes guesswork and validates whether defenses hold up against realistic adversarial behavior.
Supporting DORA compliance
From continuous monitoring to executive-ready reporting, the solution provides the transparency and accountability the bank needs to demonstrate operational resilience frameworks.
Proactive security delivers tangible outcomes
Since deploying Darktrace / Proactive Exposure Management, the bank has significantly strengthened its cybersecurity posture while improving operational efficiency.
Security teams are now saving more than four hours per week previously spent aggregating and analyzing risk data. With a unified view of their exposure, they can focus directly on remediation instead of manually correlating multiple reports.
Because risks are now prioritized based on business impact and real-time operational context, they no longer waste time on low-value tasks. Instead, critical issues are identified and resolved sooner, reducing potential windows for exploitation and strengthening the bank’s ongoing resilience against both known and emerging threats.
“Our goal was to move from reactive to proactive security,” the CTO says. “Darktrace didn’t just help us achieve that, it accelerated our roadmap. We now understand our environment with a level of clarity we simply didn’t have before.”
Leadership clarity and stronger governance
Executives and board stakeholders now receive clear, organization-wide visibility into the bank’s risk posture, supported by consistent reporting that highlights trends, progress, and areas requiring attention. This transparency has strengthened confidence in the bank’s cyber resilience and enabled leadership to take true ownership of risk across the institution.
Beyond improved visibility, the bank has also deepened its overall governance maturity. Continuous monitoring and structured oversight allow leaders to make faster, more informed decisions that strategically align security efforts with business priorities. With a more predictable understanding of exposure and risk movement over time, the organization can maintain operational continuity, demonstrate accountability, and adapt more effectively as regulatory expectations evolve.
Trading stress for control
With Darktrace, leaders now have the clarity and confidence they need to report to executives and regulators with accuracy. The ability to see organization-wide risk in context provides assurance that the right issues are being addressed at the right time. That clarity is also empowering security analysts who no longer shoulder the anxiety of wondering which risks matter most or whether something critical has slipped through the cracks. Instead, they’re working with focus and intention, redirecting hours of manual effort into strategic initiatives that strengthen the bank’s overall resilience.
Prioritizing risk to power a resilient future
For this leading financial institution, Darktrace / Proactive Exposure Management has become the foundation for a more unified, data-driven, and resilient cybersecurity program. With clearer, business-relevant priorities, stronger oversight, and measurable efficiency gains, the bank has strengthened its resilience and met demanding regulatory expectations without adding operational strain.
Most importantly, it shifted the bank’s security posture from a reactive stance to a proactive, continuous program. Giving teams the confidence and intelligence to anticipate threats and safeguard the people and services that depend on them.
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![Data uploaded to erp.ranasons[.]com and the number of model alerts from the exfiltrating device, represented by yellow and orange dots.](https://cdn.prod.website-files.com/626ff4d25aca2edf4325ff97/69601f43842f8016c3898afd_Screenshot%202026-01-08%20at%201.18.52%E2%80%AFPM.png)
![Cyber AI Analyst identified a file server making C2 connections to an attacker-controlled SimpleHelp server (213.183.63[.]41) and exfiltrating data to erp.ranasons[.]com.](https://cdn.prod.website-files.com/626ff4d25aca2edf4325ff97/69601f524d01b4d269313c38_Screenshot%202026-01-08%20at%201.19.06%E2%80%AFPM.png)
![The same file server that connected to 213.183.63[.]41 and exfiltrated data to erp.ranasons[.]com was also observed attempting to connect to an IP address associated with Moscow, Russia (193.37.69[.]154:7070).](https://cdn.prod.website-files.com/626ff4d25aca2edf4325ff97/69601f6a598a3380572e284e_Screenshot%202026-01-08%20at%201.19.32%E2%80%AFPM.png)
