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August 2, 2023

Darktrace's Detection of Ransomware & Syssphinx

Read how Darktrace identified an attack technique by the threat group, Syssphinx. Learn how Darktrace's quick identification process can spot a threat.
Written by
Adam Potter
Senior Cyber Analyst
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
Adam Potter
Senior Cyber Analyst
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02
Aug 2023

Introduction

As the threat of costly cyber-attacks continues represent a real concern to security teams across the threat landscape, more and more organizations are strengthening their defenses with additional security tools to identify attacks and protect their networks. As a result, malicious actors are being forced to adapt their tactics, modify existing variants of malicious software, or utilize entirely new variants.  

Symantec recently released an article about Syssphinx, the financially motivated cyber threat group previously known for their point-of-sale attacks. Syssphinx attempts to deploy ransomware on customer networks via a modified version of their ‘Sardonic’ backdoor. Such activity highlights the ability of threat actors to alter the composition and presentation of payloads, tools, and tactics.

Darktrace recently detected some of the same indicators suggesting a likely Syssphinx compromise within the network of a customer trialing the Darktrace DETECT™ and RESPOND™ products. Despite the potential for variations in the construction of backdoors and payloads used by the group, Darktrace’s anomaly-based approach to threat detection allowed it to stitch together a detailed account of compromise activity and identify the malicious activity prior to disruptive events on the customer’s network.

What is Syssphinx?

Syssphinx is a notorious cyber threat entity known for its financially motivated compromises.  Also referred to as FIN8, Syssphinx has been observed as early as 2016 and is largely known to target private sector entities in the retail, hospitality, insurance, IT, and financial sectors.[1]

Although Syssphinx primarily began focusing on point-of-sale style attacks, the activity associated with the group has more recently incorporated ransomware variants into their intrusions in a potential bid to further extract funds from target organizations.[2]

Syssphinx Sardonic Backdoor

Given this gradual opportunistic incorporation of ransomware, it should not be surprising that Syssphinx has slowly expanded its repertoire of tools.  When primarily performing point-of-sale compromises, the group was known for its use of point-of-sale specific malwares including BadHatch, PoSlurp/PunchTrack, and PowerSniff/PunchBuggy/ShellTea.[3]

However, in a seeming response to updates in detection systems while using previous indicators of compromise (IoCs), Syssphinx began to modify its BadHatch malware.  This resulted in the use of a C++ derived backdoor known as “Sardonic”, which has the ability to aggregate host credentials, spawn additional command sessions, and deliver payloads to compromised devices via dynamic-link library (DLL).[4],[5]

Analysis of the latest version of Sardonic reveals further changes to the malware to elude detection. These shifts include the implementation of the backdoor in the C programming language, and additional over-the-network communication obfuscation techniques. [6]

During the post-exploitation phase, the group tends to rely on “living-off-the-land” tactics, whereby an attacker utilizes tools already present within the organization’s digital environment to avoid detection. Syssphinx seems to utilize system-native tools such as PowerShell and the Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) interface.[7] It is also not uncommon to see Windows-based vulnerability exploits employed on compromised devices. This has been observed by researchers who have examined previous iterations of Syssphinx backdoors.[8] Syssphinx also appears to exhibit elements of strategic patience and discipline in its operations, with significant time gaps in operations noted by researchers. During this time, it appears likely that updates and tweaks were applied to Syssphinx payloads.

Compromise Details

In late April 2023, Darktrace identified an active compromise on the network of a prospective customer who was trialing Darktrace DETECT+RESPOND. The customer, a retailer in EMEA with hundreds of tracked devices, reached out to the Darktrace Analyst team via the Ask the Expert (ATE) service for support and further investigation, following the encryption of their server and backup data storage in an apparent ransomware attack. Although the encryption events fell outside Darktrace’s purview due to a limited set up of trial appliances, Darktrace was able to directly track early stages of the compromise before exfiltration and encryption events began. If a full deployment had been set up and RESPOND functionality had been configured in autonomous response mode, Darktrace may have helped mitigate such encryption events and would have aided in the early identification of this ransomware attack.

Initial Intrusion and Establishment of Command and Control (C2) Infrastructure

As noted by security researchers, Syssphinx largely relies on social engineering and phishing emails to deliver its backdoor payloads. As there were no Darktrace/Email™ products deployed for this customer, it would be difficult to directly observe the exact time and manner of initial payload delivery related to this compromise. This is compounded by the fact that the customer had only recently began using Darktrace’s products during their trial period. Given the penchant for patience and delay by Syssphinx, it is possible that the intrusion began well before Darktrace had visibility of the organization’s network.

However, beginning on April 30, 2023, at 07:17:31 UTC, Darktrace observed the domain controller dc01.corp.XXXX  making repeated SSL connections to the endpoint 173-44-141-47[.]nip[.]io. In addition to the multiple open-source intelligence (OSINT) flags for this endpoint, the construction of the domain parallels that of the initial domain used to deliver a backdoor, as noted by Symantec in their analysis (37-10-71-215[.]nip[.]io). This activity likely represented the initial beaconing being performed by the compromised device. Additionally, an elevated level of incoming external data over port 443 was observed during this time, which may be associated with the delivery of the Sardonic backdoor payload. Given the unusual use of port 443 to perform SSH connections later seen in the kill chain of this attack, this activity could also parallel the employment of embedded backdoor payloads seen in the latest iteration of the Sardonic backdoor noted by Symantec.

Figure 1: Graph of the incoming external data surrounding the time of the initial establishment of command and control communication for the domain controller. As seen in the graph, the spike in incoming external data during this time may parallel the delivery of Syssphinx Sardonic backdoor.

Regardless, the domain controller proceeded to make repeated connections over port 443 to the noted domain.

Figure 2: Breach event log for the domain controller making repeated connections over port 443 to the rare external destination endpoint in constitute the establishment of C2 communication.

Internal Reconnaissance/Privilege Escalation

Following the establishment of C2 communication, Darktrace detected numerous elements of internal reconnaissance. On Apr 30, 2023, at 22:06:26 UTC, the desktop device desktop_02.corp.XXXX proceeded to perform more than 100 DRSGetNCChanges requests to the aforementioned domain controller. These commands, which are typically implemented over the RPC protocol on the DRSUAPI interface, are frequently utilized in Active Directory sync attacks to copy Active Directory information from domain controllers. Such activity, when not performed by new domain controllers to sync Active Directory contents, can indicate malicious domain or user enumeration, credential compromise or Active Directory enumeration.

Although the affected device made these requests to the previously noted domain controller, which was already compromised, such activity may have further enabled the compromise by allowing the threat actor to transfer these details to a more easily manageable device.

The device performing these DRSGetNCChanges requests would later be seen performing lateral movement activity and making connections to malicious endpoints.

Figure 3: Breach log highlighting the DRS operations performed by the corporate device to the destination domain controller. Such activity is rarely authorized for devices not tagged as administrative or as domain controllers.

Execution and Lateral Movement

At 23:09:53 UTC on April 30, 2023, the original domain server proceeded to make multiple uncommon WMI calls to a destination server on the same subnet (server01.corp.XXXX). Specifically, the device was observed making multiple RPC calls to IWbem endpoints on the server, which included login and ExecMethod (method execution) commands on the destination device. This destination device later proceeded to conduct additional beaconing activity to C2 endpoints and exfiltrate data.

Figure 4: Breach log for the domain controller performing WMI commands to the destination server during the lateral movement phase of the breach.

Similarly, beginning on May 1, 2023, at 00:11:09 UTC, the device desktop_02.corp.XXXX made multiple WMI requests to two additional devices, one server and one desktop, within the same subnet as the original domain controller. During this time, desktop_02.corp.XXXX  also utilized SMBv1, an outdated and typically non-compliant version communication protocol, to write the file rclone.exe to the same two destination devices. Rclone.exe, and its accompanying bat file, is a command-line tool developed by IT provider Rclone, to perform file management tasks. During this time, Darktrace also observed the device reading and deleting an unexpected numeric file on the ADMIN$ of the destination server, which may represent additional defense evasion techniques and tool staging.

Figure 5: Event log highlighting the writing of rclone.exe using the outdated SMBv1 communication protocol.
Figure 6: SMB logs indicating the reading and deletion of numeric string files on ADMIN$ shares of the destination devices during the time of the rclone.exe SMB writes. Such activity may be associated with tool staging and could indicate potential defense evasion techniques.

Given that the net loader sample analyzed by Symantec injects the backdoor into a WmiPrvSE.exe process, the use of WMI operations is not unexpected. Employment of WMI also correlates with the previously mentioned “living-off-the-land” tactics, as WMI services are commonly used for regular network and system administration purposes. Moreover, the staging of rclone.exe, a legitimate file management tool, for data exfiltration underscores attempts to blend into existing and expected network traffic and remain undetected on the customer’s network.

Data Exfiltration and Impact

Initial stages of data exfiltration actually began prior to some of the lateral movement events described above. On April 30, 2023, 23:09:47 the device server01.corp.XXXX, transferred nearly 11 GB of data to 173.44[.]141[.]47, as well as to the rare external IP address 170.130[.]55[.]77, which appears to have served as the main exfiltration destination during this compromise. Furthermore, the host made repeated connections to the same external IP associated with the initial suspicious beaconing activity (173.44[.]141[.]47) over SSL.

While the data exfiltration event unfolded, the device, server01.corp.XXXX, made multiple HTTP requests to 37.10[.]71[.]215, which featured URIs requesting the rclone.exe and rclone.bat files. This IP address was directly involved in the sample analyzed by Symantec. Furthermore, one of the devices that received the SMB file writes of rclone.exe and the WMI commands from desktop_02.corp.XXXX also performed SSL beaconing to endpoints associated with the compromise.

Between 01:20:45 - 03:31:41 UTC on May 1, 2023, a Darktrace detected a series of devices on the network performing a repeated pattern of activity, namely external connectivity followed by suspicious file downloads and external data transfer operations. Specifically, each affected device made multiple HTTP requests to 37.10[.]71[.]215 for rclone files. The devices proceeded to download the executable and/or binary files, and then transfer large amounts of data to the aforementioned endpoints, 170.130[.]55[.]77 and or 173-44-141-47[.]nip[.]io. Although the devices involved in data exfiltration utilized port 443 as a destination port, the connections actually used the SSH protocol. Darktrace recognized this behavior as unusual as port 443 is typically associated with the SSL protocol, while port 22 is reserved for SSH. Therefore, this activity may represent the threat actor’s attempts to remain undetected by security tools.

This unexpected use of SSH over port 443 also correlates with the descriptions of the new Sardonic backdoor according to threat researchers. Further beaconing and exfiltration activity was performed by an additional host one day later whereby the device made suspicious repeated connections to the aforementioned external hosts.

Figure 7: Connection details highlighting the use of port 443 for SSH connections during the exfiltration events.

In total, nine separate devices were involved in this pattern of activity. Five of these devices were labeled as ‘administrative’ devices according to their hostnames. Over the course of the entire exfiltration event, the attackers exfiltrated almost 61 GB of data from the organization’s environment.

Figure 8: Graph showing the levels of external data transfer from a breach device for one day on either side of the breach time. There is a large spike in such activity during the time of the breach that underscores the exfiltration events.

In addition to the individual anomaly detections by DETECT, Darktrace’s Cyber AI Analyst™ launched an autonomous investigation into the unusual behavior carried out by affected devices, connecting and collating multiple security events into one AI Analyst Incident. AI Analyst ensures that Darktrace can recognize and link the individual steps of a wider attack, rather than just identifying isolated incidents. While traditional security tools may mistake individual breaches as standalone activity, Darktrace’s AI allows it to provide unparalleled visibility over emerging attacks and their kill chains. Furthermore, Cyber AI Analyst’s instant autonomous investigations help to save customer security teams invaluable time in triaging incidents in comparison with human teams who would have to commit precious time and resources to conduct similar pattern analysis.

In this specific case, AI Analyst identified 44 separate security events from 18 different devices and was able to tie them together into one incident. The events that made up this AI Analyst Incident included:

  • Possible SSL Command and Control
  • Possible HTTP Command and Control
  • Unusual Repeated Connections
  • Suspicious Directory Replication ServiceActivity
  • Device / New or Uncommon WMI Activity
  • SMB Write of Suspicious File
  • Suspicious File Download
  • Unusual External Data Transfer
  • Unusual External Data Transfer to MultipleRelated Endpoints
Figure 9: Cyber AI Incident log highlighting multiple unusual anomalies and connecting them into one incident.

Had Darktrace RESPOND been enabled in autonomous response mode on the network of this prospective customer, it would have been able to take rapid mitigative action to block the malicious external connections used for C2 communication and subsequent data exfiltration, ideally halting the attack at this stage. As previously discussed, the limited network configuration of this trial customer meant that the encryption events unfortunately took place outside of Darktrace’s scope. When fully configured on a customer environment, Darktrace DETECT can identify such encryption attempts as soon as they occur. Darktrace RESPOND, in turn, would be able to immediately intervene by applying preventative actions like blocking internal connections that may represent file encryption, or limiting potentially compromised devices to a previously established pattern of life, ensuring they cannot carry out any suspicious activity.

Conclusion

Despite the limitations posed by the customer’s trial configuration, Darktrace demonstrated its ability to detect malicious activity associated with Syssphinx and track it across multiple stages of the kill chain.

Darktrace’s ability to identify the early stages of a compromise and various steps of the kill chain, highlights the necessity for machine learning-enabled, anomaly-based detection. In the face of threats such as Syssphinx, that exhibit the propensity to recast backdoor payloads and incorporate on “living-off-the-land” tactics, signatures and rules-based detection may not prove as effective. While Syssphinx and other threat groups will continue to adopt new tools, methods, and techniques, Darktrace’s Self-Learning AI is uniquely positioned to meet the challenge of such threats.

Appendix

DETECT Model Breaches Observed

•      Anomalous Server Activity / Anomalous External Activity from Critical Network Device

•      Anomalous Connection / Anomalous DRSGetNCChanges Operation

•      Device / New or Uncommon WMI Activity

•      Compliance / SMB Drive Write

•      Anomalous Connection / Data Sent to Rare Domain

•      Anomalous Connection / Uncommon 1 GiB Outbound

•      Unusual Activity / Unusual External Data Transfer

•      Unusual Activity / Unusual External Data to New Endpoints

•      Compliance / SSH to Rare External Destination

•      Anomalous Connection / Unusual SMB Version 1 Connectivity

•      Anomalous File / EXE from Rare External Location

•      Anomalous File / Script from Rare External Location

•      Compromise / Suspicious File and C2

•      Device / Initial Breach Chain Compromise

‍

AI Analyst Incidents Observed

•      Possible SSL Command and Control

•      Possible HTTP Command and Control

•      Unusual Repeated Connections

•      Suspicious Directory Replication Service Activity

•      Device / New or Uncommon WMI Activity

•      SMB Write of Suspicious File

•      Suspicious File Download

•      Unusual External Data Transfer

•      Unusual External Data Transfer to Multiple Related Endpoints

IoCs

IoC - Type - Description

37.10[.]71[.]215 – IP – C2 + payload endpoint

173-44-141-47[.]nip[.]io – Hostname – C2 – payload

173.44[.]141[.]47 – IP – C2 + potential payload

170.130[.]55[.]77 – IP – Data exfiltration endpoint

Rclone.exe – Exe File – Common data tool

Rclone.bat – Script file – Common data tool

MITRE ATT&CK Mapping

Command and Control

T1071 - Application Layer Protocol

T1071.001 – Web protocols

T1573 – Encrypted channels

T1573.001 – Symmetric encryption

T1573.002 – Asymmetric encryption

T1571 – Non-standard port

T1105 – Ingress tool transfer

Execution

T1047 – Windows Management Instrumentation

Credential Access‍

T1003 – OS Credential Dumping

T1003.006 – DCSync

Lateral Movement

T1570 – Lateral Tool Transfer

T1021 - Remote Services

T1021.002 - SMB/Windows Admin Shares

T1021.006 – Windows Remote Management

Exfiltration

T1048 - Exfiltration Over Alternative Protocol

T1048.001 - Exfiltration Over Symmetric Encrypted Non-C2 Protocol

T1048.002 - Exfiltration Over Symmetric Encrypted Non-C2 Protocol

T1041 - Exfiltration Over C2 Channel

References

[1] https://cyberscoop.com/syssphinx-cybercrime-ransomware/

[2] https://symantec-enterprise-blogs.security.com/blogs/threat-intelligence/Syssphinx-FIN8-backdoor

[3] https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/fin8-deploys-alphv-ransomware-using-sardonic-malware-variant/

[4] https://symantec-enterprise-blogs.security.com/blogs/threat-intelligence/Syssphinx-FIN8-backdoor

[5] https://thehackernews.com/2023/07/fin8-group-using-modified-sardonic.html

[6] https://symantec-enterprise-blogs.security.com/blogs/threat-intelligence/Syssphinx-FIN8-backdoor

[7] https://symantec-enterprise-blogs.security.com/blogs/threat-intelligence/Syssphinx-FIN8-backdoor

[8] https://www.mandiant.com/resources/blog/windows-zero-day-payment-cards

Written by
Adam Potter
Senior Cyber Analyst
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
Adam Potter
Senior Cyber Analyst

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July 8, 2026

Securing AI: Analysis of the Complete Security Stack with Governance and Controls

ai security stackDefault blog imageDefault blog image

Why traditional cybersecurity approaches are not enough for AI

AI adoption outpaces most security programs’ ability to adapt.  That gap is now one of the most consequential sources of cyber risk facing enterprises. As organizations embed generative and agentic AI into development workflows, business operations, and security tooling itself, the question is no longer whether AI will introduce risk. The question is whether organizations understand where that risk actually lives and how to manage it operationally.  

Two recent pieces of guidance underscore this shift:

  1. The upcoming Cybersecurity Framework Profile for AI from NIST
  1. The Five Eyes government guidance on the careful adoption of agentic AI services

Taken together, they point to a critical conclusion. AI security cannot be reduced to model hardening or prompt filtering. It requires a defense in depth strategy that treats AI as both a new attack surface and a force multiplier for defense, while accounting for how AI fundamentally changes scale, speed, and autonomy.  

Recent threat research suggests that today's cyber risk is driven less by initial compromise and more by an adversary's ability to blend into normal operations over time. AI systems create the same exposure in a new form: more autonomy, more scale, and more opportunities for risky behavior to blend into normal operations.

How NIST defines the three core pillars of AI security

The NIST profile organizes AI risk across three inseparable focus areas that span all cybersecurity functions, Secure, Defend and Thwart. These areas are not sequential. They exist simultaneously and must be addressed together.

Secure

This treats AI as an attack surface. It includes models, prompts, agents, pipelines, training and inference data, retrieval augmented generation corpora, and the AI supply chain itself. AI systems are opaque, probabilistic, and non-deterministic by design. Some vulnerabilities are inherent in how models are trained or how data is sourced. Traditional patching does not fully mitigate these risks. This is also where many enterprises are weakest today and, critically, where many security programs stop.  

Defend

This is AI as a defensive force multiplier. AI can improve detection speed, scale, correlation, and response, but only if the right models are used and operationalized correctly. Machine-speed behavior-based detection, response and containment becomes critical in defending non-deterministic systems. Accuracy, explainability, governance, testing, validation, and integration into SOC workflows matter as much as capability. Without those controls, hallucination risk, over automation, and misplaced trust become security risks themselves.  

Thwart

This treats AI as an adversarial accelerant. Threat actors are already using AI to generate targeted social engineering attacks, deepfakes, malware, and autonomous attack agents. Asymmetric warfare is highlighting faster vulnerability discovery and exploitation with a lag on patch development, testing and deployment.  

How this looks in practice

Darktrace researchers observed scaled, automated exploitation of the React2Shell vulnerability within days of disclosure. A vulnerable cloud asset was exploited in under 120 seconds of being deployed. Darktrace research team observed an AI/LLM-generated malware sample used in exploitation activity tied to React2Shell. The significance isn't novelty. It is that AI lowers the barrier to producing usable offensive tooling and compresses the time between experimentation and deployment.  

Tactics are getting more and more creative in order to string together steps of an attack kill chain. This creates a dependency on behavior-based detection, autonomous investigation, autonomous containment, training, resilience investment, and recovery planning across the entire enterprise.

Why agentic AI fundamentally changes enterprise cyber risk

The Five Eyes guidance on agentic AI highlights material changes to the cyber risk profile of an organization. Unlike generative AI systems that produce content for human consumption, agentic AI systems reason, plan, and act autonomously across tools, data, and environments. That autonomy, combined with access to real systems, amplifies the impact of traditional cyber failures and introduces new system level risks that are difficult to predict, observe, and contain.  

Risk in agentic systems does not live in the model alone. It emerges from interactions between models, prompts, memory, tools, APIs, identities, privileges, inter-agent trust relationships, and human assumptions baked into design. Vulnerabilities are often introduced through data, connectors, natural language interfaces, protocols, and drift by design.

In supply-chain incidents, attackers did not need sophisticated exploits to scale impact. They abused trusted systems built for automation and implicit access. Agentic AI inherits that model. Once a system can act across tools, data, and workflows, compromise propagates through trust relationships that were never designed for machine autonomy.

The major agentic AI risk classes include the following:  

  • The identity control for non-human identities or autonomous agents makes it difficult to mitigate over-permissioning, limiting access, scope, and duration, as well as access hygiene
  • Agents are frequently over permissioned
  • Compromised tools inherit agent authority
  • Static secrets enable impersonation
  • Implicit trust between agents enables lateral movement

Design and configuration risks compound this, including privileges evaluated once at startup, poor segmentation, unvetted third party tools, reused authorization decisions outside their original context, and guardrail limitations.  

Behavioral risk  

Agents can optimize for goals in unsafe ways, misinterpret ambiguous intent, chain actions into unintended sequences, change behavior during evaluation, and exhibit deceptive or sycophantic responses.  

Structural risk  

Structural risk follows from agentic systems that are tightly coupled, multicomponent ecosystems. Failures can propagate across agents. Hallucinations cascade downstream. Resource exhaustion becomes systemic. Tool misuse enables indirect prompt injection and command execution. Rogue agents can poison peer agents through trust relationships.  

Accountability

Accountability becomes unclear as autonomy increases. Autonomous agents assume human identity permissions, and humans should have clear ownership of these agents, but they don’t, and this model is flawed. Decision paths are opaque and non-deterministic. Logs are fragmented and difficult to interpret. Reproducing an incident will be impossible without explicit design for observability and forensics. An agent compromise is functionally an insider threat, often with better access and fewer behavioral constraints than a human.  

What does defense in depth look like for AI?

Agentic AI runs on software, networks, identities, and data. It must be governed using the same foundational principles that have proven resilient under uncertainty, including secure by design, defense in depth, zero trust, least privilege, continuous monitoring, behavior-based advanced threat detection and containment, and incident response and recovery.

Core components to a Defense in depth Strategy for Securing the use of AI:

  • Strong, precise identity control plane to include an identity per agent (cryptographic, non‑shared)
    • Privilege monitoring and just‑in‑time access
  • Data Governance
  • Secure‑by‑default configurations
    • Security Posture Management  
    • Zero Trust principles  
  • Strong guardrails, deny‑by‑default policies, and isolation
  • Explicit instruction hierarchies and controlled context
  • Behavioral-based detection across entire enterprise to include inputs, tools, and outputs as well as AI used on the endpoint, across the network, cloud, SaaS, email, and OT
    • Runtime anomaly detection and goal‑drift detection
    • Autonomous containment to mitigate risk and minimize damage
  • Hard boundaries on autonomy and delegation
  • Testing, Evaluation, Validation and Verification  
    • Determine when autonomous action and when human in the loop
    • Adversarial training and agent‑specific testing
    • Simulation, red teaming, and chaos testing
  • Kill‑switches, rollback, and containment mechanisms
    • Forensics data captures, interpretability, autonomous containment, and remediation/recovery plans  

Until standards, tooling, and assurance methods mature, organizations should assume agentic AI systems will behave unexpectedly and design deployments around resilience, behavior-based detection, reversibility, and containment, not efficiency.

How security leaders should prepare for enterprise AI adoption

AI security is not model security alone. Data, pipelines, identities, and agents are first class assets. Many AI attacks succeed through standard cyber failures amplified by AI. Identity, data, and supply chain risk dominate. Behavior-based detection and response are critical, not optional. Logging, provenance, versioning, and forensics data capture of detections are mandatory because you cannot investigate or recover from AI incidents without them.  

Risk will often be visible in behavior before it is clearly defined in policy or guidance. The same pattern has been seen in pre-CVE disclosure detection, where abnormal activity appears before the industry has named or described the vulnerability. AI systems introduce that uncertainty by design.

Security leaders should prioritize controls before AI is fully deployed, avoid generic AI security checklists, integrate AI risk into existing cyber programs, and mitigate the risk of non-deterministic technology with continuous oversight, monitoring, behavior analytics, anomaly detection, autonomous investigation, and autonomous containment.

Visibility has a different connotation with AI. Previously, audit logging worked for software/people, but with Generative AI-based systems, interpretability and explainability is difficult to understand, you cannot "undo" what has been done, or see the logic or control a chain of events. This is why behavioral-based detections and containment becomes critical.  

What capabilities should every AI security program include?

If an organization asked “what must be in place before scaling AI?”:

  1. AI Risk board and approval workflow
  1. IAM + PAM for all AI services and agents
  1. AI asset inventory
  1. Prompt/output DLP with sanctioned AI access – This is not just pre- and post- filters, but behavior-based detections of semantic interface as well as behavior-based analysis of output with associated risk context.  
  1. Shadow AI identification
  1. Secure MLOps – This is an entire paper itself
  1. Runtime guardrails and tool restrictions
    • Including AI Gateway/SASE/Zero trust/
  1. Runtime security with behavior-based detections
    • Complete visibility, monitoring, behavior analytics, anomaly detection, risk/intent/context evaluation of anomalies, autonomous investigation and autonomous containment of all AI assets across endpoint, network, SaaS, SASE, cloud, OT, email, and messaging platforms
  1. Secure data pipelines and data governance
  1. SOC workflow changes from malicious classification workflows to behavior-based detection workflows
  1. Remediation plans for AI-related incidents  

Layered Governance and Security Stack for Securing AI  

The following outline considers governance and security tools that should be considered, well-integrated, deployed, tested, operationalized and embedded within security workflows. These tools and controls map to NIST’s CMF for AI.  

These considerations do not need to be implemented in order. Runtime Detect and Respond will help mitigate risk while Governance, Visibility, and Identity mature.

Category Tooling Controls
Governance & Visibility
  • AI asset inventory / AI CMDB
  • Shadow AI discovery
  • SaaS discovery
  • AI usage on non-endpoint managed systems via network or cloud telemetry
  • MCP server/client usage via protocols
  • Browser telemetry
  • Gateway or SASE telemetry
  • Establish a risk board to set up controls
  • Mandatory registration of AI systems
  • Owner, data classification, intended use, and risk tier
  • Supplier disclosure requirements
  • Risk mitigation plan for AI adoption, innovation, or development
Identity, Access & Agent Control

Non-human autonomous agents should not have the full permissions associated with a human user.

  • IAM with workload identities
  • PAM for AI service accounts
  • Secrets management with short-lived tokens
  • Zero Trust principles
  • Identity, permission, and token hygiene
  • Unique identities per model, agent, and pipeline
  • Least privilege for tools, data, and APIs
  • Explicit approval for autonomous actions
Data Security & Privacy
  • Data classification and labeling
  • Enterprise DLP across endpoint, email, network, cloud, and SaaS
  • Forensics data capture after risky detections
  • Prompt-level DLP through behavior-based semantic analysis with risk and intent context
  • Input/interface analysis for risky data requests
  • Output analysis for sensitive data
  • Data integrity evaluation
  • Retention and redaction policies for prompts and responses
Secure MLOps / LLMOps
  • Secure CI/CD with AI-specific gates
  • Model registries with approval workflows
  • Dependency, container, and artifact scanning
  • SBOM/AIBOM generation
  • IaC security scanning
  • Security posture management
  • Misconfiguration identification
  • Hardening recommendations
  • Signed models and prompts
  • Versioned datasets, configurations, logging, and controls
  • Securing data pipelines
  • Controlled promotion
  • Quality assurance
  • Adversarial testing
Runtime Security

Securing runtime goes beyond guardrails and model firewalls to include behavior-based detections, response, and containment.

  • Detection, monitoring, and SOC integration
  • Centralized visibility into prompts, outputs, and tool calls
  • AI-specific detections
  • Behavior-based detection for AI usage patterns
  • Model drift and behavior monitoring
  • Autonomous containment
  • Behavior-based detection of model inputs and outputs
  • Prompt injection detection
  • Model manipulation, including jailbreaking, poisoning, and related attacks
  • Sensitive data access attempts
  • Behavior-based detection across low-code agents, high-code agents, MCP clients and servers, endpoint, network, cloud, email, SaaS, SASE, IoT, and OT
  • Policy enforcement between users, models, tools, agents, SaaS models/tools, and MCP servers/clients
  • Risk, intent, and context evaluation for detections and response actions
Response & Recovery
  • Autonomous containment
  • AI-assisted playbooks
  • Forensics data capture for AI-related events
  • Model rollback mechanisms
  • Backup and restore for models and datasets
  • Kill switch for agents
  • Autonomous response to agents performing risky behaviors
  • Model and dataset rollback
  • Remediation plans
  • Tabletop exercises
  • Supplier coordination plans
  • Post-incident AI performance validation

AI security requires continuous visibility and behavioral detection

AI changes how fast systems move, how decisions are made, and how risk propagates. It does not change the fundamentals of security. Organizations that succeed will be the ones that apply those fundamentals rigorously, assume failure, and build systems that can detect, contain, and recover when AI behaves in ways they did not anticipate. Security is not what AI is allowed to do. It is whether the organization can understand, trust, and control what AI actually does in practice.  

Take this guidance to understand different initiatives that organizations should be considering. Securing AI is the most critical component to AI safety. As organizations invest more in AI adoption, they should be investing in security in order to mitigate the risk of AI adoption. Organizations should be evaluating their governance and security stack to include well-integrated tools that are deployed, tested, operationalized and embedded within security workflows. While organizations mature in governance, visibility and identity access management, they should be investing in behavior-based detection and autonomous containment to mitigate AI risk.  

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July 6, 2026

NIST Just Proved It: AI Security Can’t Be Solved With Rules

ai security nistDefault blog imageDefault blog image

Static AI guardrails are inherently limited

As organizations adopt generative AI, many still assume that the right set of guardrails will be enough. The problem is you can’t anticipate every way these systems might be misused, abused or attacked. What NIST has done is put a mathematical foundation under that intuition.

In recent research building on Gödel’s incompleteness theorems, which showed that any system built on a fixed set of rules will always have gaps, NIST demonstrates that there is no finite set of guardrails that can be universally robust against adversarial prompts. In plain terms, if your defense is based on a fixed set of rules, there will always be inputs that bypass them. Not because the rules are badly written, but because the problem space is bigger than static rules can ever cover.

This is not new in cybersecurity - detection rules have always had to live with this trade-off. What is different with GenAI is the scale and shape of that problem. These systems are built on human language, and human language is not bounded. It is fluid, contextual and deliberately ambiguous. The number of ways intent can be hidden is effectively limitless. You are not defending against a defined protocol or a fixed exploit chain. You are defending against the entire expressive capacity of people.

So attempting to create a complete set of rules is the wrong starting point. It assumes the problem can be deterministically described. NIST’s work shows that it cannot. Organizations still need a way to manage AI risk, but the traditional approach of defining allowed and disallowed patterns is always going to lag behind what is actually happening. The same input can be benign in one context and risky in another, and static rules struggle to capture that distinction.

The question then is what fills that gap?

AI security must shift from rules to behavior

What's required is a shift in what you are trying to understand. Rules try to describe what should and shouldn't happen. Behavior shows you what is happening. Or to put it another way, if inputs are unbounded and adversaries adapt, the only stable signal is behavior.

In a GenAI context, that means analyzing how an AI model is being used, how prompts evolve over time, how outputs are shaped, and where AI agent interactions start to drift from what is expected. It means moving from static definitions of bad to a more dynamic understanding of intent.

Instead of trying to predict every bad prompt, you focus on identifying when behavior starts to move outside expected norms. Instead of asking whether a single input matches a rule, you ask whether the overall pattern of activity makes sense for the system and how it’s being used.

Guardrails remain important but they are only one layer

This does not eliminate the need for guardrails. They still play a role. But they will never address the entire problem space and are simply one part of your defense in depth approach.

NIST’s proof is useful because it makes this explicit. It removes the assumption that with enough effort, a complete rule set is achievable. It isn’t.

Once you accept that, the shift becomes unavoidable. This is no longer a problem of writing better rules, but of understanding behavior in a space where the possible inputs are effectively unbounded.

For security leaders, that changes the nature of the problem. It is less about defining what should be allowed, and more about recognizing when something is no longer consistent with expected behavior.

That does not remove the need for guardrails, but it does change their role. They set boundaries, but they do not define understanding. The gap between the two is where risk now sits.

In the end, this is what “can’t be solved with rules” really means. Rules will always leave gaps, and those gaps are not theoretical. They show up in how systems actually behave Not what we expect them to do, or what we intended them to do, but what they are doing in practice. That is where the signal is, and increasingly, that is where the security problem sits.

References:

https://www.nist.gov/news-events/news/2026/06/nist-mathematical-proof-supports-transition-continuous-monitor-and-update

https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/11475847

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About the author
Andrew Hollister
Principal Solutions Engineer, Cyber Technician
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