Darktrace, the leader in Enterprise and Industrial Immune System technology, has today announced that top organizations are rapidly deploying its self-learning platform to protect their critical infrastructure. Leading organizations such as Drax, City of Las Vegas and Truckee Donner Public Utility District are now using Darktrace’s Industrial Immune System technology for cyber defense.

Industrial Control Systems (ICS) are at the heart of modern industry. They maintain control over facilities such as power stations, water distribution, and manufacturing production lines, monitoring complex processes and equipment. As Operational Technology (OT) and IT networks converge, organizations across all industries are realizing the limitations of perimeter defenses to protect their critical infrastructure. Now open to the same attack vectors as traditional networks, industrial control systems are inherently less secure but their compromise can lead to catastrophic consequences.

Powered by unsupervised machine learning, the Industrial Immune System autonomously learns about the normal ‘pattern of life’ of each user and device across the entire network and uses that baseline to detect threatening anomalies in real time. Created by mathematicians from the University of Cambridge, the Industrial Immune System is a self-configuring platform that requires no prior set-up and uses AI algorithms that mimic the human immune system to detect and defend against the most sophisticated threats, including ‘unknown unknowns’.

We no longer live in an era where cyber-attacks are limited to the desktop or server,” commented Michael Sherwood, CIO, City of Las Vegas. “IT and OT networks have never been more connected and as a result, threat-actors are setting their sights on critical infrastructure, where the decentralized facilities make the network hard to physically secure. Darktrace’s machine learning approach provides unprecedented awareness across both our IT and OT networks, making it uniquely capable of fighting the battle before it has truly begun.”

Sophisticated threat-actors now have both the motivation and capability to compromise critical infrastructure,” commented Nicole Eagan, CEO, Darktrace. “As ICS facilities become increasingly connected to the corporate network and the internet, the security of OT environments has never been more at risk. Unsupervised machine learning and AI algorithms will be crucial to detecting these emerging threats within critical infrastructure, before they do damage.”