AI cyber defence specialist Darktrace has created a new business unit to focus on threats to industrial and critical infrastructure.

Darktrace Industrial will identify emerging and existing attack vectors for industrial and critical infrastructure networks.

The company has also updated its Darktrace Industrial Immune System to detect silent and subtle attacks on control systems. New capabilities include: new mathematical techniques focused on detecting low and slow attacks; new ways to analyse and visualise ICS zone structures; improved detection of compliance breaches within OT environments: expanded support for legacy industrial systems and non-traditional IT, such as IoT.

“Cyber-threats to critical infrastructure are evolving at a pace that is nearly impossible to keep up with, and coupled with the escalated international attention to ICS threats, the security of our systems is our utmost business priority,” commented Michael Sherwood, Director of Technology and Innovation, City of Las Vegas. “Darktrace Industrial is fundamentally changing the game of ICS cyber defense – armed with its machine learning technology, we feel confident in our ability to identify the subtle and increasingly sophisticated attacks threatening our infrastructure. The Industrial Immune System’s combination of genuine AI and unprecedented visibility heralds a new future for proactively defending OT environments.”

“Industrial control systems have long operated under ‘air-gap’ principles that assume their isolation from IT and publicly accessible networks. In reality, many are accessible from IT networks for control and integration,” commented Scott Crawford, Research Director for information security with 451 Research. “As ‘smart’ technologies become more integral to physical controls, their wide accessibility and connections to public networks are only likely to grow. This is an increasingly serious concern, considering the public and personal safety dependent on ICS, and the potential for disruption and catastrophic damage.”

“With increased digitisation and the rise of the Industrial Internet of Things, the need for cyber security within operational environments has never been higher,” commented Andrew Tsonchev, Director of Technology at Darktrace Industrial. “Darktrace has a four-year investment in the Industrial Immune System, the world’s first and only proven machine learning technology capable of detecting emerging attacks on OT environments, including ‘low and slow’ attacks, and ‘unknown unknowns’.