Guarding Operational Environments
Visibility into OT & IoT Vulnerabilities
The APT actor known as Salt Typhoon has been linked to deep intrusions into U.S. telecommunications infrastructure and other critical systems. Their campaign has underscored how adversaries are not just targeting IT systems — they are increasingly seeking footholds into OT/IoT layers. In fact, U.S. Army National Guard networks were reportedly “extensively compromised” by Salt Typhoon between March and December 2024, with the use of stealthy techniques that blend into benign activity.
Agencies know that adversaries are probing and targeting infrastructure in the OT and IoT domains. Without specialized visibility and defense at these layers, mission systems risk silent infiltration, persistence, and exfiltration.
Get Immediate OT and IoT Visibility
Agencies operate industrial control systems, field sensors, SCADA interfaces, and smart infrastructure in support of mission-critical functions. State-backed actors may already be mapping or probing their OT/IoT environment, inserting backdoors, or planning future intelligence collection. Here’s how Cynamics Federal can solve for this:
Rapid onboarding in sensor, gateway, and control plane
- Lightweight collectors installed at network ingress/egress points near IoT/OT subsystems
- Passive process monitoring and telemetry capture, without injecting agents on device controllers
Baseline mapping & continuous behavior profiling
- Identification of “normal” profiles of device communication, command flows, firmware versions, uptimes
- Detection of deviations such as unauthorized REST/Modbus calls, firmware changes, local user additions
Threat hunting for Salt-style TTPs
- Application of heuristics modeled on Salt Typhoon’s known techniques (e.g. SSH authorized_keys, configuration dumps, exfiltration via non-standard channels)
- Flagging of suspicious sessions from IoT gateways to unexpected external endpoints or lateral attempts to control-edge systems
Alerting & rapid investigation
- Delivering prioritized alerts (with device context, timestamp, command lines, peer endpoints) to analysts
- Analysts could immediately pivot and validate whether an alert reflects malicious activity
Concrete outcome in the proof window
- Within the first two weeks, the agency detected a dormant backdoor in a networked sensor cluster—unauthorized SSH key insertion
- The threat was neutralized before it escalated to control planes