.png)
In cybersecurity, what you can’t see will hurt you.
Effective cybersecurity depends on timely, accurate information, actionable intelligence, and direct visibility into the systems being protected. In operational technology (OT) environments, this has been lacking or at times outright missing.
The convenient assumption has long been that traditional malware detection systems can be adapted to provide meaningful OT protection. They cannot. In reality, the majority of traditional information technology (IT) tools were not designed to operate within the significant structural and environmental limitations of OT devices.
Because of the size constraints in many OT systems, traditional IT security tools are simply too large and resource-intensive to operate inside the very devices they’re meant to protect — as they often do in the IT world. To compensate, these tools are “adapted” to run from the outside, relying on methods like self-reported system behavior, network traffic monitoring, and log file analysis. As malware evolves, and as OT systems continue to modernize, these gaps are becoming more and more obvious — and catastrophic.
Crytica’s Rapid Detection & Alert (RDA) system is a much-needed new approach. It was designed specifically to address the limitations in OT cybersecurity and threat detection. Below are three of the most common and dangerous blind spots we see across the critical infrastructure systems and how Crytica can eliminate them.
1. If You Aren’t Inside, You Can’t Protect
The Problem
Let me say this plainly: if you're not observing from inside a device, you have no real visibility into what is happening inside of that device. From the outside, you may be seeing only what the malware inside of the device wants you to see.
In the OT world, most cybersecurity tools are externally observational. They examine log files, monitor network traffic, and query devices about their status — all relying on “secondary” rather than primary sources. This means they provide inferred intelligence, not direct intelligence, and they operate under a dangerous assumption: that the system being “protected” is trustworthy, and that malware isn’t advanced enough to counterfeit the performance indicators being monitored. That assumption is a mistake — one that history has shown can be disastrous in any conflict.
Today’s sophisticated malware — often enhanced with artificial intelligence (AI) — can subvert every aspect of a device’s performance. It can generate logs and network traffic that look legitimate, hide malicious processes, spoof resource usage reports, and return falsified status updates. From the outside, everything appears normal. Inside, the device may already be under complete control of the attacker.
How Crytica Can Help
Crytica’s RDA system was developed to address this core limitation in OT cybersecurity. Our ultra-lightweight and highly efficient probes are deployed directly inside of protected devices. There they can continuously monitor for unauthorized code injection events. They can even effectively monitor for anomalous performance characteristics. Rather than relying on external-level indicators or system self-reported metrics, the RDA system observes the device from within — detecting malicious activity at the time of injection, prior to any malicious execution.
This approach enables Crytica to identify threats that evade traditional EDR, NDR, and SIEM platforms. It avoids the delays of relying on logs, network traffic or false positives, reducing dwell time and significantly improving the odds of containment before damage occurs.
2. If You Put All Your Eggs in One Basket, You Can’t Protect
The Problem
Multi-function “agents” in security architectures, especially in critical infrastructure, are attractive from a management perspective. They seem conceptually simple: install a single agent in each device to handle everything from scanning to interpreting results to remediating threats. However, such an approach introduces the danger of single point catastrophic failure.
If attackers can locate that one agent, their first move will be to disable or destroy it. In fact, there’s an entire category of malware, known as “hunter-killer” malware, built to do exactly that. Take Hive ransomware, for example. Once it gains access, it systematically dismantles the device’s defenses by stopping antivirus, anti-malware, and anti-spyware tools, removing virus definitions, and disabling Windows Defender entirely through system registry modifications. These actions allow Hive to operate entirely undetected while exfiltrating data and encrypting files.
When all detection logic resides in one agent — or in multiple agents co-located on the same device — a single, well-crafted attack can disable them all in one blow, leaving the system blind and defenseless.
How Crytica Can Help
Crytica’s architecture takes a distributed intelligence approach. Our detection model uses multiple components, working collaboratively in multiple devices in order to render the RDA system much more difficult for attackers to disable.
Crytica’s detection system is built around mutual awareness. Our probes form a cohesive mesh where each node validates both its own state and the health of its peers. This inter-probe communication enables dynamic consensus and rapid alerts if abnormal activity is detected, even when only part of the network is affected.
This concept is best illustrated through a physical-world analogy. When skiing in subzero conditions, it is common practice to ask a partner to inspect your face and ears for frostbite. The reason is simple: frostbite often sets in without self-awareness. You can’t always detect it yourself — but others can.
Crytica applies the same principle to cybersecurity. Each component of our system continuously evaluates the others. A disruption in one probe's behavior, for example, triggers inspection and escalation from the rest of the mesh. In doing so, we eliminate silent failures and ensure system-wide visibility, even under active attack conditions.
The RDA components communicate through an encrypted, digitally signed “heartbeat” signal that confirms the operational integrity of its sender. If a component is disabled or tampered with, nearby components detect the disruption immediately. Compromised or deleted components can be dynamically, rapidly, and autonomously replaced. This self-monitoring resilience ensures the system remains operational, even during active attacks. The “disposable and replaceable” component design protects against both targeted attacks and systemic failures — capabilities that traditional, single-point models are unable to provide.
3. If You Need Remote Communication, You Can’t Protect
The Problem
Almost all contemporary malware detection systems depend on reliable back-end or cloud communications. This is because most rely on AI-enhanced or probabilistic algorithms for threat detection. Unfortunately, these approaches suffer from a common problem: false positives, or alerts that flag harmless activity as malware. To reduce the wasted time and resources spent by Security Operations Center (SOC) staff chasing false alarms, many anti-malware platforms route raw alerts through a team of cybersecurity experts, sometimes assisted by AI tools, before any action is taken.
This introduces a major drawback: no remediation can begin until the alerts have been reviewed. That means:
- Alerts can’t be immediately logged, and responses can’t be launched right away. The review process takes time, creating a significant delay before any constructive actions can occur.
- If the communication link between the attacked devices and the back-end reviewers is disrupted, alerts can’t be reviewed at all.
The second point highlights a perfect strategy for cybercriminals: sever the communication channels between protected devices and the back-end. No communication means no detection — and no protection!
How Crytica Can Help
Our RDA system is very different. It uses a detection algorithm that is binary and deterministic, not probabilistic. It does not require a bank of cybersecurity experts to filter through its alerts. The Crytica probes do not need to rely on continuous connectivity with a remote back-end system. They are designed to be able to function autonomously. This is especially important in remote, semi-air-gapped, and resource-constrained OT environments.
The RDA system can be configured to operate autonomously in collaboration with local remediation systems. It can do without the remote experts and remote AI tools. Meaning, it can detect and alert far more rapidly and is not vulnerable to the clear attack of communication channel disruption.
Eliminating Blind Spots Before They Are Exploited
Cybersecurity failures in OT are rarely the result of a single missed indicator. More often, they are the result of major blind spots. If your security solution 1) lives outside the device, 2) depends on a single agent or multiple agents in the same device, or 3) can’t operate in isolation, then you’re working with blind spots that cyber attackers know how to exploit.
At Crytica, we’re not interested in the illusion of protection. Our RDA system was designed to eliminate these gaps by:
- Embedding lightweight detection mechanisms inside the device
- Deploying a distributed intelligence, self-healing mesh to avoid single point catastrophic failures
- Providing locally “autonomous” and reliable detection and alert capabilities, without the need for back-end communications and reviews
In today’s evolving threat landscape, if you aren’t inside, if you put all your eggs in one basket, and if you’re dependent upon remote communication, then you can’t protect.
Crytica addresses these realities with a purpose-built solution — closing the cybersecurity blind spots that others ignore. Reach out to our team to learn more about our revolutionary RDA system and how to deploy it across your existing infrastructure.
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)