At Rudin Management, our 700 employees are responsible for managing 33 residential and commercial properties in New York City. We pride ourselves on operating these Class A buildings with premier customer service and a real duty of care – a big part of which is ensuring the security of our buildings and clients.

We’ve been keenly aware of developments in cyber over recent years, from new attacker techniques to changes in our own digital environments. It was clear that our cyber security efforts would need to keep pace if we were to avoid causing disruption to the tenants and businesses who use our properties. Prior to Darktrace, we employed a range of security tools, each with a highly specific function. This method was complex, however, and potentially risked leaving gaps for attackers to slip through into our network. We were soon seeking out other solutions.

Protecting every corner of every property

We brought Darktrace in to protect our whole environment, streamlining and strengthening our cyber security processes. For the first time, we have security for our network, ICS, Azure environment, and endpoint devices under one roof – all working together to spot threats. In an era where attackers will no longer confine their efforts to a single system, detecting threats with this extra context provides stronger insights into attacks and can prove essential for spotting dispersed threats. 

Crucially for the work we do, we were able to make this switch without disruption. Darktrace integrated seamlessly with all of the tools we wanted to hang on to, augmenting their capabilities without getting in the way. 

Darktrace is now not only protecting our important IT systems, but our ICS network as well, which alone spans millions of square feet. Keeping this network functioning properly is essential to the upkeep of our common building services, and Darktrace/OT gives us the confidence that we’re safe from OT attacks and dangerous misconfigurations. 

Adding Peace of Mind with Autonomous Response

Beyond simply spotting these threats, Darktrace is able to take action against them with Autonomous Response. Darktrace can respond to threats whether they arise in our network, our individual endpoints, or even our cloud environment. It has totally kept up with our adoption of cloud infrastructure, shining a light on what would otherwise be a major blind spot and taking action against fast-moving threats. These actions don’t get in the way of our normal business operations – they simply cut off the malicious activity and leave us to carry on working hard for our clients. 

Autonomous Response is configurable, meaning we can set it to only take action in certain systems, at certain times or in response to certain threats. We therefore initially considered restricting its ability to take action on our ICS network, but it has since proved to be particularly useful in that area of the environment. 

Autonomous Response secures a dangerous misconfiguration

Limited expertise has long been a concern in the cyber security space, and has often led to strain being put on smaller teams, inevitably causing fatigue and errors. With Darktrace taking on some of our team’s most time-consuming tasks, and its Autonomous Response capability removing the danger of human error and misconfigurations, however, that concern has been alleviated at Rudin Management.

In a recent incident, one of our integrators misconfigured some of our critical ICS systems, exposing them to the internet. This, of course, posed a massive threat. If attackers had been able to take control of our systems, they could have caused massive disruption to our clients, and attempted to leverage a damaging ransom payment out of our business. Gladly, I can say that these were problems we didn’t have to face. On detecting the threat of the misconfiguration, Darktrace’s Autonomous Response blocked access to these exposed components, and prevented the possibility of an intrusion.

Having Darktrace as a safety net has taken the tension out of our security efforts – we now know that should a slip-up occur again, Autonomous Response will be there to keep the organization safe and on course.