Attackers inside OT environments don’t run, they walk slowly, blend in, and map everything before they act. Here’s why cyber deception technology is built for exactly that threat.
64%
YoY increase in ransomware groups targeting industrial organizations in 2025
42 days
Average attacker dwell time in OT environments
$10.22M
Average US data breach cost, an all-time high in 2025
5 days
Average dwell time for organizations with comprehensive OT visibility
OT Environments Were Not Built for Today’s Threat Landscape, and Attackers Know It
Industrial control systems, PLCs, HMIs, SCADA platforms: these were engineered for uptime, safety, and deterministic performance. Security was rarely part of the original design.
That architectural reality is now a strategic liability.
According to Dragos’s 2026 OT/ICS Cybersecurity Year in Review, ransomware groups targeting industrial organizations grew from 80 to 119 in 2025, a 64% year-over-year increase, collectively impacting 3,300 industrial organizations. Manufacturing accounted for more than two-thirds of victims.
The attacker dwell time figure is what should concern every OT security team the most. The industry-wide average in OT environments hit 42 days. That is six weeks of undetected access to systems that control physical processes: compressors, turbines, chemical feed lines, power distribution.
Compounding this, the SANS State of ICS/OT Security 2025 Survey, drawing on responses from 330 industrial cybersecurity professionals, found that only 14% of respondents felt fully prepared for emerging OT cyber threats. Unauthorized external access accounted for half of all incidents, and just 13% of organizations had implemented advanced controls like session recording or ICS-aware authentication.
In roughly 30% of Dragos’s 2025 incident response engagements, it was operational staff reporting abnormal behavior, not automated alerts, that first flagged a potential compromise. In many cases, the telemetry needed to confirm a cyber incident had never even been collected.
Traditional perimeter controls, signature-based detection, and passive monitoring were built for a different era. Network deception for OT systems was built for this one.
What Attackers Are Actually Doing Inside OT Networks Right Now
Modern threat actors operating in industrial environments do not sprint. They move methodically, blend into normal traffic, and spend weeks mapping the environment before taking any action that triggers an alert.
Dragos’s 2026 report introduced three newly tracked threat groups that illustrate this playbook clearly.
Deception Supercharges
Threat Detection & Response
Early Detection and Response
Cyber Terrain Mapping
Noise Reduction
THREAT GROUP TABLE:
Threat GroupTacticTargetStage
AZURITETargets engineering workstations to exfiltrate operational dataIndustrial OT — ICS Kill Chain Stage 2Stage 2SYLVANITEInternet-facing initial access; hands off to VOLTZITE for OT intrusionMulti-sector ICS environmentsStage 1PYROXENESocial engineering + leverages PARASITE data to move IT → OTLinked to IRGC-CEC; deploys wipersStage 2VOLTZITEStealthy long-dwell reconnaissance; steals industry data to manipulate OTUS critical infrastructure, VPNsStage 2
The pattern across all of these groups is lateral movement using legitimate tools, stolen credentials, and trusted protocols. VOLTZITE, for example, conducts granular reconnaissance, scanning entire control loops including HMIs, variable frequency drives, metering modules, and remote gateways, before ever triggering an observable action.
North America experienced approximately 54% of global ransomware incidents targeting industrial organizations in Q2 2025, with the United States accounting for the majority. Manufacturing, transportation, and ICS equipment and engineering consistently remained the top targeted sectors.
“The threat landscape in 2025 reached a new level of maturity. Adversaries are mapping how control systems work, understanding where commands originate, how they propagate, and where physical effects can be induced.”
This is the structural challenge: attackers only need one path in, and they have time to find it. Defenders must watch every path simultaneously, in environments built decades before modern threat intelligence existed.
Why Conventional Security Controls Fail to Detect Threats Early in OT
The Fortinet 2025 State of Operational Technology and Cybersecurity Report, based on a global survey of more than 550 OT professionals, found meaningful maturity progress, but persistent detection gaps remain for organizations that haven’t moved beyond Level 1 or 2 maturity.
The alert fatigue problem runs deep. Security teams drowning in too many security alerts cannot separate meaningful signals from noise. In OT, a missed signal doesn’t just mean a compromised laptop, it can mean a disrupted production line, a tripped safety relay, or a compromised physical process.
Traditional Detection Weaknesses in OT
High false positive rates exhaust small security teams
Signature-based rules miss living-off-the-land techniques
Legitimate credentials bypass behavioral baselines
Passive monitoring offers no attacker engagement or intelligence
Limited OT protocol visibility at lower Purdue levels
Alerts don’t fire until after damage-stage activity
Perimeter tools are blind to insider threats and compromised users
What Network Deception Adds
Limited visibility into encrypted network traffic
Catches lateral movement even with valid stolen credentials
Fires early during reconnaissance, before production systems are touched
Active engagement yields attacker TTPs and internal threat intelligence
High-fidelity decoys emulate production services and protocols to appear legitimate to attackers
Traps compromised users and insider threats accessing decoy assets
Operates passively, with no operational risk to ICS uptime
The SANS 2025 survey reinforced this visibility problem: asset inventory and detection coverage collapsed sharply at Purdue Levels 2–3 and at remote or unmanned sites, exactly the areas where adversaries like VOLTZITE operate most aggressively.
How Network Deception Catches Attackers — Step By Step
Step 1: Attacker Gains Initial Access
Threat actor enters via phishing, VPN exploit, or compromised vendor credentials. Traditional controls may not fire — the attacker is using a valid identity or known-good protocol.
Step 2: Reconnaissance Begins. Attacker Finds Breadcrumbs
The attacker harvests credentials from endpoints, scans for open shares, maps Active Directory. Fidelis-planted breadcrumbs, fake cached connections, ghost AD accounts, fake config entries, appear to point toward high-value targets.
Step 3: Attacker Reaches a Decoy. Deception Alert Fires
The decoy mimics a legitimate server, PLC, HMI, or engineering workstation with full protocol fidelity. The moment the attacker interacts, whether through a query, a login attempt, a scan, a high-confidence deception alert triggers. No legitimate user or system ever touches these decoys.
Step 4: Intelligence Gathered. Attacker Contained
While the attacker interacts with the controlled decoy environment, defenders observe their full TTPs, including entry point, tools, target preferences, lateral movement path. This creates internal threat intelligence that strengthens real asset hardening. Incident response begins with clear, rich context.
Note: Organizations with comprehensive OT visibility detected and contained incidents in ~5 days vs. the 42-day industry average. Source: Dragos 2026 OT/ICS Report
How Deception Technology Works Inside OT, and Why OT Requires a Different Approach
Network deception operates on a fundamentally different logic than conventional security. Rather than trying to distinguish malicious behavior from the noise of thousands of legitimate events, deception creates an environment where any unauthorized interaction is, by definition, suspicious.
The core mechanism: deception decoys, which are fake assets built to mimic real OT devices, are distributed throughout the network. Fidelis emulated decoys natively support IT protocols, which are commonly used across OT networks. For OT protocol support such as Modbus, DNP3, or EtherNet/IP, customers can build RealOS decoys configured to emulate OT devices and their native protocol behavior. They respond to scans, queries, and polling patterns just as production assets would. But no legitimate process or user has any reason to interact with them.
When something interacts with them, that is a confirmed threat.
Why IT Deception Tools Cannot Simply Be Dropped Into OT Environments
This is a critical technical distinction. OT environments operate under strict availability and safety requirements that have no equivalent in IT.
Zero tolerance for added latency.
Control loops at Purdue Levels 0–1 operate in real time. Any inline security component that introduces delay is unacceptable and potentially hazardous.
Protocol specificity is mandatory.
A decoy PLC that doesn’t respond accurately to Modbus, DNP3, or EtherNet/IP will be immediately flagged as anomalous by an experienced attacker. Customers can build Fidelis RealOS decoys configured to emulate OT devices and support these protocols accurately.
Off-path architecture is non-negotiable.
Effective OT deception decoys occupy unused IP addresses and never initiate traffic. When deployed alongside Fidelis Network, mirrored traffic can be analyzed without touching production systems, preserving uptime and operational stability.
Safety systems must be excluded.
No deception component should ever be placed on or adjacent to safety-critical systems (SIS). This requires a thorough asset map before deployment.
Done right, deception delivers high-fidelity detection with zero operational risk, a combination that is uniquely difficult to achieve with any other security control in OT environments.
Active Directory Deception: Stopping Privilege Escalation Before It Reaches Production
A significant percentage of OT incidents involve identity abuse, stolen credentials, lateral movement via valid accounts, and privilege escalation. IBM’s 2025 Cost of a Data Breach Report found phishing and credential theft among the costliest attack vectors, averaging $4.8M per breach.
AD deception directly addresses this. Fake AD objects, ghost service accounts, and planted honey credentials are seeded throughout the directory. When an attacker harvests these credentials, from an infected endpoint, from a BloodHound enumeration, or from a reconnaissance scan, and attempts to use them, they walk directly into a deception trap. The attempted privilege escalation is intercepted before reaching any real domain asset.
Fidelis Deception® plants fake high-privilege accounts in Active Directory bound to network decoys. When an attacker queries AD and uses these seeded credentials, high-fidelity alerts trigger immediately, and AD logs are analyzed to detect unauthorized enumeration, even before credentials are used.
5 Measurable Outcomes Deception Technology Delivers for OT Security Teams
BenefitWhat It Means in PracticeEvidence
Dramatically shorter dwell timeDetect attackers at the reconnaissance stage before they reach critical assets5 days vs 42 days avgExtremely low false positivesEvery deception alert is confirmed attacker behavior. No legitimate process touches decoysAlerts trigger only upon interaction with decoy assets, minimizing false positivesInternal threat intelligence creationObserve full attacker TTP in a controlled setting; harden real assets from what you learnBehavioral data collected during decoy engagementProactive threat hunting supportDeception alerts provide confirmed starting indicators for threat hunters with no more blind searchesSANS 2025: ICS-specific intel improves detection outcomesFaster, more surgical incident responseAlert contains attacker location, tools used, and segment of origin. Response is immediate and targetedEarly-stage detection during reconnaissance reduces time to identify and contain threats
The Fortinet 2025 OT Report found that the percentage of organizations reporting no intrusions at all grew from 6% in 2022 to 52% in 2025. Deception is a direct accelerant of that maturity curve.
Deception Is Particularly Effective Against Insider Threats and Compromised Users
One underestimated strength of cyber deception in OT is its performance against insider threats and compromised users, the attacks that conventional detection handles worst.
Insiders use legitimate credentials, access systems they’re entitled to reach, and behave in ways that look normal from a perimeter perspective. Compromised user accounts present the same challenge. The attacker is the legitimate user, as far as your controls are concerned.
Deception changes this entirely. When a malicious insider or a compromised user traverses the network looking for valuable data, they encounter decoy assets that appear attractive, such as fake databases, ghost file shares, decoy engineering workstations. Any interaction triggers an alert. The attack surface that was previously invisible to security teams becomes a detection surface.
IBM’s 2025 report found that the most expensive breach type involves slow-moving, credential-based attacks that evade perimeter controls entirely. Deception catches exactly these at the movement stage, not after data has been touched.
This is also where account hijacking attacks and stolen credentials being used for lateral movement get intercepted. The attacker moves with a valid identity, looks normal to every other control, and then steps into a deception trap because they navigated to an asset that only attackers seek out.
Deception Is Not a Point Solution — How It Integrates with NDR, EDR, and Zero Trust
Deception technology is not a replacement for existing controls. It is an active defense layer that fills a specific, critical gap: detecting threats that bypass perimeter controls and operate inside your environment using legitimate-looking behavior.
The most effective OT security architectures layer deception with:
Network Detection and Response (NDR): for behavioral baselines and broad network visibility across all traffic flows
Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR): for process-level visibility on managed endpoints and servers
Zero Trust Architecture: for identity-based access controls that limit blast radius if credentials are stolen
Network Access Control (NAC): for enforcing which devices can connect to which segments
SIEM/SOAR: for centralizing deception alerts alongside other telemetry for coordinated response
The deception layer catches what all others miss: the attacker who has slipped past the perimeter, evaded NDR behavioral detection, and is moving with valid credentials. When that attacker touches a decoy, the alert fires with the exact context the rest of your stack needs to respond effectively.
This is equally important for cloud and IoT deception. Modern OT environments extend far beyond the plant floor, including cloud-managed SCADA, IoT sensors, remote access gateways, and edge nodes. Effective deception strategies extend across this entire terrain, with decoys that adapt to hybrid and distributed deployments, not just on-premises ICS.
Aligning security controls tightly across these layers means that even the most sophisticated attack, using legitimate tools, valid credentials, and trusted protocols, encounters a deception trap before it reaches business-critical systems.
Fidelis Deception® is Designed for Segmented and High-Availability Environments
Fidelis Deception® analyzes the environment to generate high-fidelity decoys that mirror real systems, including servers, endpoints, and directory services, based on observed network and identity characteristics. Decoys are deployed as lightweight virtual images and containerized services running off-path, never inline with production traffic.
Active Directory Intercept seeds fake high-privilege accounts, ghost users, and honey credentials throughout the directory. When attackers enumerate AD and use these credentials, high-fidelity alerts fire immediately.
Breadcrumbs — fake cached connections, planted config entries, registry-level credential artifacts are placed on real systems to guide attackers toward the deception layer rather than production assets.
Natively integrated within Fidelis Elevate® XDR, deception works alongside NDR and EDR in a unified defense architecture. Alerts flow into SIEM and SOAR through open APIs. The result is broad threat coverage across IT, OT, cloud, and identity, with a centralized deception server managing all decoy deployment and monitoring from a single pane of glass.
Key capabilities:
Off-path / passive deployment
Protocol-aware OT decoys
Active Directory Intercept
Automated breadcrumbs
Support for hybrid and cloud-based environments
Native XDR integration
Centralized deception server
Off-path deployment designed to avoid disruption to production systems
The Financial and Operational Case for Deception in 2026
The cost argument for network deception in OT environments has never been more concrete.
IBM’s 2025 Cost of a Data Breach Report (Ponemon Institute) found that the average US breach cost reached $10.22 million, an all-time high, up 9% year-over-year, driven by regulatory penalties and slower detection times. Faster detection is the single most effective cost reducer in the report’s findings.
The global deception technology market reflects growing recognition of this value. According to Grand View Research, the market is projected to reach $4.59 billion by 2030, growing at a 13.2% CAGR from 2024, with North America holding a 35.3% revenue share. The US deception technology market alone is projected to grow at a 12.4% CAGR through 2030.
Gartner’s September 2025 analysis predicted that preemptive cybersecurity capabilities, including deception, will represent over 50% of IT security spending by 2030, up from less than 5% in 2024.
Real-World Performance Data
Avoiding False Savings
Why Fidelis Outperforms the Competition
COMPARISON TABLE:
MetricWithout DeceptionWith Comprehensive OT Visibility + Deception
Average OT ransomware dwell time42 days~5 daysAlert qualityHigh false positive rate, analyst fatigueNear-zero false positives, every alert is confirmedAttacker intelligence gatheredMinimal, attackers move unseenFull TTP capture in controlled decoy environmentInsider threat coverageLow, insiders use legitimate accessHigh, decoys catch unauthorized asset explorationUS breach cost exposure$10.22M average (IBM 2025)Significantly reduced by faster detection + containment
Deception Turns the Terrain Against Attackers; That Is Why It Works
Industrial organizations in 2026 face a threat landscape that has matured well beyond opportunistic access. Adversaries are mapping control systems, pre-positioning for operational disruption, and moving with patience and precision through environments that were never designed to detect them.
Conventional detection, perimeter controls, signature-based rules, behavioral baselines, leaves a fundamental gap: the period between initial access and eventual detection, when attackers move freely using legitimate tools and stolen credentials. That gap, averaging 42 days in OT environments, is where physical consequences are planned.
Network deception closes that gap. By making the terrain itself hostile to attackers, seeding breadcrumbs, deploying convincing decoys, and creating traps that fire only on genuine malicious behavior, deception technology delivers early threat detection at the exact point where conventional controls fail.
The result is a robust cybersecurity strategy that doesn’t ask security teams to do more with the same broken approach. It changes the fundamental dynamic: attackers who enter your network will encounter a terrain designed to expose them, study them, and stop them before they ever reach what matters.
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