CASE STUDY – MINING
Unified IT/OT security improves visibility and exposure management in a distributed mining environment
DOWNLOAD THE PDFAbout the client
The client is a global gold mining company with operations spanning ten countries across the Americas, Africa and Australia, and a workforce of roughly 40,000 employees and contractors. Its core business is the extraction and processing of gold, with silver and other minerals produced as strategic by-products.
The client’s challenge
The client’s global mining operations rely on a complex mix of IT and OT systems supporting production, safety and environmental controls. Security operations were fragmented across regions and vendors, creating visibility gaps, inconsistent incident response and limited coordination across critical sites. Poor integration between IT and OT environments prevented a holistic view of risk and hindered effective response to threats impacting production.
Key challenges included:
- Rising log ingestion costs, as up to 5,000 daily alerts from the OT monitoring platform (Nozomi Vantage) increased SIEM (Microsoft Sentinel) ingestion from 200GB to 300GB per day.
- Fragmented IT and OT security operations, with separate teams, tools and processes and no unified threat view.
- Limited OT visibility and integration, driven by inconsistent monitoring and weak connectivity between Nozomi Vantage and Sentinel.
- Complex integrations, including Syslog connector issues, JSON Web Token (JWT) authentication challenges and pagination errors.
- Excessive alert noise, reducing analyst focus on production-impacting threats.
- Governance and communication gaps, including unclear ownership, inconsistent reporting and slow escalation between SOC and site teams.
The client’s global footprint also required consistent 24×7 monitoring across time zones and languages, which the existing vendor model could not reliably deliver.
Benefits
- Lower SIEM costs through targeted log-ingestion optimization and removal of redundant data sources.
- Stronger threat intelligence, including detection of leaked credentials and mining-sector threat activity.
- Unified IT–OT visibility via integration of Nozomi Vantage with Microsoft Sentinel, and visibility into 10,000 unmanaged assets.
- Improved governance through new dashboards, daily health checks and clearer operational oversight.
Our solution
CyberProof implemented a unified IT–OT security operations model to deliver end-to-end visibility across the client’s global mining environment while strengthening governance, incident response and threat readiness. The approach integrated technology, processes and expertise into a single operating framework.
Key elements included:
- Integrated IT and OT monitoring, with a converged SOC model connecting Nozomi Vantage to Microsoft Sentinel. Analysts received OT-specific training to enable effective triage and response across production and enterprise environments.
- Detection engineering and playbooks, with new OT-focused incident response playbooks and MITRE ATT&CK-aligned detection tuning to improve coverage, standardize workflows and reduce false positives.
- Operational dashboards and health checks, providing real-time visibility into ingestion gaps, log issues and platform health to improve governance and speed remediation.
- Enhanced threat intelligence, integrating OpenCTI into the SIEM to replace legacy feeds and deliver threat insights tailored to mining operations.
- Credential leak detection, identifying previously unknown exposures and providing clear remediation guidance, alongside onboarding a dedicated tool to improve identity and data leak visibility.
- Improved operational hygiene, including agent rationalization, migration from Microsoft Monitoring Agent (MMA) to Azure Monitor Agent (AMA), log optimization to reduce Azure costs and deployment of structured SOC playbooks.
- Security scorecard integration, automating external security ratings and executive reporting, with proactive alerting for score degradation.
Together, these capabilities delivered holistic visibility, stronger operational control and a unified security posture across the client’s geographically dispersed mining operations.
Results
CyberProof’s unified operating model significantly improved visibility and control across the client’s IT and OT environments. The engagement uncovered major monitoring gaps, revealing that only 7,000 of approximately 17,000 assets were previously visible, enabling the client to bring more than 10,000 unmanaged devices under security oversight.
By integrating Nozomi Vantage with Microsoft Sentinel, CyberProof delivered a single, correlated view across production and corporate systems. New dashboards, health checks and cyber threat intelligence improved oversight of asset coverage, ingestion health and external risk, including earlier detection of credential exposure and mining-relevant threats, establishing a stronger and more measurable security posture across global operations.
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