Blog
/
Cloud
/
February 3, 2025

CNAPP Alone Isn’t Enough: Focusing on CDR for Real-Time Cross Domain Protection

Default blog imageDefault blog imageDefault blog imageDefault blog imageDefault blog imageDefault blog image
03
Feb 2025
This blog dives into the strengths and limitations of CNAPP, explaining how a CDR solution can enhance cloud security to identify and mitigate cross-domain threats.

Forecasts predict public cloud spending will soar to over $720 billion by 2025, with 90%[1] of organizations embracing a hybrid cloud approach by 2027. These figures could also be eclipsed as more businesses unearth the potential impact that AI can make on their productivity. The pace of evolution is staggering, but one thing hasn’t changed: the cloud security market is a maze of complexity. Filled with acronyms, overlapping capabilities, and endless use cases tailored to every buyer persona.

On top of this, organizations face a fragmented landscape of security tools, each designed to cover just one slice of the cloud security puzzle. Then there’s CNAPP (Cloud-Native Application Protection Platform) — a broad platform promising to do it all but often falling short, especially around providing runtime detection and response capabilities. It’s no wonder organizations struggle to cut through the noise and find the precision they require.

Looking more closely at what CNAPP has to offer, it can feel like as if it is all you would ever need, but is that really the case?

Strengths and limitations of CNAPP

A CNAPP is undeniably a compelling solution, originally coming from CSPM (Cloud Security Posture Management), it provided organizations with a snapshot of their deployed cloud assets, highlighting whether they were as secure as intended. However, this often resulted in an overwhelming list of issues to fix, leaving organizations unsure where to focus their energy for maximum impact.

To address this, CNAPP’s evolved, incorporating capabilities like; identifying software vulnerabilities, mapping attack paths, and understanding which identities could act within the cloud. The goal became clear: prioritize fixes to reduce the risk of compromise.

But what if we could avoid these problems altogether? Imagine deploying software securely from the start — preventing the merging of vulnerable packages and ensuring proper configurations in production environments by shifting left. This preventative approach is vital to any “secure by design” strategy, CNAPP’s again evolving to add this functionality alongside.

However, as applications grow more complex, so do the variety and scope of potential issues. The responsibility for addressing these challenges often falls to engineers, who are left balancing the pressure to write code with the burden of fixing critical findings that may never even pose a real risk to the organization.

While CNAPP serves as an essential risk prevention tool — focusing on hygiene, compliance, and enabling organizations to deploy high-quality code on well-configured infrastructure — its role is largely limited to reducing the potential for issues. Once applications and infrastructure are live, the game changes. Security’s focus shifts to detecting unwanted activity and responding to real-time risks.

Limitations of CNAPP

Here’s where CNAPP shows its limitations:

1. Blind spots for on-premises workloads

Designed for cloud-native environments, it can leave blind spots for workloads that remain on-premises — a significant concern given that 90% of organizations are expected to adopt a hybrid cloud strategy by 2027. These blind spots can increase the risk of cross-domain attacks, underscoring the need for a solution that goes beyond purely prevention but adds real-time detection and response.

2. Detecting and mitigating cross-domain threats

Adversaries have evolved to exploit the complexity of hybrid and cloud environments through cross-domain attacks. These attacks span multiple domains — including traditional network environments, identity systems, SaaS platforms, and cloud environments — making them exceptionally difficult to detect and mitigate. Attackers are human and will naturally choose the path of least resistance, why spend time writing a detailed software exploit for a vulnerability if you can just target the identity?

Imagine a scenario where an attacker compromises an organization via leaked credentials and then moves laterally, similar to the example outlined in this blog: The Price of Admission: Countering Stolen Credentials with Darktrace. If an attacker identifies cloud credentials and moves into the cloud control plane, they could access additional sensitive data. Without a detection platform that monitors these areas for unusual activity, while working to consolidate findings into a unified timeline, detecting these types of attacks becomes incredibly challenging.

A CNAPP might only point to a potential misconfiguration of an identity or for example a misconfiguration around secret storage, but it cannot detect when that misconfiguration has been exploited — let alone respond to it.

Identity + Network: Unlocking cross-domain threats

Identity is more than just a role or username; it is essentially an access point for attackers to leverage and move between different areas of a digital estate. Real-time monitoring of human and non-human identities is crucial for understanding intent, spotting anomalies, and preventing possible attacks before they spread.

Non-human roles, such as service accounts or automation tooling, often operate with trust and without oversight. In 2024, the Cybersecurity and Critical Infrastructure Agency (CISA) [2] released a warning regarding new strategies employed by SolarWinds attackers. These strategies were primarily aimed at cloud infrastructure and non-human identities. The warning details how attackers leverage credentials and valid applications for malicious purposes.

With organizations opting for a hybrid approach, combining network, identity, cloud management and cloud runtime activity is essential to detecting and mitigating cross domain attacks, these are just some of the capabilities needed for effective detection and response:

  • AI driven automated and unified investigation of events – due to the volume of data and activity within businesses digital estates leveraging AI is vital, to enable SOC teams in understanding and facilitating proportional and effective responses.
  • Real-time monitoring auditing combined with anomaly detection for human and non-human identities.
  • A unified investigation platform that can deliver a real-time understanding of Identity, deployed cloud assets, runtime and contextual findings as well as coverage for remaining on premises workloads.
  • The ability to leverage threat intelligence automatically to detect potential malicious activities quickly.

The future of cloud security: Balancing risk management with real-time detection and response

Darktrace / CLOUD's CDR approach enhances CNAPP by providing the essential detection and native response needed to protect against cross-domain threats. Its agentless, default setup is both cost-effective and scalable, creating a runtime baseline that significantly boosts visibility for security teams. While proactive controls are crucial for cloud security, pairing them with Cloud Detection and Response solutions addresses a broader range of challenges.

With Darktrace / CLOUD, organizations benefit from continuous, real-time monitoring and advanced AI-driven behavioral detection, ensuring proactive detection and a robust cloud-native response. This integrated approach delivers comprehensive protection across the digital estate.

Unlock advanced cloud protection

Darktrace / CLOUD solution brief screenshot

Download the Darktrace / CLOUD solution brief to discover how autonomous, AI-driven defense can secure your environment in real-time.

  • Achieve 60% more accurate detection of unknown and novel cloud threats.
  • Respond instantly with autonomous threat response, cutting response time by 90%.
  • Streamline investigations with automated analysis, improving ROI by 85%.
  • Gain a 30% boost in cloud asset visibility with real-time architecture modeling.

References

  1. https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2024-11-19-gartner-forecasts-worldwide-public-cloud-end-user-spending-to-total-723-billion-dollars-in-2025
  2. https://www.cisa.gov/news-events/cybersecurity-advisories/aa24-057a
Inside the SOC
Darktrace cyber analysts are world-class experts in threat intelligence, threat hunting and incident response, and provide 24/7 SOC support to thousands of Darktrace customers around the globe. Inside the SOC is exclusively authored by these experts, providing analysis of cyber incidents and threat trends, based on real-world experience in the field.
Author
Adam Stevens
Director of Product, Cloud Security
Book a 1-1 meeting with one of our experts
Share this article

More in this series

No items found.

Blog

/

OT

/

April 4, 2025

Darktrace Named as Market Leader in the 2025 Omdia Market Radar for OT Cybersecurity Platforms

Default blog imageDefault blog image

We are pleased to announce that Darktrace / OT has been named a Market Leader in Omdia’s  2025 Market Radar for OT Cybersecurity Platforms. We believe this highlights our unique capabilities in the OT security market and follows similar recognition from Gartner who recently named Darktrace / OT as the sole Visionary in in the Magic Quadrant for Cyber Physical Systems (CPS) Protection Platforms market.

Historically, IT and OT systems have been managed separately, creating challenges due to the differences of priorities between the two domains. While both value availability, IT emphasizes confidentiality and integrity whereas OT focuses on safety and reliability. Organizations are increasingly converging these systems to reap the benefits of automation, efficiency, and productivity (1).

Omdia’s research highlights that decision makers are increasingly prioritizing comprehensive security coverage, centralized management, and advanced cybersecurity capabilities when selecting OT security solutions (1).

Rising productivity demands have driven the convergence of OT, IT, and cloud-connected systems, expanding attack surfaces and exposing vulnerabilities. Darktrace / OT provides a comprehensive OT security solution, purpose-built for critical infrastructure, offering visibility across OT, IoT, and IT assets, bespoke risk management, and industry-leading threat detection and response powered by Self-Learning AITM.

Figure 1: Omdia vendor overview for OT cybersecurity platforms
Figure 1: Omdia vendor overview for OT cybersecurity platforms

An AI-first approach to OT security  

Many OT security vendors have integrated AI into their offerings, often leveraging machine learning for anomaly detection and threat response. However, only a few have a deep-rooted history in AI, with longstanding expertise shaping their approach beyond surface-level adoption.

The Omdia Market Radar recognizes that Darktrace has extensive background in the AI space:

“Darktrace has invested extensively in AI research to fuel its capabilities since 2013 with 200-plus patent applications, providing anomaly detection with a significant level of customization, helping with SOC productivity and efficiency, streamlining to show what matters for OT.” (1)

Unlike other security approaches that rely on existing threat data, Darktrace / OT achieves this through Self-Learning AI that understands normal business operations, detecting and containing known and unknown threats autonomously, thereby reducing Sec Ops workload and ensuring minimal downtime

This approach extends to incident investigations where an industry-first Cyber AI AnalystTM automatically investigates all relevant threats across IT and OT, prioritizes critical incidents, and then summarizes findings in an easily understandable view—bringing production engineers and security analysts together to communicate and quickly take appropriate action.

Balancing autonomous response with human oversight

In OT environments where uptime is essential, autonomous response technology can be approached with apprehension. However, Darktrace offers customizable response actions that can be set to “human confirmation mode.”

Omdia recognizes that our approach provides customizable options for autonomous response:

“Darktrace’s autonomous response functionality enforces normal, expected behavior. This can be automated but does not need to be from the beginning, and it can be fine-tuned. Alternative step-by-step mitigations are clearly laid out step-by-step and updated based on organizational risk posture and current level of progress.” (1)

This approach allows security and production to keep humans-in-the-loop with pre-defined actions for potential attacks, enforcing normal to contain a threat, and allowing production to continue without disruption.  

Bespoke vulnerability and risk management

In the realm of OT security, asset management takes precedent as one of the key focus points for organizations. With a large quantity of assets to manage, practitioners are overwhelmed with information with no real way to prioritize or apply them to their unique environment.

Darktrace / OT is recognized by Omdia as having:

“Advanced risk management capabilities that showcase metrics on impact, exploit difficulty, and estimated cost of an attack […] Given the nascency of this capability (April 2024), it is remarkably granular in depth and insight.” (1)

Enabling this is Darktrace’s unique approach to AI extends to risk management capabilities for OT. Darktrace / OT understands customers’ unique risks by building a comprehensive and contextualized picture that goes beyond isolated CVE scoring. It combines attack path modeling with MITRE ATT&CK  techniques to provide hardening recommendations regardless of patching availability and gives you a clearer view of the potential impact of an attack from APT groups.

Modular, scalable security for industrial environments

Organizations need flexibility when it comes to OT security, some want a fully integrated IT-OT security stack, while others prefer a segregated approach due to compliance or operational concerns. The Darktrace ActiveAI Security Platform offers integrated security across multiple domains, allowing flexibility and unification across IT and OT security. The platform combines telemetry from all areas of your digital estate to detect and respond to threats, including OT, network, cloud, email, and user identities.

Omdia recognizes Darktrace’s expansive coverage across multiple domains as a key reason why organizations should consider Darktrace / OT:

“Darktrace’s modular and platform, approach offer’s integrated security across multiple domains. It offers the option of Darktrace / OT as a separate platform product for those that want to segregate IT and OT cybersecurity or are not yet in a position to secure both domains in tandem. The deployment of Darktrace’s platform is flexible—with nine different deployment options, including physical on-premises, virtual, cloud, and hybrid.” (1)

With flexible deployment options, Darktrace offers security teams the ability to choose a model that works best for their organization, ensuring that security doesn’t have to be a “one-size-fits-all” approach.

Conclusion: Why Darktrace / OT stands out in Omdia’s evaluation

Omdia’s 2025 Market Radar for OT Cybersecurity Platforms provides a technical-first, vendor-agnostic evaluation, offering critical insights for organizations looking to strengthen their OT security posture. Darktrace’s recognition as a Market Leader reinforces its unique AI-driven approach, flexible deployment options, and advanced risk management capabilities as key differentiators in an evolving threat landscape.

By leveraging Self-Learning AI, autonomous response, and real-world risk analysis, Darktrace / OT enables organizations to detect, investigate, and mitigate threats before they escalate, without compromising operational uptime.

Read the full report here!

References

  1. www.darktrace.com/resources/darktrace-named-a-market-leader-in-the-2025-omdia-market-radar-for-ot-cybersecurity-platforms
Continue reading
About the author
Pallavi Singh
Product Marketing Manager, OT Security & Compliance

Blog

/

Cloud

/

April 2, 2025

Fusing Vulnerability and Threat Data: Enhancing the Depth of Attack Analysis

Default blog imageDefault blog image

Cado Security, recently acquired by Darktrace, is excited to announce a significant enhancement to its data collection capabilities, with the addition of a vulnerability discovery feature for Linux-based cloud resources. According to Darktrace’s Annual Threat Report 2024, the most significant campaigns observed in 2024 involved the ongoing exploitation of significant vulnerabilities in internet-facing systems. Cado’s new vulnerability discovery capability further deepens its ability to provide extensive context to security teams, enabling them to make informed decisions about threats, faster than ever.

Deep context to accelerate understanding and remediation

Context is critical when understanding the circumstances surrounding a threat. It can also take many forms – alert data, telemetry, file content, business context (for example asset criticality, core function of the resource), and risk context, such as open vulnerabilities.

When performing an investigation, it is common practice to understand the risk profile of the resource impacted, specifically determining open vulnerabilities and how they may relate to the threat. For example, if an analyst is triaging an alert related to an internet-facing Webserver running Apache, it would greatly benefit the analyst to understand open vulnerabilities in the Apache version that is running, if any of them are exploitable, whether a fix is available, etc. This dataset also serves as an invaluable source when developing a remediation plan, identifying specific vulnerabilities to be prioritised for patching.

Data acquisition in Cado

Cado is the only platform with the ability to perform full forensic captures as well as utilize instant triage collection methods, which is why fusing host-based artifact data with vulnerability data is such an exciting and compelling development.

The vulnerability discovery feature can be run as part of an acquisition – full or triage – as well as independently using a fast ‘Scan only’ mode.

Figure 1: A fast vulnerability scan being performed on the acquired evidence

Once the acquisition has completed, the user will have access to a ‘Vulnerabilities’ table within their investigation, where they are able to view and filter open vulnerabilities (by Severity, CVE ID, Resource, and other properties), as well as pivot to the full Event Timeline. In the Event Timeline, the user will be able to identify whether there is any malicious, suspicious or other interesting activity surrounding the vulnerable package, given the unified timeline presents a complete chronological dataset of all evidence and context collected.

Figure 2: Vulnerabilities discovered on the acquired evidence
Figure 3: Pivot from the Vulnerabilities table to the Event Timeline provides an in-depth view of file and process data associated with the vulnerable package selected. In this example, Apache2.

Future work

In the coming months, we’ll be releasing initial versions of highly anticipated integrations between Cado and Darktrace, including the ability to ingest Darktrace / CLOUD alerts which will automatically trigger a forensic capture (as well as a vulnerability discovery) of the impacted assets.

To learn more about how Cado and Darktrace will combine forces, request a demo today.

Continue reading
About the author
Paul Bottomley
Director of Product Management, Cado
Your data. Our AI.
Elevate your network security with Darktrace AI