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December 7, 2017

Darktrace: Investigating Widespread Trojan Infections

Discover how Darktrace expedites the investigation of widespread Trojan infections, enhancing cybersecurity and response times.
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.
Written by
Max Heinemeyer
Global Field CISO
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07
Dec 2017

This blog post outlines how Darktrace helps security operations centre (SOC) teams become more efficient by drastically cutting down the time needed to investigate incidents. This is illustrated by an example encountered in a recent Proof of Value where over 350 client devices had been infected by a stealthy banking trojan.

Identifying and investigating a compromise of this size would usually take a SOC team several hours if not days using disparate traditional security tools. Employing Darktrace, the most important questions were answered within 90 minutes. The main reason for this is that Darktrace provides full visibility and context into network activity for all devices monitored on a single, unified platform.

Alert fatigue & the cyber security skill gap

Getting cyber security right is difficult and time-consuming. Complexity is one of the main challenges the cyber security community is facing. These days, networks are only vaguely defined with digital supply chains, outsourcing, the push into the cloud and the advent of micro-virtualisation like Docker. The amount of data stored, devices connected to internal networks, connections made by devices and the heterogeneity in IT adds to this complexity. Managing it is difficult at best and securing it with traditional tools can be a daunting task.

Our industry is struggling with what has been labelled the ‘cyber security skill gap’. The demand for skilled, experienced security practitioners consistently outstrips supply. SOC teams struggle to find the right people for the job and to keep their analysts motivated in the face of a rapidly evolving threat landscape. Alert fatigue and burnout are common symptoms for SOC analysts working long hours and graveyard shifts.

Investigation methodology

Any incident responder will always begin by asking some high-level questions concerning the incident under investigation – regardless of it being an adware infection, a banking trojan, ransomware, an active intrusion or any other form of cyber security incident.

The most important questions usually are:

  • How did the infection occur? (To prevent the same initial infection vector in the future)
  • What behavior is the infected device exhibiting? (To understand the threat and the risk of the infection)
  • What Indicators of Compromise (IoC) are seen? (To update other security tools and to use for further investigation)
  • Are other devices infected as well? (To assess the extent of the infection)

We did a recent Proof of Value with an IT service provider in EMEA. Darktrace entered an environment which had already succumbed to a widespread compromise – over 350 client devices had been infected with banking trojans. Let’s walk through how we identified, triaged and investigated this infection using Darktrace.

Identifying the incident

Darktrace came into the environment after the initial infection had taken place already. Darktrace instantly identified several devices exhibiting unexpected HTTP beaconing to unusual, rare external IP addresses. The devices made HTTP POST requests without prior GET requests along other suspicious behavior. Darktrace created several high-severity alerts for this, e.g. ‘Compromise / Suspicious HTTP Beacons to Dotted Quad’ and ‘Compromise / Possible Malware HTTP Comms’:

Figure 1: Example Darktrace alert.

Triaging the incident

Darktrace then provides context around this alert - e.g. the external IP the beaconing was made to, the internal device including the associated user, and the suspicious behavior:

Figure 2: Detection context and C2 IP.

A quick investigation of the external IP reveals that it is a recently discovered command and control (C2) IP address for the Dridex banking trojan.

Drilling deeper into this, Darktrace provides PCAPs for every connection seen. A PCAP for the C2 connection above confirms this incident as active, successful, encoded beaconing to a malicious C2 IP:

Figure 3: PCAP and encoded HTTP POSTs.

Investigating the incident

At this stage, we want to further examine the behavior of the infected device around the time of the incident. Darktrace provides full visibility into past activity, including all network connection made by any device - regardless of whether the incident occurred on the device or not.

We attend to all external connections made by the infected device around the time of the incident and immediately identify more suspicious C2 communication:

Figure 4: More device behavior; further C2 IPs.

By now we have identified 6 different C2 IP addresses.

We can use Darktrace’s ‘External Sites Summary’ to view all devices that have connected to a specific IP or domain in the recent past. Doing this for the initial C2 IP yields the following result (excerpt):

Figure 5: External Sites Summary; further infections.

We immediately identify 5 additional devices that made successful connections to the C2 IP address. In fact, the list above is abridged as we actually saw over 350 devices connecting to this and other C2 IP addresses. Notably, all observed devices appear to have a similar naming structure - this will become important in the next part of the analysis.

At this point we have answered all but the first question: ‘How did the infection occur?’

Darktrace started monitoring the network after the initial infection occurred and spread. Further research into the C2 IP addresses shows that they are associated with the Emotet trojan. This sophisticated malware often precedes banking trojan (e.g. Dridex) infections and is spread via phishing. We can thus assume that phishing was a likely initial infection vector.

How then did the infection manage to spread to so many devices?

Surely not all users clicked on suspicious phishing emails? Recent versions of Emotet have limited lateral movement capabilities. They mainly propagate via SMB brute forcing - trying administrative accounts and hard-coded password lists. The naming convention on the infected devices is very similar - this could indicate a similar build-process and setup of the devices. If a vulnerability - such as an administrative account with a weak password - existed on one of the devices, it might be present in all of the devices with a similar build.

Using Darktrace, the security team has now a solid understanding of the nature and size of the infection, the IoCs available to update firewalls and other preventive security controls and outstanding remediation-activities.

What would this investigation look like with traditional tools, not using Darktrace?

Detecting these covert banking trojans in the first place, let alone triaging them fully, can be a difficult challenge in itself. Current banking Trojan strains such as Dridex, Fedeo or Vawtrak keep updating the malware with new C2 addresses to avoid blacklisting. Initial detection could be at any stage of the attack lifecycle – likely it will be in the latter stages though, when considerable damage has already been done.

An analyst will have to log into various security devices to get close to the same level of visibility provided in Darktrace – web proxy logs, anti-virus logs, running PCAPs on infected hosts, SIEM logs. Having to switch between all those disparate security tools is not time-efficient and produces a fragmentary picture of what actually transpired.

Conclusion

A working hypothesis is that a single device was initially infected via phishing, allowing Emotet to spread to over 350 internal devices via SMB brute forcing. It took no longer than 90 minutes to come from an initial detection of the incident to this conclusion, which forms the basis for an actionable report.

The last thing a SOC needs is yet another tool producing a profusion of alerts. Using Darktrace’s machine learning and unrivalled network visibility, you can focus on the small set of relevant alerts and rapidly investigate those incidents according to their severity and priority.

Darktrace can reduce costs even if you bring in a third-party incident response team. You will be able to significantly speed up their ongoing investigation if they have access to Darktrace. Third-party incident response teams are expensive – their daily rates ranging between £2,000 and £3,000 per day. Cutting their work down from days to hours will result in cost and efforts saved.

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.
Written by
Max Heinemeyer
Global Field CISO

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July 17, 2025

Introducing the AI Maturity Model for Cybersecurity

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AI adoption in cybersecurity: Beyond the hype

Security operations today face a paradox. On one hand, artificial intelligence (AI) promises sweeping transformation from automating routine tasks to augmenting threat detection and response. On the other hand, security leaders are under immense pressure to separate meaningful innovation from vendor hype.

To help CISOs and security teams navigate this landscape, we’ve developed the most in-depth and actionable AI Maturity Model in the industry. Built in collaboration with AI and cybersecurity experts, this framework provides a structured path to understanding, measuring, and advancing AI adoption across the security lifecycle.

Overview of AI maturity levels in cybersecurity

Why a maturity model? And why now?

In our conversations and research with security leaders, a recurring theme has emerged:

There’s no shortage of AI solutions, but there is a shortage of clarity and understanding of AI uses cases.

In fact, Gartner estimates that “by 2027, over 40% of Agentic AI projects will be canceled due to escalating costs, unclear business value, or inadequate risk controls. Teams are experimenting, but many aren’t seeing meaningful outcomes. The need for a standardized way to evaluate progress and make informed investments has never been greater.

That’s why we created the AI Security Maturity Model, a strategic framework that:

  • Defines five clear levels of AI maturity, from manual processes (L0) to full AI Delegation (L4)
  • Delineating the outcomes derived between Agentic GenAI and Specialized AI Agent Systems
  • Applies across core functions such as risk management, threat detection, alert triage, and incident response
  • Links AI maturity to real-world outcomes like reduced risk, improved efficiency, and scalable operations

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How is maturity assessed in this model?

The AI Maturity Model for Cybersecurity is grounded in operational insights from nearly 10,000 global deployments of Darktrace's Self-Learning AI and Cyber AI Analyst. Rather than relying on abstract theory or vendor benchmarks, the model reflects what security teams are actually doing, where AI is being adopted, how it's being used, and what outcomes it’s delivering.

This real-world foundation allows the model to offer a practical, experience-based view of AI maturity. It helps teams assess their current state and identify realistic next steps based on how organizations like theirs are evolving.

Why Darktrace?

AI has been central to Darktrace’s mission since its inception in 2013, not just as a feature, but the foundation. With over a decade of experience building and deploying AI in real-world security environments, we’ve learned where it works, where it doesn’t, and how to get the most value from it. This model reflects that insight, helping security leaders find the right path forward for their people, processes, and tools

Security teams today are asking big, important questions:

  • What should we actually use AI for?
  • How are other teams using it — and what’s working?
  • What are vendors offering, and what’s just hype?
  • Will AI ever replace people in the SOC?

These questions are valid, and they’re not always easy to answer. That’s why we created this model: to help security leaders move past buzzwords and build a clear, realistic plan for applying AI across the SOC.

The structure: From experimentation to autonomy

The model outlines five levels of maturity :

L0 – Manual Operations: Processes are mostly manual with limited automation of some tasks.

L1 – Automation Rules: Manually maintained or externally-sourced automation rules and logic are used wherever possible.

L2 – AI Assistance: AI assists research but is not trusted to make good decisions. This includes GenAI agents requiring manual oversight for errors.

L3 – AI Collaboration: Specialized cybersecurity AI agent systems  with business technology context are trusted with specific tasks and decisions. GenAI has limited uses where errors are acceptable.

L4 – AI Delegation: Specialized AI agent systems with far wider business operations and impact context perform most cybersecurity tasks and decisions independently, with only high-level oversight needed.

Each level reflects a shift, not only in technology, but in people and processes. As AI matures, analysts evolve from executors to strategic overseers.

Strategic benefits for security leaders

The maturity model isn’t just about technology adoption it’s about aligning AI investments with measurable operational outcomes. Here’s what it enables:

SOC fatigue is real, and AI can help

Most teams still struggle with alert volume, investigation delays, and reactive processes. AI adoption is inconsistent and often siloed. When integrated well, AI can make a meaningful difference in making security teams more effective

GenAI is error prone, requiring strong human oversight

While there is a lot of hype around GenAI agentic systems, teams will need to account for inaccuracy and hallucination in Agentic GenAI systems.

AI’s real value lies in progression

The biggest gains don’t come from isolated use cases, but from integrating AI across the lifecycle, from preparation through detection to containment and recovery.

Trust and oversight are key initially but evolves in later levels

Early-stage adoption keeps humans fully in control. By L3 and L4, AI systems act independently within defined bounds, freeing humans for strategic oversight.

People’s roles shift meaningfully

As AI matures, analyst roles consolidate and elevate from labor intensive task execution to high-value decision-making, focusing on critical, high business impact activities, improving processes and AI governance.

Outcome, not hype, defines maturity

AI maturity isn’t about tech presence, it’s about measurable impact on risk reduction, response time, and operational resilience.

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Outcomes across the AI Security Maturity Model

The Security Organization experiences an evolution of cybersecurity outcomes as teams progress from manual operations to AI delegation. Each level represents a step-change in efficiency, accuracy, and strategic value.

L0 – Manual Operations

At this stage, analysts manually handle triage, investigation, patching, and reporting manually using basic, non-automated tools. The result is reactive, labor-intensive operations where most alerts go uninvestigated and risk management remains inconsistent.

L1 – Automation Rules

At this stage, analysts manage rule-based automation tools like SOAR and XDR, which offer some efficiency gains but still require constant tuning. Operations remain constrained by human bandwidth and predefined workflows.

L2 – AI Assistance

At this stage, AI assists with research, summarization, and triage, reducing analyst workload but requiring close oversight due to potential errors. Detection improves, but trust in autonomous decision-making remains limited.

L3 – AI Collaboration

At this stage, AI performs full investigations and recommends actions, while analysts focus on high-risk decisions and refining detection strategies. Purpose-built agentic AI systems with business context are trusted with specific tasks, improving precision and prioritization.

L4 – AI Delegation

At this stage, Specialized AI Agent Systems performs most security tasks independently at machine speed, while human teams provide high-level strategic oversight. This means the highest time and effort commitment activities by the human security team is focused on proactive activities while AI handles routine cybersecurity tasks

Specialized AI Agent Systems operate with deep business context including impact context to drive fast, effective decisions.

Join the webinar

Get a look at the minds shaping this model by joining our upcoming webinar using this link. We’ll walk through real use cases, share lessons learned from the field, and show how security teams are navigating the path to operational AI safely, strategically, and successfully.

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About the author
Ashanka Iddya
Senior Director, Product Marketing

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July 17, 2025

Forensics or Fauxrensics: Five Core Capabilities for Cloud Forensics and Incident Response

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The speed and scale at which new cloud resources can be spun up has resulted in uncontrolled deployments, misconfigurations, and security risks. It has had security teams racing to secure their business’ rapid migration from traditional on-premises environments to the cloud.

While many organizations have successfully extended their prevention and detection capabilities to the cloud, they are now experiencing another major gap: forensics and incident response.

Once something bad has been identified, understanding its true scope and impact is nearly impossible at times. The proliferation of cloud resources across a multitude of cloud providers, and the addition of container and serverless capabilities all add to the complexities. It’s clear that organizations need a better way to manage cloud incident response.

Security teams are looking to move past their homegrown solutions and open-source tools to incorporate real cloud forensics capabilities. However, with the increased buzz around cloud forensics, it can be challenging to decipher what is real cloud forensics, and what is “fauxrensics.”

This blog covers the five core capabilities that security teams should consider when evaluating a cloud forensics and incident response solution.

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1. Depth of data

There have been many conversations among the security community about whether cloud forensics is just log analysis. The reality, however, is that cloud forensics necessitates access to a robust dataset that extends far beyond traditional log data sources.

While logs provide valuable insights, a forensics investigation demands a deeper understanding derived from multiple data sources, including disk, network, and memory, within the cloud infrastructure. Full disk analysis complements log analysis, offering crucial context for identifying the root cause and scope of an incident.

For instance, when investigating an incident involving a Kubernetes cluster running on an EC2 instance, access to bash history can provide insights into the commands executed by attackers on the affected instance, which would not be available through cloud logs alone.

Having all of the evidence in one place is also a capability that can significantly streamline investigations, unifying your evidence be it disk images, memory captures or cloud logs, into a single timeline allowing security teams to reconstruct an attacks origin, path and impact far more easily. Multi–cloud environments also require platforms that can support aggregating data from many providers and services into one place. Doing this enables more holistic investigations and reduces security blind spots.

There is also the importance of collecting data from ephemeral resources in modern cloud and containerized environments. Critical evidence can be lost in seconds as resources are constantly spinning up and down, so having the ability to capture this data before its gone can be a huge advantage to security teams, rather than having to figure out what happened after the affected service is long gone.

darktrace / cloud, cado, cloud logs, ost, and memory information. value of cloud combined analysis

2. Chain of custody

Chain of custody is extremely critical in the context of legal proceedings and is an essential component of forensics and incident response. However, chain of custody in the cloud can be extremely complex with the number of people who have access and the rise of multi-cloud environments.

In the cloud, maintaining a reliable chain of custody becomes even more complex than it already is, due to having to account for multiple access points, service providers and third parties. Having automated evidence tracking is a must. It means that all actions are logged, from collection to storage to access. Automation also minimizes the chance of human error, reducing the risk of mistakes or gaps in evidence handling, especially in high pressure fast moving investigations.

The ability to preserve unaltered copies of forensic evidence in a secure manner is required to ensure integrity throughout an investigation. It is not just a technical concern, its a legal one, ensuring that your evidence handling is documented and time stamped allows it to stand up to court or regulatory review.

Real cloud forensics platforms should autonomously handle chain of custody in the background, recording and safeguarding evidence without human intervention.

3. Automated collection and isolation

When malicious activity is detected, the speed at which security teams can determine root cause and scope is essential to reducing Mean Time to Response (MTTR).

Automated forensic data collection and system isolation ensures that evidence is collected and compromised resources are isolated at the first sign of malicious activity. This can often be before an attacker has had the change to move latterly or cover their tracks. This enables security teams to prevent potential damage and spread while a deeper-dive forensics investigation takes place. This method also ensures critical incident evidence residing in ephemeral environments is preserved in the event it is needed for an investigation. This evidence may only exist for minutes, leaving no time for a human analyst to capture it.

Cloud forensics and incident response platforms should offer the ability to natively integrate with incident detection and alerting systems and/or built-in product automation rules to trigger evidence capture and resource isolation.

4. Ease of use

Security teams shouldn’t require deep cloud or incident response knowledge to perform forensic investigations of cloud resources. They already have enough on their plates.

While traditional forensics tools and approaches have made investigation and response extremely tedious and complex, modern forensics platforms prioritize usability at their core, and leverage automation to drastically simplify the end-to-end incident response process, even when an incident spans multiple Cloud Service Providers (CSPs).

Useability is a core requirement for any modern forensics platform. Security teams should not need to have indepth knowledge of every system and resource in a given estate. Workflows, automation and guidance should make it possible for an analyst to investigate whatever resource they need to.

Unifying the workflow across multiple clouds can also save security teams a huge amount of time and resources. Investigations can often span multiple CSP’s. A good security platform should provide a single place to search, correlate and analyze evidence across all environments.

Offering features such as cross cloud support, data enrichment, a single timeline view, saved search, and faceted search can help advanced analysts achieve greater efficiency, and novice analysts are able to participate in more complex investigations.

5. Incident preparedness

Incident response shouldn't just be reactive. Modern security teams need to regularly test their ability to acquire new evidence, triage assets and respond to threats across both new and existing resources, ensuring readiness even in the rapidly changing environments of the cloud.  Having the ability to continuously assess your incident response and forensics workflows enables you to rapidly improve your processes and identify and mitigate any gaps identified that could prevent the organization from being able to effectively respond to potential threats.

Real forensics platforms deliver features that enable security teams to prepare extensively and understand their shortcomings before they are in the heat of an incident. For example, cloud forensics platforms can provide the ability to:

  • Run readiness checks and see readiness trends over time
  • Identify and mitigate issues that could prevent rapid investigation and response
  • Ensure the correct logging, management agents, and other cloud-native tools are appropriately configured and operational
  • Ensure that data gathered during an investigation can be decrypted
  • Verify that permissions are aligned with best practices and are capable of supporting incident response efforts

Cloud forensics with Darktrace

Darktrace delivers a proactive approach to cyber resilience in a single cybersecurity platform, including cloud coverage. Darktrace / CLOUD is a real time Cloud Detection and Response (CDR) solution built with advanced AI to make cloud security accessible to all security teams and SOCs. By using multiple machine learning techniques, Darktrace brings unprecedented visibility, threat detection, investigation, and incident response to hybrid and multi-cloud environments.

Darktrace’s cloud offerings have been bolstered with the acquisition of Cado Security Ltd., which enables security teams to gain immediate access to forensic-level data in multi-cloud, container, serverless, SaaS, and on-premises environments.

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About the author
Calum Hall
Technical Content Researcher
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