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
Dan Fein
VP, Product
Share
07
Jun 2020
‘Social engineering’. ‘Credential theft’. ‘Account takeover’. If you were a fly on the wall of a Security Operations Center in 2020, you would have heard these phrases far more often than ‘banking trojan’, ‘SQL injection’ or ‘exploit kit’. The reason for this is simple – the reality for most security teams now is that their perimeter has shifted into the cloud. Identities are being attacked more than devices.
‘Microsoft 365 account compromise’ is the current favorite, with 29% of organizations reporting a related incident in one month alone. Security teams struggle with these attacks because the evidence needed to detect them is scattered across the enterprise: they begin via email, are executed over the network, and progress in the cloud. This broad and spread out digital footprint means that following the breadcrumbs is not easy.
Darktrace’s Cyber AI Platform is designed to understand a user’s behavior as they move between devices and cloud services, tracking their activity to identify a compromise. To help understand how these attacks avoid detection, it is useful to look at a couple of examples of Microsoft Office 365 compromise detected recently in one of our customers.
Microsoft 365 compromised to launch external email threat
A Microsoft 365 account was recently compromised at a public accounting firm based in the United States. Darktrace initially picked up on several anomalies, including a sudden surge in outbound email traffic as well as the unusual login location – while the company and nearly all of its users were located in Wisconsin, an IP address located in Kansas was used to log in to the Microsoft 365 account. Along with the unusual login, a login to Microsoft Teams from the same Kansas IP address was detected.
Figure 1: Just after the new email rule was created, a Microsoft Teams 100% rare IP login occurred.
‘Impossible travel’ rules alone would have missed these anomalies, but an understanding of activity and behavior across different SaaS applications allowed Darktrace’s AI to recognize these events as one systematic case of credential theft. When the threat-actor subsequently created a new email rule, Darktrace was able to connect this event with the other anomalous behavior and understand its potentially malicious nature.
Figure 2: Darktrace’s SaaS Module noted a 100% rare IP logging into the user’s Microsoft 365 account and the creation of a new mailbox rules. All factors indicated 100% unusual SaaS activity.
Five minutes later, Antigena Email alerted on a large number of outbound emails containing a generic subject line and an attached PDF. The technology also detected that there was a clear spike in outbound emails from this user and flagged each of these emails with the “Out of Character” tag, which in this case denoted a change from normal behavior with the surge in recipients, and likely internal compromise.
Figure 3: Antigena Email detected a surge in recipients that indicated a serious breach of normal behavior for this user.
The unusual login behavior detected by Darktrace’s SaaS Module could be connected to the anomalous outbound email behavior flagged by Antigena Email, allowing the security team to see the extent of the attack and neutralize it as it emerged. It was clear that the account was being used to engage in malicious activity, as each of the 220 outbound emails used a generic subject line and contained a suspicious attachment. The security team therefore immediately disabled the compromised account.
Figure 4: A recreation of the email sent by the attacker, containing the malicious attachment.
‘Change of bank details’ sent from accounts department
When an Accounts Department’s Microsoft 365 account was compromised and used to send targeted phishing emails, Darktrace was able to track the attacker’s movement within the inbox, tying together information from Darktrace’s SaaS Module with Antigena Email’s alerts to understand the full picture of the threat and stop the attack.
The SaaS account appears to have been compromised via an inbound spear phishing attack, or some other form of attack that occurred before Darktrace began monitoring the organization. While Darktrace Cyber AI had no oversight of the initial compromise, it was still able to distinguish later attacker behavior as malicious, based on its actively evolving understanding of the organization and its workforce.
When the account user logged in from a 100% rare French IP address, Darktrace’s SaaS Module picked up on the anomaly immediately, and further detected a series of activities carried out after the unusual login. At the same time, Antigena Email noted an email being sent.
Figure 5: The login from a French IP was noted as 100% rare for this user and SaaS account.
Darktrace then identified more activity occurring from a second rare login location, a Swiss IP address. Very little email activity occurred when the account was logged in from this IP. Instead, Cyber AI saw the threat-actor using their illegitimate SaaS access to view information on the legitimate account user and files related to banking, invoices, and payments.
Antigena Email then identified a series of email communications that, when seen in the context of the SaaS account compromise, pointed to a clear threat. There were no obvious malicious attachments or links in the emails. However, the subject of the final reply was ‘Change of Bank Details’, and the email prompted a high Solicitation Inducement Score within Antigena Email, strongly implying that the malicious actor had sent emails instructing the destination to change payment details in order to route money to the attacker, instead of the company.
It seems the attackers went through the banking and invoicing files in order to find a customer with a big bill to pay, then used the compromised email account to launch an outbound phishing attack, changing the billing details. With Darktrace AI correlating information within the SaaS platform and insights from Antigena Email, this targeted phishing attack could be contained before further compromise or damage could occur.
The below screenshot also indicates a series of inbox processing rules made on the compromised account, showing actions that are typical of an account takeover.
Figure 6: Darktrace’s records of new inbox rules being set up on the compromised SaaS account.
The benefits of a unified approach
These stories are all too familiar. Most security tools would not be able to take action on any one of these steps individually. But the combination reveals the tell-tale sign of a Microsoft 365 account hijack. Organizations are struggling to manage their user identities across their cloud infrastructure, and rule and policy-based detection is no longer feasible.
However, by learning identities and behavior across the enterprise, Darktrace is able to detect, and seamlessly respond, to combat these threats. Hundreds of organizations are now using Antigena Email to protect their email and cloud environments continuously, trusting it to dynamically enforce MFA, lock accounts, block network traffic, and withhold emails when necessary.
As cloud-native applications become more popular, organizations face the growing problem of separate end-to-end security solutions for each type of workload. With Antigena Email working in conjunction with Darktrace’s Enterprise Immune System, defenders can be assured that a single, unified platform is tracking every suspicious behavior, wherever it arises in the organization.
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.
Defending the Cloud: Stopping Cyber Threats in Azure and AWS with Darktrace
Real-world intrusions across Azure and AWS
As organizations pursue greater scalability and flexibility, cloud platforms like Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services (AWS) have become essential for enabling remote operations and digitalizing corporate environments. However, this shift introduces a new set of security risks, including expanding attack surfaces, misconfigurations, and compromised credentials frequently exploited by threat actors.
This blog dives into three instances of compromise within a Darktrace customer’s Azure and AWS environment which Darktrace.
The first incident took place in early 2024 and involved an attacker compromising a legitimate user account to gain unauthorized access to a customer’s Azure environment.
The other two incidents, taking place in February and March 2025, targeted AWS environments. In these cases, threat actors exfiltrated corporate data, and in one instance, was able to detonate ransomware in a customer’s environment.
Case 1 - Microsoft Azure
Figure 1: Simplified timeline of the attack on a customer’s Azure environment.
In early 2024, Darktrace identified a cloud compromise on the Azure cloud environment of a customer in the Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA) region.
Initial access
In this case, a threat actor gained access to the customer’s cloud environment after stealing access tokens and creating a rogue virtual machine (VM). The malicious actor was found to have stolen access tokens belonging to a third-party external consultant’s account after downloading cracked software.
With these stolen tokens, the attacker was able to authenticate to the customer’s Azure environment and successfully modified a security rule to allow inbound SSH traffic from a specific IP range (i.e., securityRules/AllowCidrBlockSSHInbound). This was likely performed to ensure persistent access to internal cloud resources.
Detection and investigation of the threat
Darktrace / IDENTITY recognized that this activity was highly unusual, triggering the “Repeated Unusual SaaS Resource Creation” alert.
Cyber AI Analyst launched an autonomous investigation into additional suspicious cloud activities occurring around the same time from the same unusual location, correlating the individual events into a broader account hijack incident.
Figure 2: Cyber AI Analyst’s investigation into unusual cloud activity performed by the compromised account.
Figure 3: Surrounding resource creation events highlighted by Cyber AI Analyst.
Figure 4: Surrounding resource creation events highlighted by Cyber AI Analyst.
“Create resource service limit” events typically indicate the creation or modification of service limits (i.e., quotas) for a specific Azure resource type within a region. Meanwhile, “Registers the Capacity Resource Provider” events refer to the registration of the Microsoft Capacity resource provider within an Azure subscription, responsible for managing capacity-related resources, particularly those related to reservations and service limits. These events suggest that the threat actor was looking to create new cloud resources within the environment.
Around ten minutes later, Darktrace detected the threat actor creating or modifying an Azure disk associated with a virtual machine (VM), suggesting an attempt to create a rogue VM within the environment.
Threat actors can leverage such rogue VMs to hijack computing resources (e.g., by running cryptomining malware), maintain persistent access, move laterally within the cloud environment, communicate with command-and-control (C2) infrastructure, and stealthily deliver and deploy malware.
Persistence
Several weeks later, the compromised account was observed sending an invitation to collaborate to an external free mail (Google Mail) address.
Darktrace deemed this activity as highly anomalous, triggering a compliance alert for the customer to review and investigate further.
The next day, the threat actor further registered new multi-factor authentication (MFA) information. These actions were likely intended to maintain access to the compromised user account. The customer later confirmed this activity by reviewing the corresponding event logs within Darktrace.
Case 2 – Amazon Web Services
Figure 5: Simplified timeline of the attack on a customer’s AWS environment
In February 2025, another cloud-based compromised was observed on a UK-based customer subscribed to Darktrace’s Managed Detection and Response (MDR) service.
How the attacker gained access
The threat actor was observed leveraging likely previously compromised credential to access several AWS instances within customer’s Private Cloud environment and collecting and exfiltrating data, likely with the intention of deploying ransomware and holding the data for ransom.
Darktrace alerting to malicious activity
This observed activity triggered a number of alerts in Darktrace, including several high-priority Enhanced Monitoring alerts, which were promptly investigated by Darktrace’s Security Operations Centre (SOC) and raised to the customer’s security team.
The earliest signs of attack observed by Darktrace involved the use of two likely compromised credentials to connect to the customer’s Virtual Private Network (VPN) environment.
Internal reconnaissance
Once inside, the threat actor performed internal reconnaissance activities and staged the Rclone tool “ProgramData\rclone-v1.69.0-windows-amd64.zip”, a command-line program to sync files and directories to and from different cloud storage providers, to an AWS instance whose hostname is associated with a public key infrastructure (PKI) service.
The threat actor was further observed accessing and downloading multiple files hosted on an AWS file server instance, notably finance and investment-related files. This likely represented data gathering prior to exfiltration.
Shortly after, the PKI-related EC2 instance started making SSH connections with the Rclone SSH client “SSH-2.0-rclone/v1.69.0” to a RockHoster Virtual Private Server (VPS) endpoint (193.242.184[.]178), suggesting the threat actor was exfiltrating the gathered data using the Rclone utility they had previously installed. The PKI instance continued to make repeated SSH connections attempts to transfer data to this external destination.
Darktrace’s Autonomous Response
In response to this activity, Darktrace’s Autonomous Response capability intervened, blocking unusual external connectivity to the C2 server via SSH, effectively stopping the exfiltration of data.
This activity was further investigated by Darktrace’s SOC analysts as part of the MDR service. The team elected to extend the autonomously applied actions to ensure the compromise remained contained until the customer could fully remediate the incident.
Continued reconissance
Around the same time, the threat actor continued to conduct network scans using the Nmap tool, operating from both a separate AWS domain controller instance and a newly joined device on the network. These actions were accompanied by further internal data gathering activities, with around 5 GB of data downloaded from an AWS file server.
The two devices involved in reconnaissance activities were investigated and actioned by Darktrace SOC analysts after additional Enhanced Monitoring alerts had triggered.
Lateral movement attempts via RDP connections
Unusual internal RDP connections to a likely AWS printer instance indicated that the threat actor was looking to strengthen their foothold within the environment and/or attempting to pivot to other devices, likely in response to being hindered by Autonomous Response actions.
This triggered multiple scanning, internal data transfer and unusual RDP alerts in Darktrace, as well as additional Autonomous Response actions to block the suspicious activity.
Suspicious outbound SSH communication to known threat infrastructure
Darktrace subsequently observed the AWS printer instance initiating SSH communication with a rare external endpoint associated with the web hosting and VPS provider Host Department (67.217.57[.]252), suggesting that the threat actor was attempting to exfiltrate data to an alternative endpoint after connections to the original destination had been blocked.
Further investigation using open-source intelligence (OSINT) revealed that this IP address had previously been observed in connection with SSH-based data exfiltration activity during an Akira ransomware intrusion [1].
Once again, connections to this IP were blocked by Darktrace’s Autonomous Response and subsequently these blocks were extended by Darktrace’s SOC team.
The above behavior generated multiple Enhanced Monitoring alerts that were investigated by Darktrace SOC analysts as part of the Managed Threat Detection service.
Figure 5: Enhanced Monitoring alerts investigated by SOC analysts as part of the Managed Detection and Response service.
Final containment and collaborative response
Upon investigating the unusual scanning activity, outbound SSH connections, and internal data transfers, Darktrace analysts extended the Autonomous Response actions previously triggered on the compromised devices.
As the threat actor was leveraging these systems for data exfiltration, all outgoing traffic from the affected devices was blocked for an additional 24 hours to provide the customer’s security team with time to investigate and remediate the compromise.
Additional investigative support was provided by Darktrace analysts through the Security Operations Service, after the customer's opened of a ticket related to the unfolding incident.
Figure 8: Simplified timeline of the attack
Around the same time of the compromise in Case 2, Darktrace observed a similar incident on the cloud environment of a different customer.
Initial access
On this occasion, the threat actor appeared to have gained entry into the AWS-based Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) networkvia a SonicWall SMA 500v EC2 instance allowing inbound traffic on any port.
The instance received HTTPS connections from three rare Vultr VPS endpoints (i.e., 45.32.205[.]52, 207.246.74[.]166, 45.32.90[.]176).
Lateral movement and exfiltration
Around the same time, the EC2 instance started scanning the environment and attempted to pivot to other internal systems via RDP, notably a DC EC2 instance, which also started scanning the network, and another EC2 instance.
The latter then proceeded to transfer more than 230 GB of data to the rare external GTHost VPS endpoint 23.150.248[.]189, while downloading hundreds of GBs of data over SMB from another EC2 instance.
Figure 7: Cyber AI Analyst incident generated following the unusual scanning and RDP connections from the initial compromised device.
The same behavior was replicated across multiple EC2 instances, whereby compromised instances uploaded data over internal RDP connections to other instances, which then started transferring data to the same GTHost VPS endpoint over port 5000, which is typically used for Universal Plug and Play (UPnP).
What Darktrace detected
Darktrace observed the threat actor uploading a total of 718 GB to the external endpoint, after which they detonated ransomware within the compromised VPC networks.
This activity generated nine Enhanced Monitoring alerts in Darktrace, focusing on the scanning and external data activity, with the earliest of those alerts triggering around one hour after the initial intrusion.
Darktrace’s Autonomous Response capability was not configured to act on these devices. Therefore, the malicious activity was not autonomously blocked and escalated to the point of ransomware detonation.
Conclusion
This blog examined three real-world compromises in customer cloud environments each illustrating different stages in the attack lifecycle.
The first case showcased a notable progression from a SaaS compromise to a full cloud intrusion, emphasizing the critical role of anomaly detection when legitimate credentials are abused.
The latter two incidents demonstrated that while early detection is vital, the ability to autonomously block malicious activity at machine speed is often the most effective way to contain threats before they escalate.
Together, these incidents underscore the need for continuous visibility, behavioral analysis, and machine-speed intervention across hybrid environments. Darktrace's AI-driven detection and Autonomous Response capabilities, combined with expert oversight from its Security Operations Center, give defenders the speed and clarity they need to contain threats and reduce operational disruption, before the situation spirals.
Credit to Alexandra Sentenac (Senior Cyber Analyst) and Dylan Evans (Security Research Lead)
Top Eight Threats to SaaS Security and How to Combat Them
The latest on the identity security landscape
Following the mass adoption of remote and hybrid working patterns, more critical data than ever resides in cloud applications – from Salesforce and Google Workspace, to Box, Dropbox, and Microsoft 365.
As SaaS applications look set to remain an integral part of the digital estate, organizations are being forced to rethink how they protect their users and data in this area.
What is SaaS security?
SaaS security is the protection of cloud applications. It includes securing the apps themselves as well as the user identities that engage with them.
Below are the top eight threats that target SaaS security and user identities.
1. Account Takeover (ATO)
Attackers gain unauthorized access to a user’s SaaS or cloud account by stealing credentials through phishing, brute-force attacks, or credential stuffing. Once inside, they can exfiltrate data, send malicious emails, or escalate privileges to maintain persistent access.
2. Privilege escalation
Cybercriminals exploit misconfigurations, weak access controls, or vulnerabilities to increase their access privileges within a SaaS or cloud environment. Gaining admin or superuser rights allows attackers to disable security settings, create new accounts, or move laterally across the organization.
3. Lateral movement
Once inside a network or SaaS platform, attackers move between accounts, applications, and cloud workloads to expand their foot- hold. Compromised OAuth tokens, session hijacking, or exploited API connections can enable adversaries to escalate access and exfiltrate sensitive data.
4. Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) bypass and session hijacking
Threat actors bypass MFA through SIM swapping, push bombing, or exploiting session cookies. By stealing an active authentication session, they can access SaaS environments without needing the original credentials or MFA approval.
5. OAuth token abuse
Attackers exploit OAuth authentication mechanisms by stealing or abusing tokens that grant persistent access to SaaS applications. This allows them to maintain access even if the original user resets their password, making detection and mitigation difficult.
6. Insider threats
Malicious or negligent insiders misuse their legitimate access to SaaS applications or cloud platforms to leak data, alter configurations, or assist external attackers. Over-provisioned accounts and poor access control policies make it easier for insiders to exploit SaaS environments.
SaaS applications rely on APIs for integration and automation, but attackers exploit insecure endpoints, excessive permissions, and unmonitored API calls to gain unauthorized access. API abuse can lead to data exfiltration, privilege escalation, and service disruption.
8. Business Email Compromise (BEC) via SaaS
Adversaries compromise SaaS-based email platforms (e.g., Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace) to send phishing emails, conduct invoice fraud, or steal sensitive communications. BEC attacks often involve financial fraud or data theft by impersonating executives or suppliers.
BEC heavily uses social engineering techniques, tailoring messages for a specific audience and context. And with the growing use of generative AI by threat actors, BEC is becoming even harder to detect. By adding ingenuity and machine speed, generative AI tools give threat actors the ability to create more personalized, targeted, and convincing attacks at scale.
Protecting against these SaaS threats
Traditionally, security leaders relied on tools that were focused on the attack, reliant on threat intelligence, and confined to a single area of the digital estate.
However, these tools have limitations, and often prove inadequate for contemporary situations, environments, and threats. For example, they may lack advanced threat detection, have limited visibility and scope, and struggle to integrate with other tools and infrastructure, especially cloud platforms.
AI-powered SaaS security stays ahead of the threat landscape
New, more effective approaches involve AI-powered defense solutions that understand the digital business, reveal subtle deviations that indicate cyber-threats, and action autonomous, targeted responses.
