How McLaren Racing Counters Advanced Email Threats
05
Jan 2021
Learn how Darktrace helps McLaren Racing counter advanced email threats, ensuring robust cybersecurity for their operations.
Securing our team’s inboxes has long been a challenge at McLaren Racing. Even before COVID-19 hit, our workforce was incredibly dynamic; we’d been used to effectively setting up a remote office at tracks around the world every other weekend for the last 30 years. We were therefore used to people emailing at an extremely high rate while not always being centralised in a single location.
Collaboration is key for this team, with both our partners and key suppliers. Sharing data happens every day and a variety of methods are used – ranging from sensitive car designs to confidential track-side data.
The email attacks targeting our users have advanced considerably in the last year or two, with attackers seeking to solicit fraudulent payments, or trying to access our own intellectual property. Increasingly sophisticated social engineering attempts meant that our users continued to engage with these phishing and spoofing emails, despite having an array of tools and procedures in place to avoid such an eventuality.
Last year we extended Darktrace’s coverage to our inbox, and now have an intelligent AI security solution understanding ‘patterns of life’ for every Microsoft 365 user in order to spot attacks. Darktrace has allowed the security team here to stay ahead of the most advanced email threats, rather than respond retrospectively to attacks that manage to slip through traditional defences.
Training our workforce to spot attacks
Previously we relied on threat intelligence feeds and retrospective security tools that blocked malicious addresses, domains and URLs, but regardless, a small volume of phishing emails would still reach user mailboxes. Typically, these emails would be well-researched and highly contextualised, targeted to the recipient and sometimes indistinguishable from genuine communications. Despite running employee awareness programs, a proportion of these malicious emails would be acted on by users, leading to account compromises and fraud attempts. Our security resources were then consumed with reacting to these incidents rather than proactively improving security at McLaren Racing.
We run cyber awareness weeks, in collaboration with many of our partners, simulating our own phishing campaigns to teach our workforce how to spot attacks. But these education programs have become harder to communicate with the increase of remote working. Employee engagement was always key and that meant a larger resource strain on our security team, who would typically spend a lot of time with our senior stakeholders, helping them identify spoof emails and working with them on putting business processes in place.
This was a long and arduous process, and it’s difficult to expect our employees to spot the increasingly subtle signs of an email attack. With the sophistication of modern email attacks, the research that goes into them, and the level of social engineering in play, phishing attacks do inevitably still get through both humans and rudimentary defences.
Turning to cyber AI
Working with our partner Darktrace, we deployed their email security technology, Darktrace/Email, and worked on the configuration and installation together. We were able to see results in days. The volume of phishing emails reported by users fell substantially, and over time with Autonomous Response, the regular reviews of Darktrace/Email’s actions has led us to discover many phishing campaigns that we were previously unaware of.
Darktrace’s actions are taken in the context of the business, holding back emails only as a last resort (less than 1% in our environment), and catching only the genuinely malicious emails rather than producing a load of false positives. The actions are also targeted and proportionate, varying from moving emails to junk to converting attachments and locking links, giving us the flexibility we need.
With Darktrace/Email constantly learning and stopping advanced email attacks, the pressure has been taken off the rest of the team, who can now spend their time working with the business supporting new initiatives and collaborating on new areas of innovation.
Stopping a targeted credential-grabbing attack targeting the C-suite
As with many organisations, it’s often our C-suite that gets targeted by the most malicious mails, and Darktrace/Email recently detected an email sent to one of our executives, prompting them to sign a financial document. The email appeared to come from DocuSign, and contained a malicious link hidden behind the text ‘Review Document’.
Figure 1: An interactive snapshot of Darktrace/Email’s user interface surfacing the email
Figure 2: A screenshot of the email in question
If the link is clicked on, two types of scenarios usually follow from these kind of email attacks. Either the user is led to a fake (and often very convincing) login page which captures credentials, or the document itself contains a legitimate-looking invoice, but with one crucial element changed – the bank details. Accounts teams and CFOs are targeted with this kind of attack on a regular basis, but in this case, the attackers were after the executive’s credentials.
Had the executive clicked through and attempted to log in, they would unknowingly have been sending their credentials to the attacker, who then could have used this information to gather sensitive data from their inbox or other SaaS accounts, or send additional malicious emails from the account to make further inroads into our organisation.
The email was sent over the Imola GP race weekend, which was a high-pressured 48 hours for the whole team, as we ran in a new format without Friday practice, bringing a new intensity to the race weekend. However, Darktrace/Email was on guard, recognising the sender as a new contact and deeming the link to be suspicious. With suitable concerns over the email, Darktrace’s AI double locked the link and automatically moved the email to the executive’s Junk folder. All without having to alert the on-call cyber security team over the weekend.
With attacks like this coming in every day, relying on McLaren’s workforce to distinguish real from fake will never realistically protect us from every single threat. With credential harvesting and account takeover on the rise, it really felt like a matter of time before just one phishing email was successful and the floodgates were opened. But with Darktrace/Email, we can rest assured that we have a powerful AI solution keeping us safe, on and off the track.
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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.
RansomHub Ransomware: Darktrace’s Investigation of the Newest Tool in ShadowSyndicate's Arsenal
What is ShadowSyndicate?
ShadowSyndicate, also known as Infra Storm, is a threat actor reportedly active since July 2022, working with various ransomware groups and affiliates of ransomware programs, such as Quantum, Nokoyawa, and ALPHV. This threat actor employs tools like Cobalt Strike, Sliver, IcedID, and Matanbuchus malware in its attacks. ShadowSyndicate utilizes the same SSH fingerprint (1ca4cbac895fc3bd12417b77fc6ed31d) on many of their servers—85 as of September 2023. At least 52 of these servers have been linked to the Cobalt Strike command and control (C2) framework [1].
What is RansomHub?
First observed following the FBI's takedown of ALPHV/BlackCat in December 2023, RansomHub quickly gained notoriety as a Ransomware-as-a-Service (RaaS) operator. RansomHub capitalized on the law enforcement’s disruption of the LockBit group’s operations in February 2024 to market themselves to potential affiliates who had previously relied on LockBit’s encryptors. RansomHub's success can be largely attributed to their aggressive recruitment on underground forums, leading to the absorption of ex-ALPHV and ex-LockBit affiliates. They were one of the most active ransomware operators in 2024, with approximately 500 victims reported since February, according to their Dedicated Leak Site (DLS) [2].
ShadowSyndicate and RansomHub
External researchers have reported that ShadowSyndicate had as many as seven different ransomware families in their arsenal between July 2022, and September 2023. Now, ShadowSyndicate appears to have added RansomHub’s their formidable stockpile, becoming an affiliate of the RaaS provider [1].
Darktrace’s analysis of ShadowSyndicate across its customer base indicates that the group has been leveraging RansomHub ransomware in multiple attacks in September and October 2024. ShadowSyndicate likely shifted to using RansomHub due to the lucrative rates offered by this RaaS provider, with affiliates receiving up to 90% of the ransom—significantly higher than the general market rate of 70-80% [3].
In many instances where encryption was observed, ransom notes with the naming pattern “README_[a-zA-Z0-9]{6}.txt” were written to affected devices. The content of these ransom notes threatened to release stolen confidential data via RansomHub’s DLS unless a ransom was paid. During these attacks, data exfiltration activity to external endpoints using the SSH protocol was observed. The external endpoints to which the data was transferred were found to coincide with servers previously associated with ShadowSyndicate activity.
Darktrace’s coverage of ShadowSyndicate and RansomHub
Darktrace’s Threat Research team identified high-confidence indicators of compromise (IoCs) linked to the ShadowSyndicate group deploying RansomHub. The investigation revealed four separate incidents impacting Darktrace customers across various sectors, including education, manufacturing, and social services. In the investigated cases, multiple stages of the kill chain were observed, starting with initial internal reconnaissance and leading to eventual file encryption and data exfiltration.
Attack Overview
Internal Reconnaissance
The first observed stage of ShadowSyndicate attacks involved devices making multiple internal connection attempts to other internal devices over key ports, suggesting network scanning and enumeration activity. In this initial phase of the attack, the threat actor gathers critical details and information by scanning the network for open ports that might be potentially exploitable. In cases observed by Darktrace affected devices were typically seen attempting to connect to other internal locations over TCP ports including 22, 445 and 3389.
C2 Communication and Data Exfiltration
In most of the RansomHub cases investigated by Darktrace, unusual connections to endpoints associated with Splashtop, a remote desktop access software, were observed briefly before outbound SSH connections were identified.
Following this, Darktrace detected outbound SSH connections to the external IP address 46.161.27[.]151 using WinSCP, an open-source SSH client for Windows used for secure file transfer. The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) identified this IP address as malicious and associated it with ShadowSyndicate’s C2 infrastructure [4]. During connections to this IP, multiple gigabytes of data were exfiltrated from customer networks via SSH.
Data exfiltration attempts were consistent across investigated cases; however, the method of egress varied from one attack to another, as one would expect with a RaaS strain being employed by different affiliates. In addition to transfers to ShadowSyndicate’s infrastructure, threat actors were also observed transferring data to the cloud storage and file transfer service, MEGA, via HTTP connections using the ‘rclone’ user agent – a command-line program used to manage files on cloud storage. In another case, data exfiltration activity occurred over port 443, utilizing SSL connections.
Lateral Movement
In investigated incidents, lateral movement activity began shortly after C2 communications were established. In one case, Darktrace identified the unusual use of a new administrative credential which was quickly followed up with multiple suspicious executable file writes to other internal devices on the network.
The filenames for this executable followed the regex naming convention “[a-zA-Z]{6}.exe”, with two observed examples being “bWqQUx.exe” and “sdtMfs.exe”.
Figure 1: Cyber AI Analyst Investigation Process for the SMB Writes of Suspicious Files to Multiple Devices' incident.
Additionally, script files such as “Defeat-Defender2.bat”, “Share.bat”, and “def.bat” were also seen written over SMB, suggesting that threat actors were trying to evade network defenses and detection by antivirus software like Microsoft Defender.
File Encryption
Among the three cases where file encryption activity was observed, file names were changed by adding an extension following the regex format “.[a-zA-Z0-9]{6}”. Ransom notes with a similar naming convention, “README_[a-zA-Z0-9]{6}.txt”, were written to each share. While the content of the ransom notes differed slightly in each case, most contained similar text. Clear indicators in the body of the ransom notes pointed to the use of RansomHub ransomware in these attacks. As is increasingly the case, threat actors employed double extortion tactics, threatening to leak confidential data if the ransom was not paid. Like most ransomware, RansomHub included TOR site links for communication between its "customer service team" and the target.
Figure 2: The graph shows the behavior of a device with encryption activity, using the “SMB Sustained Mimetype Conversion” and “Unusual Activity Events” metrics over three weeks.
Since Darktrace’s Autonomous Response capability was not enabled during the compromise, the ransomware attack succeeded in its objective. However, Darktrace’s Cyber AI Analyst provided comprehensive coverage of the kill chain, enabling the customer to quickly identify affected devices and initiate remediation.
Figure 3: Cyber AI Analyst panel showing the critical incidents of the affected device from one of the cases investigated.
In lieu of Autonomous Response being active on the networks, Darktrace was able to suggest a variety of manual response actions intended to contain the compromise and prevent further malicious activity. Had Autonomous Response been enabled at the time of the attack, these actions would have been quickly applied without any human interaction, potentially halting the ransomware attack earlier in the kill chain.
Figure 4: A list of suggested Autonomous Response actions on the affected devices."
Conclusion
The Darktrace Threat Research team has noted a surge in attacks by the ShadowSyndicate group using RansomHub’s RaaS of late. RaaS has become increasingly popular across the threat landscape due to its ease of access to malware and script execution. As more individual threat actors adopt RaaS, security teams are struggling to defend against the increasing number of opportunistic attacks.
For customers subscribed to Darktrace’s Security Operations Center (SOC) services, the Analyst team promptly investigated detections of the aforementioned unusual and anomalous activities in the initial infection phases. Multiple alerts were raised via Darktrace’s Managed Threat Detection to warn customers of active ransomware incidents. By emphasizing anomaly-based detection and response, Darktrace can effectively identify devices affected by ransomware and take action against emerging activity, minimizing disruption and impact on customer networks.
Credit to Kwa Qing Hong (Senior Cyber Analyst and Deputy Analyst Team Lead, Singapore) and Signe Zahark (Principal Cyber Analyst, Japan)
Senior Cyber Analyst and Deputy Analyst Team Lead, Singapore
Blog
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January 14, 2025
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Email
Why AI-powered Email Protection Became Essential for this Global Financial Services Leader
When agile cyber-attackers don’t stop, but pivot
When he first joined this leading financial services provider, it was clear to the CISO that email security needed to be a top priority. The organization provides transfer services to millions of consumers via a network of thousands of agent locations across the US. Those agents are connected to hundreds of thousands of global payers to complete consumer transfers, ranging from leading financial institutions to small local businesses.
With this vast network of agents and payers, the provider relies on email as its primary communications channel. Transmitting billions of dollars every year, the organization is a prime target for cyber criminals looking to steal credentials, financial assets, and sensitive data.
Vulnerable to attacks with gaps in email security and visibility
The CISO discovered that employees were under constant attack by phishing emails impersonating his company’s own executives. The business email compromise (BEC) attacks were designed to deceive employees into sharing credentials or clicking on malicious links.
Upon discovering that their Microsoft 365 tenant lacked secure configuration, the CISO implemented necessary changes to strengthen the service, including enabling authentication controls. While his efforts significantly reduced BEC attacks, cyber criminals changed their tactics, sending employees malicious phishing emails from seemingly valid email accounts from trusted domains like Google and Yahoo. The emails passed through the organization’s native email filters without detection.
The CISO also sought to strengthen defenses against third-party supply chain attacks that could originate with any of the hundreds of thousands of third-party agents and payers the company works with around the world. While the larger institutions typically have sophisticated email security strategies in place, the smaller businesses may lack the cybersecurity expertise needed to effectively secure and manage their data, putting the organization at risk.
While the CISO knew the company was vulnerable to phishing and third-party threats, he didn’t have visibility across the flow of email. Without access to key metrics and valuable data, he couldn’t get the crucial insights needed to quickly identify possible threats and adjust security protocols.
Skilled analysts bogged down with low-level tasks
Like many enterprise organizations, this leading financial services provider relied on a crew of highly skilled analysts to respond to alerts and analyze and triage emails most of their workday. “That shouldn’t be how we operate,” said the CISO. “My role and the role of my staff should be to focus on more strategic projects, support the business, and work on important new product development.”
Balancing user experience with mitigating threats
Enabling greater email security measures without negatively impacting the business, user experience, and customer satisfaction was a daunting challenge the CISO and his security team faced. Imposing restrictions that are too stringent could restrict communication, delay the delivery of important messages, or block legitimate emails – potentially slowing down money transfers, frustrating customers, affecting employee productivity, and impacting revenue. However, maintaining controls that are too permissive could result in serious outcomes like data theft, financial fraud, operational disruption, compliance penalties, and customer attrition.
Self-Learning AI is a game changer
After conducting a thorough POC with several modern security solution providers, this global financial services provider chose the Darktrace / EMAIL an AI-driven email security platform. The CISO said they chose the solution for two key reasons:
Self-Learning AI uses business data to recognize anomalies in communication patterns and user behavior to stop known and unknown threats
Secures the organization’s entire mailflow across all inbound, outbound, and lateral email
Protects against account takeover attacks by identifying subtle anomalies in cloud SaaS
Catches sophisticated threats like impersonations, session token misuse, adversary-in-the-middle attacks, credential theft, and data exfiltration
Second, they pointed to Darktrace’s experience, innovation, and expertise
Deep cybersecurity and industry knowledge
Demonstrated customers successes worldwide
At the forefront of innovation and research, establishing new thresholds in cybersecurity, with technology advances backed by over 200 patents and pending applications
Moreover, and most importantly, this organization trusted Darktrace to deliver on its promises. And according to the CISO, that’s just what happened.
Significantly reduced phishing threats and business risk
Since implementing Darktrace / EMAIL, the threat posed by BEC attacks has dropped sharply. “Phishing is not an issue that concerns me anymore. I estimate we are now identifying and blocking more than 85% of threats our previous solution was missing,” said the CISO. The biggest factor contributing to this success? The power of AI.
With Darktrace / EMAIL, this leadingglobal financial services provider is identifying and blocking more than 85% ofthe phishing email threats its previous solution missed.
AI wasn’t originally on the financial service provider’s list of criteria. But after seeing AI in action and understanding its potential to vastly scale their detection and response capabilities–without adding headcount, the CISO determined AI wasn’t an option but an imperative. “AI is essential when it comes to email security, it’s an absolute necessity,” he said.
Darktrace / EMAIL’s Self-Learning AI is uniquely powerful because it learns the content and context of every internal and external user and can spot the subtle differences in behavioral patterns that point to possible social engineering attacks. Through patented behavioral anomaly detection, Darktrace / EMAIL continuously learns about the organization’s business and users, based on its own operations and data, adjusting security protocols accordingly.
For example, when clients are transferring large amounts of money, they are required to send photos of their driver’s licenses and passports via email to the organization for verification – accounting for a large percentage of its’ inbound email. Darktrace / EMAIL recognizes that it’s normal for customers to send this sensitive information, and it also knows that it’s not normal for that same sensitive information to leave the organization via outbound mail. In addition, Darktrace identifies patterns in user behavior, including who employees communicate with and what kind of information they share. When user behavior falls outside of established norms, such as an email sent from the CFO to employees the CEO would not typically communicate with, Darktrace can take the appropriate action to remove the threat.
“After the implementation, we gave the solution two weeks to ingest our data and learn the specifics of our business. After that, it was perfect, just amazing,” said the CISO.
Boosted team productivity and elevated value to the business
With Darktrace / EMAIL, the organization has successfully scaled its detection and response efforts without scaling personnel. The security team has reduced the number of emails requiring manual investigation by 90%. And because analysts now have the benefit of Darktrace / EMAIL’s analytics and reporting, the investigation process is much easier and faster. “The impact of this solution on my team has been very positive,” said the CISO. “Darktrace / EMAIL essentially manages itself, freeing up time for our skilled analysts–and for myself–to focus on more important projects.”
The security team has scaled its detection and response efforts without scaling personnel,reducing the number of emails it manually investigates by 90%
You can’t control what you can’t see, and with zero visibility into critical data and metrics, this financial services provider was at a serious disadvantage. That has all changed. “Something that I love about Darktrace / EMAIL is the visibility that it provides into key metrics from a single dashboard. We can now understand the behavior of our email flow and data traffic and can make insight-driven decisions to continuously optimize our email security. It’s awesome,” said the CISO.
An efficient user interface also improves productivity and reduces mean time to action by enabling teams to easily visualize key data points and quickly evaluate what actions need to be taken. Darktrace / EMAIL was developed with that experience in mind, allowing users to access data and take quick action without having to constantly log into the solution.
Keeping the business focused on cybersecurity
The leadership of this global organization takes information security very seriously, understanding that cyber-attacks aren’t just an IT problem but a business problem. When it came to evaluating Darktrace, the CISO said numerous stakeholders were involved including C-level executives, infrastructure, and IT, which operates separately from information security. The CISO initially identified the need, conducted the market research, engaged the target vendors, and then brought the other decision makers into the process for the solution evaluation and final decision. “Our IT group, infrastructure team, CTO and CEO are all involved when it comes to making major cybersecurity investments. We always try to make these decisions jointly to ensure we are taking everything into consideration.”
The organization has reached a higher level of maturity when it comes to email cybersecurity. The ability to automate routine email detection and investigation tasks has both strengthened the organization’s cyber resilience and enabled the CISO and his team to contribute more to the business. His advice for other IT leaders facing the same email security and visibility challenges he once experienced: “For those companies that need greater insight and control over their email but have limited resources and people, AI is the answer.”
Discover the most advanced cloud-native AI email security solution to protect your domain and brand while preventing phishing, novel social engineering, business email compromise, account takeover, and data loss.
Gain up to 13 days of earlier threat detection and maximize ROI on your current email security
Experience 20-25% more threat blocking power with Darktrace / EMAIL
Stop the 58% of threats bypassing traditional email security
