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April 17, 2023

Boosting Security Posture with Email Integration

Protect your organization from cyber-attacks with a strong security strategy. Learn how to safeguard against threats targeting email, cloud apps, and beyond.
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
Dan Fein
VP, Product
Written by
Carlos Gray
Senior Product Marketing Manager, Email
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17
Apr 2023

On its own, Darktrace/Email™ stops attacks before they reach an employee’s inbox and considers both security teams and the employees themselves. But its value extends beyond email security, increased by its ability to integrate with the wider security ecosystem, including both Darktrace products and external tools. 

Darktrace’s understanding of you and your organization can be applied anywhere your company has data. This unifying approach to cyber security feeds AI outputs into each other, from threat prevention to detection and response, in order to harden the entire security posture autonomously and continuously. The AI also enriches other security solutions an organization has in place by both ingesting and sharing data. This degree of integration transforms a security stack so that it is greater than the sum of its parts. 

Integrating Beyond Email to Enhance Detection and Response 

Integrating email security with other areas of the digital estate bolsters defenses, while reducing required resources. With more data, security teams gain a better understanding of the security stack and how attacks move through the system.

Traditional security solutions do this by either manually aggregating inputs from various tools or using a SIEM without native integrations to collate data. In contrast, Darktrace’s integration provides real-time intelligence communications between products to inform security teams. 

For example, context of network activity can provide more holistic email security. There’s a strong correlation between the websites users visit and the people that they email, which means information like web traffic provides insight into email threats, and vice versa. 

If an organization receives an email from a strange new sender, that happens to be have been sent from a domain nobody has ever visited, that added context could influence the aggression levels of actions taken. Integrations with endpoint security extends this type of informed decision-making to remote environments. These examples highlight the patented power of Darktrace/Network™ and Darktrace/Endpoint™ when paired with email coverage. 

Diagram depicting the flow of email activity generated by Darktrace Email Security tool.
Figure 2. Darktrace/Email works with Darktrace/Network and Darktrace/Endpoint to generate email insights from web traffic and vice versa. 

Email activity is tied to cloud/SaaS application account activity in an even more direct way. In the case of an account takeover, a suspicious Microsoft 365 login becomes even more suspicious if it is followed by highly unusual email activity, like new inbox rules being created. Too many email security solutions focus on the inbox alone, but viewing these areas in a single scope is critical for security teams wanting to understand the full timeline of an incident. 

To this end, Darktrace creates a 360-degree view of each user and their behavior. This comprehensive view goes beyond native security monitoring tools, allowing security teams to identify instances of data exfiltration, human error, misdirected emails, inappropriate link sharing, unusual log activity, and more. 

In one real-life example, the security team saw an attack from both an email and a SaaS perspective to quickly understand the whole picture, thanks to Darktrace/Email and Darktrace/Apps™. 

Darktrace customers are getting significant value from this integrated security stack. “The whole suite of products has given us 100% visibility across our whole ecosystem, which is fantastic. A lot of times we need to use many products to do that, and with the Darktrace products, I have that all in one,” commented a vice president of enterprise security and fraud management at a major credit union. 

Siloed solutions are a massive pain point in the cyber industry. Most companies have several, layered tools in their security stacks. When there is little to no communication between them, the security team must contend with an inflated workload and misses out on value. They must learn how to navigate several different dashboards, translate between languages and terms, and manually correlate data, in addition to monitoring all the solutions daily. This process makes maintaining security more difficult for the team, especially in a threat landscape with increasingly complex and fast-paced attacks. 

By sending and collecting information to and from other tools that the security team already uses, whether they are a part of Darktrace’s product stack or not, Darktrace/Email optimizes workflows so security teams can reallocate resources to larger, more strategic projects.  

Collaborating Across Email Security and Cyber Risk Management Tools

Syncing email protections with cyber risk management tools even further reduces risk and hardens security.

When emails are received from domain names associated with the brand of the client, an attack surface management tool can automatically analyze if those domains should be included as part of the attack surface scope or trigger malicious domain responses. 

In the other direction, when the attack surface management tool identifies malicious assets, like suspicious domains, spoofing sites, and typo squatters, it can inform email security decisions. With integrations between tools, these malicious assets automatically become watched domains with heightened sensitivity for inbound email. 

This integrated risk reduction can occur internally as well. When security teams look at cyber risk from an internal perspective, they may identify attack paths and high value targets within the company’s digital estate. By leveraging this understanding, Darktrace can determine which employees are critical components of potential attack paths. Once determined, the AI can test them by creating phishing simulations using details like real-life communication patterns and calendar data. These tests generate insights that feed back into Darktrace/Email to harden the environment, for example by heightening sensitivity. 

This demonstrates the benefits of combining Darktrace/Email and Darktrace PREVENT™. As part of the Cyber AI Loop, these connections between email security and cyber risk management are made easy for the security team to understand and act on. One customer noted how this integration had improved its security team’s workflow.  

“The more you use of Darktrace, the better it can correlate on your behalf,” said a Chief Information Officer at a construction company. “That’s why we’re all in with Darktrace now. We now have a holistic Darktrace footprint, which benefits us because we have more of the modules working on our behalf and not having to do the correlations separately or in isolation.” 

Supporting Compatibility with External Security Solutions

Darktrace/Email also works together with external tools. In addition to its mature integration with email providers like Microsoft 365 and Google Workspaces, Darktrace/Email has an open architecture that makes it immensely flexible. It is both API-driven and compatible with syslog, so it can integrate with any security tool and feed into any SIEM or SOAR. 

This unlimited capacity for integration allows Darktrace to detect and respond to threats more precisely with access to more data, as well as reduce the security team’s time-to-meaning by putting all relevant information in a single pane of glass. 

Darktrace/Email is also part of the Darktrace Mobile App, so security teams can view notifications, reports, and remediation actions at any time, even on the go. In this way, Darktrace not only fits into the greater security posture, but also with employees’ day-to-day workflow. 

Finally, Darktrace/Email supports data exports. These translate and share the data it collects within the email environment, allowing the security team to communicate key takeaways generated by Darktrace/Email to anyone within the organization. It can export directly to Microsoft Excel, or any other data analytics tool. This is especially useful for security teams as they work with other departments like IT, compliance, finance, and more. 

Integrations Add Value to the Darktrace Partnership

While Darktrace/Email is a powerful tool on its own, a major source of its value comes from its compatibility with the rest of Darktrace, other tools, people, and processes. 

Deploying multiple Darktrace products builds a robust security ecosystem that enhances detection while breaking down silos and improving workflows, therefore enabling the security team to take on higher-level and more strategic work. By integrating with external tools, Darktrace not only increases its own value but also maximizes the return on investment of other security solutions a team already has.  

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
Dan Fein
VP, Product
Written by
Carlos Gray
Senior Product Marketing Manager, Email

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May 7, 2025

Anomaly-based threat hunting: Darktrace's approach in action

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What is threat hunting?

Threat hunting in cybersecurity involves proactively and iteratively searching through networks and datasets to detect threats that evade existing automated security solutions. It is an important component of a strong cybersecurity posture.

There are several frameworks that Darktrace analysts use to guide how threat hunting is carried out, some of which are:

  • MITRE Attack
  • Tactics, Techniques, Procedures (TTPs)
  • Diamond Model for Intrusion Analysis
  • Adversary, Infrastructure, Victims, Capabilities
  • Threat Hunt Model – Six Steps
  • Purpose, Scope, Equip, Plan, Execute, Feedback
  • Pyramid of Pain

These frameworks are important in baselining how to run a threat hunt. There are also a combination of different methods that allow defenders diversity– regardless of whether it is a proactive or reactive threat hunt. Some of these are:

  • Hypothesis-based threat hunting
  • Analytics-driven threat hunting
  • Automated/machine learning hunting
  • Indicator of Compromise (IoC) hunting
  • Victim-based threat hunting

Threat hunting with Darktrace

At its core, Darktrace is an anomaly-based detection tool. It combines various machine learning types that allows it to characterize what constitutes ‘normal’, based on the analysis of many different measures of a device or actor’s behavior. Those types of learning are then curated into what are called models.

Darktrace models leverage anomaly detection and integrate outputs from Darktrace Deep Packet Inspection, telemetry inputs, and additional modules, creating tailored activity detection.

This dynamic understanding allows Darktrace to identify, with a high degree of precision, events or behaviors that are both anomalous and unlikely to be benign.  On top of machine learning models for detection, there is also the ability to change and create models showcasing the tool’s diversity. The Model Editor allows security teams to specify values, priorities, thresholds, and actions they want to detect. That means a team can create custom detection models based on specific use cases or business requirements. Teams can also increase the priority of existing detections based on their own risk assessments to their environment.

This level of dexterity is particularly useful when conducting a threat hunt. As described above, and in previous ‘Inside the SOC’ blogs such a threat hunt can be on a specific threat actor, specific sector, or a  hypothesis-based threat hunt combined with ‘experimenting’ with some of Darktrace’s models.

Conducting a threat hunt in the energy sector with experimental models

In Darktrace’s recent Threat Research report “AI & Cybersecurity: The state of cyber in UK and US energy sectors” Darktrace’s Threat Research team crafted hypothesis-driven threat hunts, building experimental models and investigating existing models to test them and detect malicious activity across Darktrace customers in the energy sector.

For one of the hunts, which hypothesised utilization of PerfectData software and multi-factor authentication (MFA) bypass to compromise user accounts and destruct data, an experimental model was created to detect a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) user performing activity relating to 'PerfectData Software’, known to allow a threat actor to exfiltrate whole mailboxes as a PST file. Experimental model alerts caused by this anomalous activity were analyzed, in conjunction with existing SaaS and email-related models that would indicate a multi-stage attack in line with the hypothesis.

Whilst hunting, Darktrace researchers found multiple model alerts for this experimental model associated with PerfectData software usage, within energy sector customers, including an oil and gas investment company, as well as other sectors. Upon further investigation, it was also found that in June 2024, a malicious actor had targeted a renewable energy infrastructure provider via a PerfectData Software attack and demonstrated intent to conduct an Operational Technology (OT) attack.

The actor  logged into Azure AD from a rare US IP address. They then granted Consent to ‘eM Client’ from the same IP. Shortly after, the actor granted ‘AddServicePrincipal’ via Azure  to PerfectData Software. Two days later, the actor created a  new email rule from a London IP to move emails to an RSS Feed Folder, stop processing rules, and mark emails as read. They then accessed mail items in the “\Sent” folder from a malicious IP belonging to anonymization network,  Private Internet Access Virtual Private Network (PIA VPN). The actor then conducted mass email deletions , deleting multiple instances of emails with subject “[Name] shared "[Company Name] Proposal" With You” from the  “\Sent folder”. The emails’ subject suggests the email likely contains a link to file storage for phishing purposes. The mass deletion likely represented an attempt to obfuscate a potential outbound phishing email campaign.

The Darktrace Model Alert that triggered for the mass deletes of the likely phishing email containing a file storage link.
Figure 1: The Darktrace Model Alert that triggered for the mass deletes of the likely phishing email containing a file storage link.

A month later, the same user was observed downloading mass mLog CSV files related to proprietary and Operational Technology information. In September, three months after the initial attack, another mass download of operational files occurred by this actor, pertaining to operating instructions and measurements, The observed patience and specific file downloads seemingly demonstrated an intent to conduct or research possible OT attack vectors. An attack on OT could have significant impacts including operational downtime, reputational damage, and harm to everyday operations. Darktrace alerted the impacted customer once findings were verified, and subsequent actions were taken by the internal security team to prevent further malicious activity.

Conclusion

Harnessing the power of different tools in a security stack is a key element to cyber defense. The above hypothesis-based threat hunt and custom demonstrated intent to conduct an experimental model creation demonstrates different threat hunting approaches, how Darktrace’s approach can be operationalized, and that proactive threat hunting can be a valuable complement to traditional security controls and is essential for organizations facing increasingly complex threat landscapes.

Credit to Nathaniel Jones (VP, Security & AI Strategy, Field CISO at Darktrace) and Zoe Tilsiter (EMEA Consultancy Lead)

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About the author
Nathaniel Jones
VP, Security & AI Strategy, Field CISO

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May 6, 2025

Combatting the Top Three Sources of Risk in the Cloud

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With cloud computing, organizations are storing data like intellectual property, trade secrets, Personally Identifiable Information (PII), proprietary code and statistics, and other sensitive information in the cloud. If this data were to be accessed by malicious actors, it could incur financial loss, reputational damage, legal liabilities, and business disruption.

Last year data breaches in solely public cloud deployments were the most expensive type of data breach, with an average of $5.17 million USD, a 13.1% increase from the year before.

So, as cloud usage continues to grow, the teams in charge of protecting these deployments must understand the associated cybersecurity risks.

What are cloud risks?

Cloud threats come in many forms, with one of the key types consisting of cloud risks. These arise from challenges in implementing and maintaining cloud infrastructure, which can expose the organization to potential damage, loss, and attacks.

There are three major types of cloud risks:

1. Misconfigurations

As organizations struggle with complex cloud environments, misconfiguration is one of the leading causes of cloud security incidents. These risks occur when cloud settings leave gaps between cloud security solutions and expose data and services to unauthorized access. If discovered by a threat actor, a misconfiguration can be exploited to allow infiltration, lateral movement, escalation, and damage.

With the scale and dynamism of cloud infrastructure and the complexity of hybrid and multi-cloud deployments, security teams face a major challenge in exerting the required visibility and control to identify misconfigurations before they are exploited.

Common causes of misconfiguration come from skill shortages, outdated practices, and manual workflows. For example, potential misconfigurations can occur around firewall zones, isolated file systems, and mount systems, which all require specialized skill to set up and diligent monitoring to maintain

2. Identity and Access Management (IAM) failures

IAM has only increased in importance with the rise of cloud computing and remote working. It allows security teams to control which users can and cannot access sensitive data, applications, and other resources.

Cybersecurity professionals ranked IAM skills as the second most important security skill to have, just behind general cloud and application security.

There are four parts to IAM: authentication, authorization, administration, and auditing and reporting. Within these, there are a lot of subcomponents as well, including but not limited to Single Sign-On (SSO), Two-Factor Authentication (2FA), Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA), and Role-Based Access Control (RBAC).

Security teams are faced with the challenge of allowing enough access for employees, contractors, vendors, and partners to complete their jobs while restricting enough to maintain security. They may struggle to track what users are doing across the cloud, apps, and on-premises servers.

When IAM is misconfigured, it increases the attack surface and can leave accounts with access to resources they do not need to perform their intended roles. This type of risk creates the possibility for threat actors or compromised accounts to gain access to sensitive company data and escalate privileges in cloud environments. It can also allow malicious insiders and users who accidentally violate data protection regulations to cause greater damage.

3. Cross-domain threats

The complexity of hybrid and cloud environments can be exploited by attacks that cross multiple domains, such as traditional network environments, identity systems, SaaS platforms, and cloud environments. These attacks are difficult to detect and mitigate, especially when a security posture is siloed or fragmented.  

Some attack types inherently involve multiple domains, like lateral movement and supply chain attacks, which target both on-premises and cloud networks.  

Challenges in securing against cross-domain threats often come from a lack of unified visibility. If a security team does not have unified visibility across the organization’s domains, gaps between various infrastructures and the teams that manage them can leave organizations vulnerable.

Adopting AI cybersecurity tools to reduce cloud risk

For security teams to defend against misconfigurations, IAM failures, and insecure APIs, they require a combination of enhanced visibility into cloud assets and architectures, better automation, and more advanced analytics. These capabilities can be achieved with AI-powered cybersecurity tools.

Such tools use AI and automation to help teams maintain a clear view of all their assets and activities and consistently enforce security policies.

Darktrace / CLOUD is a Cloud Detection and Response (CDR) solution that makes cloud security accessible to all security teams and SOCs by using AI to identify and correct misconfigurations and other cloud risks in public, hybrid, and multi-cloud environments.

It provides real-time, dynamic architectural modeling, which gives SecOps and DevOps teams a unified view of cloud infrastructures to enhance collaboration and reveal possible misconfigurations and other cloud risks. It continuously evaluates architecture changes and monitors real-time activity, providing audit-ready traceability and proactive risk management.

Real-time visibility into cloud assets and architectures built from network, configuration, and identity and access roles. In this unified view, Darktrace / CLOUD reveals possible misconfigurations and risk paths.
Figure 1: Real-time visibility into cloud assets and architectures built from network, configuration, and identity and access roles. In this unified view, Darktrace / CLOUD reveals possible misconfigurations and risk paths.

Darktrace / CLOUD also offers attack path modeling for the cloud. It can identify exposed assets and highlight internal attack paths to get a dynamic view of the riskiest paths across cloud environments, network environments, and between – enabling security teams to prioritize based on unique business risk and address gaps to prevent future attacks.  

Darktrace’s Self-Learning AI ensures continuous cloud resilience, helping teams move from reactive to proactive defense.

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About the author
Pallavi Singh
Product Marketing Manager, OT Security & Compliance
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