Introducing ‘Defend Beyond’: Our promise to customers in the face of evolving threats
27
Aug 2024
As we enter the era of AI, both the way businesses operate and the landscape that they operate within are changing. To continue to support our customers, we’ve refocused our mission to be the essential cybersecurity platform using AI to proactively defend against novel and known threats.
There’s a global paradigm shift underway, as we enter the era of AI, that is changing both the way businesses operate and the landscape that they operate within. Our customers are dealing with the impact that AI and automation, as well as the commodification of cybercrime-as-a-service, are having on the threat landscape. Attacks that once took a human weeks or months to propagate can now be done much faster, more effectively, and on a greater scale. Earlier this year, we released our 2024 State of AI Cybersecurity Report which found that 74% of security professionals surveyed agree that AI-powered cyber threats are already having a significant impact on their organizations.
On the other hand, we’ve never been more optimistic that the application of AI in cybersecurity is an essential enabler of innovation. That’s why Darktrace has been building a new model for cybersecurity since our founding in 2013. We remain squarely focused on innovating at the crossroads of AI and cybersecurity to better help our customers build resilience and stay one step ahead of changing threats. We’ve seen first-hand how AI can transform security operations by automating alert triage and freeing up valuable human time to focus on proactively hardening defenses.
As we continue this journey in support of our customers, it’s important that our corporate identity keep pace with our ambitions. We know that the world is a dynamic place, and we believe that a proactive approach to security is the best way to help our customers realize their innovation potential in this new era. To achieve this, we’ve refocused our mission to be the essential cybersecurity platform using AI to proactively defend against novel and known threats.
This week, we introduce a bold new brand promise that encapsulates our focus on championing the defenders who protect companies every day, while also pushing beyond the boundaries of conventional thinking to innovate ahead of current challenges. Defend Beyond – our new brand platform -- achieves just that. More than a brand tagline, Defend Beyond embodies the essence of Darktrace’s ability to harness the power of AI to help our customers to stay ahead of constantly changing cyber threats and threat actors. Take a closer look at this promise through our Defend Beyond brand video.
In addition to this redefined corporate positioning, Darktrace has continued to innovate for our customers. In April, we announced the Darktrace ActiveAI Security Platform™ – an industry leading, AI-native offering that can visualize and correlate threats across the entire enterprise, provide more complete visibility to help mitigate risk, and automate time-intensive tasks to support a preventative and proactive approach to delivering cyber resilience. This platform-based approach allows our customers to be on the leading edge of AI in cybersecurity, while also reducing operational costs through security stack consolidation. Finally, as security operations teams struggle to keep up with the sheer volume of alerts, the Darktrace platform delivers industry-leading, investigative AI to automate the triaging of incidents, and further save human time in the process.
This week, we go a step further as we unveil additional changes to our product portfolio including packaging and product naming. After extensive analysis and customer feedback, we’ve taken steps to streamline and simplify our product packaging. Specifically, our flagship products of Darktrace DETECT™ and Darktrace RESPOND™, along with Cyber AI Analyst™, have now been combined and serve as the foundation of the Darktrace ActiveAI Security platform. This approach ensures that customers benefit from the breadth of our real-time detection, autonomous response, and investigative AI capabilities in the easiest approach possible.
These foundational capabilities can be purchased through any one of the Darktrace primary products, which have been renamed as follows to better align to the challenges our customers are seeking to solve:
Darktrace / CLOUD™, delivering cyber resilience through real-time and intelligent multi-cloud security
Darktrace / EMAIL™, stopping sophisticated threats up to 13 days faster through revolutionary email security.
Darktrace / NETWORK™, combatting unknown threats with one of the most advanced Network Detection and Response.
Darktrace / OT™, redefining risk management with one of the most comprehensive solutions, purpose- built for critical infrastructure.
Darktrace / IDENTITY™, unifying visibility and control of identity threats across your entire digital enterprise.
Darktrace / ENDPOINT™, providing advanced threat detection and response across devices, anywhere.
Customers can start their Darktrace journey with any of these primary products, realizing the additive benefits of the platform as their deployment grows. Cross platform products deliver value across the platform while also providing unique capabilities within their specific categories. We have renamed these products to better reflect the functionality of our offerings:
At Darktrace, supporting our 9,700+ customers is the heart of our purpose and mission. We are inspired by the work they do every day to keep their organizations, and the world, moving in the face of constant change. Over the last year, we've continuously innovated across our products, services, and go-to-market strategy to enable them to stay ahead. The new positioning we're unveiling today is designed to simplify the experience for our customers and reflects our bold ambition to enable defenders today and for the future. I hope you join me in celebrating this evolution as we strive to defend beyond.
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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.
Author
Chris Kozup
Chief Marketing Officer
Chris joins Darktrace as a proven marketing executive with 20+ years of experience across all domains of enterprise technology marketing. Prior to joining Darktrace, Chris was the CMO at Zscaler where he was responsible for global marketing strategy and execution. Prior to his time at Zscaler, Chris held senior leadership roles at a wide range of successful companies including HPE Aruba Networking, Nutanix, and Cisco. Earlier in his career, Chris was an industry analyst at the META Group, responsible for advising enterprise organizations on IT & Security best practices. Chris holds a Bachelor of Arts from Ohio University and a Master of Business Administration from IE Business School in Spain.
Reimagining Your SOC: How to Achieve Proactive Network Security
Introduction: Challenges and solutions to SOC efficiency
For Security Operation Centers (SOCs), reliance on signature or rule-based tools – solutions that are always chasing the latest update to prevent only what is already known – creates an excess of false positives. SOC analysts are therefore overwhelmed by a high volume of context-lacking alerts, with human analysts able to address only about 10% due to time and resource constraints. This forces many teams to accept the risks of addressing only a fraction of the alerts while novel threats go completely missed.
74% of practitioners are already grappling with the impact of an AI-powered threat landscape, which amplifies challenges like tool sprawl, alert fatigue, and burnout. Thus, achieving a resilient network, where SOC teams can spend most of their time getting proactive and stopping threats before they occur, feels like an unrealistic goal as attacks are growing more frequent.
Despite advancements in security technology (advanced detection systems with AI, XDR tools, SIEM aggregators, etc...), practitioners are still facing the same issues of inefficiency in their SOC, stopping them from becoming proactive. How can they select security solutions that help them achieve a proactive state without dedicating more human hours and resources to managing and triaging alerts, tuning rules, investigating false positives, and creating reports?
To overcome these obstacles, organizations must leverage security technology that is able to augment and support their teams. This can happen in the following ways:
Full visibility across the modern network expanding into hybrid environments
Have tools that identifies and stops novel threats autonomously, without causing downtime
Apply AI-led analysis to reduce time spent on manual triage and investigation
Your current solutions might be holding you back
Traditional cybersecurity point solutions are reliant on using global threat intelligence to pattern match, determine signatures, and consequently are chasing the latest update to prevent only what is known. This means that unknown threats will evade detection until a patient zero is identified. This legacy approach to threat detection means that at least one organization needs to be ‘patient zero’, or the first victim of a novel attack before it is formally identified.
Even the point solutions that claim to use AI to enhance threat detection rely on a combination of supervised machine learning, deep learning, and transformers to
train and inform their systems. This entails shipping your company’s data out to a large data lake housed somewhere in the cloud where it gets blended with attack data from thousands of other organizations. The resulting homogenized dataset gets used to train AI systems — yours and everyone else’s — to recognize patterns of attack based on previously encountered threats.
While using AI in this way reduces the workload of security teams who would traditionally input this data by hand, it emanates the same risk – namely, that AI systems trained on known threats cannot deal with the threats of tomorrow. Ultimately, it is the unknown threats that bring down an organization.
The promise and pitfalls of XDR in today's threat landscape
Enter Extended Detection and Response (XDR): a platform approach aimed at unifying threat detection across the digital environment. XDR was developed to address the limitations of traditional, fragmented tools by stitching together data across domains, providing SOC teams with a more cohesive, enterprise-wide view of threats. This unified approach allows for improved detection of suspicious activities that might otherwise be missed in siloed systems.
However, XDR solutions still face key challenges: they often depend heavily on human validation, which can aggravate the already alarmingly high alert fatigue security analysts experience, and they remain largely reactive, focusing on detecting and responding to threats rather than helping prevent them. Additionally, XDR frequently lacks full domain coverage, relying on EDR as a foundation and are insufficient in providing native NDR capabilities and visibility, leaving critical gaps that attackers can exploit. This is reflected in the current security market, with 57% of organizations reporting that they plan to integrate network security products into their current XDR toolset[1].
Why settling is risky and how to unlock SOC efficiency
The result of these shortcomings within the security solutions market is an acceptance of inevitable risk. From false positives driving the barrage of alerts, to the siloed tooling that requires manual integration, and the lack of multi-domain visibility requiring human intervention for business context, security teams have accepted that not all alerts can be triaged or investigated.
While prioritization and processes have improved, the SOC is operating under a model that is overrun with alerts that lack context, meaning that not all of them can be investigated because there is simply too much for humans to parse through. Thus, teams accept the risk of leaving many alerts uninvestigated, rather than finding a solution to eliminate that risk altogether.
Darktrace / NETWORK is designed for your Security Operations Center to eliminate alert triage with AI-led investigations , and rapidly detect and respond to known and unknown threats. This includes the ability to scale into other environments in your infrastructure including cloud, OT, and more.
Beyond global threat intelligence: Self-Learning AI enables novel threat detection & response
Darktrace does not rely on known malware signatures, external threat intelligence, historical attack data, nor does it rely on threat trained machine learning to identify threats.
Darktrace’s unique Self-learning AI deeply understands your business environment by analyzing trillions of real-time events that understands your normal ‘pattern of life’, unique to your business. By connecting isolated incidents across your business, including third party alerts and telemetry, Darktrace / NETWORK uses anomaly chains to identify deviations from normal activity.
The benefit to this is that when we are not predefining what we are looking for, we can spot new threats, allowing end users to identify both known threats and subtle, never-before-seen indicators of malicious activity that traditional solutions may miss if they are only looking at historical attack data.
AI-led investigations empower your SOC to prioritize what matters
Anomaly detection is often criticized for yielding high false positives, as it flags deviations from expected patterns that may not necessarily indicate a real threat or issues. However, Darktrace applies an investigation engine to automate alert triage and address alert fatigue.
Darktrace’s Cyber AI Analyst revolutionizes security operations by conducting continuous, full investigations across Darktrace and third-party alerts, transforming the alert triage process. Instead of addressing only a fraction of the thousands of daily alerts, Cyber AI Analyst automatically investigates every relevant alert, freeing up your team to focus on high-priority incidents and close security gaps.
Powered by advanced machine-learning techniques, including unsupervised learning, models trained by expert analysts, and tailored security language models, Cyber AI Analyst emulates human investigation skills, testing hypotheses, analyzing data, and drawing conclusions. According to Darktrace Internal Research, Cyber AI Analyst typically provides a SOC with up to 50,000 additional hours of Level 2 analysis and written reporting annually, enriching security operations by producing high level incident alerts with full details so that human analysts can focus on Level 3 tasks.
Containing threats with Autonomous Response
Simply quarantining a device is rarely the best course of action - organizations need to be able to maintain normal operations in the face of threats and choose the right course of action. Different organizations also require tailored response functions because they have different standards and protocols across a variety of unique devices. Ultimately, a ‘one size fits all’ approach to automated response actions puts organizations at risk of disrupting business operations.
Darktrace’s Autonomous Response tailors its actions to contain abnormal behavior across users and digital assets by understanding what is normal and stopping only what is not. Unlike blanket quarantines, it delivers a bespoke approach, blocking malicious activities that deviate from regular patterns while ensuring legitimate business operations remain uninterrupted.
Darktrace offers fully customizable response actions, seamlessly integrating with your workflows through hundreds of native integrations and an open API. It eliminates the need for costly development, natively disarming threats in seconds while extending capabilities with third-party tools like firewalls, EDR, SOAR, and ITSM solutions.
Unlocking a proactive state of security
Securing the network isn’t just about responding to incidents — it’s about being proactive, adaptive, and prepared for the unexpected. The NIST Cybersecurity Framework (CSF 2.0) emphasizes this by highlighting the need for focused risk management, continuous incident response (IR) refinement, and seamless integration of these processes with your detection and response capabilities.
Despite advancements in security technology, achieving a proactive posture is still a challenge to overcome because SOC teams face inefficiencies from reliance on pattern-matching tools, which generate excessive false positives and leave many alerts unaddressed, while novel threats go undetected. If SOC teams are spending all their time investigating alerts then there is no time spent getting ahead of attacks.
Achieving proactive network resilience — a state where organizations can confidently address challenges at every stage of their security posture — requires strategically aligned solutions that work seamlessly together across the attack lifecycle.
References
1. Market Guide for Extended Detection and Response, Gartner, 17thAugust 2023 - ID G00761828
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”.
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.
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.
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.
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)