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May 9, 2021

Securing Networks After SolarWinds Breach

Uncover strategies to protect your business after SolarWinds with Darktrace. Get actionable insights for enhanced cybersecurity."
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
Benny Yazdanpanahi
Chief Information Officer, City of Tyler
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09
May 2021

Insights from City of Tyler CIO Benny Yazdanpanahi, who keeps several Texas cities safe in the rapidly evolving and unpredictable threat landscape of today’s world.

The City of Tyler is the largest city in Northwest Texas, with a population of more than 100,000, and home to several major financial, health, and educational institutions. As such, it is an attractive target for cyber-criminals.

Although we were not a full SolarWinds customer, the recent breach illuminated the fundamental flaws in a rules and signatures based security approach. Cyber security must be adaptive for you to mitigate ever-present risk. As IT professionals, I believe we have a responsibility to educate business leaders – and ultimately the SolarWinds attack should serve a wakeup call to all organizations, no matter what providers they use, to reevaluate and strategize security beyond signature-based tooling. Cities must protect constituents from threats that are impossible to predict, often on small budgets and with lean teams. Here is how we do it.

Cyber AI as the key layer to an organization’s security

In order to protect your organization, you have to understand your entire digital enterprise. You have to understand what is happening within your infrastructure. If someone is uploading videos all the time and that is normal, my security technology needs to understand that. Robust security must know that if something comes from a certain resource, in a certain way, then it is okay in that context. But if these parameters subtly shift, it might be an indicator of an active threat. This is where Cyber AI becomes critical – it looks at human and enterprise behavior, and learns and grows with the organization. When something is anomalous, it does that threat investigation and response automatically. And importantly – it’s not black and white.

We originally turned to AI because heuristic tools were limiting. Most security vulnerability comes from people’s behaviors. Although we train our staff about phishing and other vulnerabilities, having an intelligent security solution is necessary. AI has become popular, but Darktrace Cyber AI truly self-learns all the subtleties of our evolving digital infrastructure.

In our Proof of Value with Darktrace Cyber AI, it actually showed us information we didn’t see before with our existing tools, and this proved to be information that was critical to monitor to stay ahead of unseen threats. Armed with Darktrace, we now know what is happening across all our environments, down to if a new device is on the network that isn’t a part of our IT. If anything is deemed a significant deviation from the normal, it is flagged immediately. This is the power of Darktrace’s machine learning. It learns the DNA of your organization and allows you to see what is most pertinent. This is a crucial and necessary ability for every organization. You can buy all kinds of products, but you must understand your network to know which threats you need to pay most attention to.

Being proactive: Fighting threats with AI

At the City of Tyler, we believe that security is layered. It is not enough to just have a firewall. You have to be proactive and have multiple layers. You have to do the basics, like patching software and educating the workforce – but all of this is just one layer of security. What Darktrace does which makes it stand out from the pack, is that it gives us the ability to react and fight back with Autonomous Response. This is critical when working to mitigate risk.

Antigena Email scrubs our email, seamlessly complementing our existing tools and strategy. The AI actually looks at the way people write emails and knows if their style is different. Antigena Email learns the human behind the accounts on City of Tyler’s infrastructure, using Darktrace’s Cyber AI to learn a unique sense of ‘self’ for the city’s email communications. By understanding what is ‘normal’ for every internal user, external sender, and all the complex relationships between them, Antigena Email neutralizes threats before they even reach the city’s users. It is the only tool that intelligently actions threats in the inbox in this way.

Antigena Network provides this proactive protection to the entire infrastructure, no matter the environment. As our employees moved to remote working, understanding what is normal across contexts has been imperative to our cyber strategy. We have a 24-hour staff rotation and I like to be a hands-on CIO, but Antigena, a solution that actually acts on all the information we have, is crucial in securing our city day in and day out. It is our on-going goal to be proactive about threats – Antigena drives this forward.

Stronger security with collaboration

Municipalities generally don’t have large budgets for cyber security, and small cities may have the purchasing power to buy only a few products. With AI achieving so much in one solution, an organization can do a lot with a single technology, as opposed to piling on tools meant to mitigate particular known risks.

We work with other cities, and share our best practices, because we don’t operate on an island by ourselves. We live in a community, and IT is often the catalyst for collaboration. Other smaller cities might not have as many resources, but sharing our use cases and what we think works can help our sister cities. This community collaboration is how we can help. It makes everyone safer.

We are uniquely fortunate in that before the pandemic even happened, most of our staff were already educated on how to use remote working tools. We were always thinking about how we could make the office seamless, but in today’s world, it is becoming imperative to embrace dynamic collaboration. Many organizations are rapidly innovating to be effective whilst remote, and it has opened up a lot of new vulnerabilities very quickly. Cyber AI is perfectly positioned to support this given it is fundamentally adaptable. From virtual deployment to expert SOC handling from a mobile app, Cyber AI is the solution to secure major infrastructure shifts. With the Darktrace Mobile App, I have been able to monitor and protect the organization from anywhere and see what I need to see at the touch of a button.

I have been here for 19 years educating city leaders about new technologies. I believe cyber security resilience comes from three points: people, process, and technology. AI allows these three to work together in combination. With full visibility, you can pinpoint vulnerabilities before they are breached, whether they originate from the people, the process, or the technology. With the ability to respond to threats autonomously, you have a built-in process layer to protect your infrastructure when it counts the most.

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
Benny Yazdanpanahi
Chief Information Officer, City of Tyler

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April 24, 2025

The Importance of NDR in Resilient XDR

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As threat actors become more adept at targeting and disabling EDR agents, relying solely on endpoint detection leaves critical blind spots.

Network detection and response (NDR) offers the visibility and resilience needed to catch what EDR can’t especially in environments with unmanaged devices or advanced threats that evade local controls.

This blog explores how threat actors can disable or bypass EDR-based XDR solutions and demonstrates how Darktrace’s approach to NDR closes the resulting security gaps with Self-Learning AI that enables autonomous, real-time detection and response.

Threat actors see local security agents as targets

Recent research by security firms has highlighted ‘EDR killers’: tools that deliberately target EDR agents to disable or damage them. These include the known malicious tool EDRKillShifter, the open source EDRSilencer, EDRSandblast and variants of Terminator, and even the legitimate business application HRSword.

The attack surface of any endpoint agent is inevitably large, whether the software is challenged directly, by contesting its local visibility and access mechanisms, or by targeting the Operating System it relies upon. Additionally, threat actors can readily access and analyze EDR tools, and due to their uniformity across environments an exploit proven in a lab setting will likely succeed elsewhere.

Sophos have performed deep research into the EDRShiftKiller tool, which ESET have separately shown became accessible to multiple threat actor groups. Cisco Talos have reported via TheRegister observing significant success rates when an EDR kill was attempted by ransomware actors.

With the local EDR agent silently disabled or evaded, how will the threat be discovered?

What are the limitations of relying solely on EDR?

Cyber attackers will inevitably break through boundary defences, through innovation or trickery or exploiting zero-days. Preventive measures can reduce but not completely stop this. The attackers will always then want to expand beyond their initial access point to achieve persistence and discover and reach high value targets within the business. This is the primary domain of network activity monitoring and NDR, which includes responsibility for securing the many devices that cannot run endpoint agents.

In the insights from a CISA Red Team assessment of a US CNI organization, the Red Team was able to maintain access over the course of months and achieve their target outcomes. The top lesson learned in the report was:

“The assessed organization had insufficient technical controls to prevent and detect malicious activity. The organization relied too heavily on host-based endpoint detection and response (EDR) solutions and did not implement sufficient network layer protections.”

This proves that partial, isolated viewpoints are not sufficient to track and analyze what is fundamentally a connected problem – and without the added visibility and detection capabilities of NDR, any downstream SIEM or MDR services also still have nothing to work with.

Why is network detection & response (NDR) critical?

An effective NDR finds threats that disable or can’t be seen by local security agents and generally operates out-of-band, acquiring data from infrastructure such as traffic mirroring from physical or virtual switches. This means that the security system is extremely inaccessible to a threat actor at any stage.

An advanced NDR such as Darktrace / NETWORK is fully capable of detecting even high-end novel and unknown threats.

Detecting exploitation of Ivanti CS/PS with Darktrace / NETWORK

On January 9th 2025, two new vulnerabilities were disclosed in Ivanti Connect Secure and Policy Secure appliances that were under malicious exploitation. Perimeter devices, like Ivanti VPNs, are designed to keep threat actors out of a network, so it's quite serious when these devices are vulnerable.

An NDR solution is critical because it provides network-wide visibility for detecting lateral movement and threats that an EDR might miss, such as identifying command and control sessions (C2) and data exfiltration, even when hidden within encrypted traffic and which an EDR alone may not detect.

Darktrace initially detected suspicious activity connected with the exploitation of CVE-2025-0282 on December 29, 2024 – 11 days before the public disclosure of the vulnerability, this early detection highlights the benefits of an anomaly-based network detection method.

Throughout the campaign and based on the network telemetry available to Darktrace, a wide range of malicious activities were identified, including the malicious use of administrative credentials, the download of suspicious files, and network scanning in the cases investigated.

Darktrace / NETWORK’s autonomous response capabilities played a critical role in containment by autonomously blocking suspicious connections and enforcing normal behavior patterns. At the same time, Darktrace Cyber AI Analyst™ automatically investigated and correlated the anomalous activity into cohesive incidents, revealing the full scope of the compromise.

This case highlights the importance of real-time, AI-driven network monitoring to detect and disrupt stealthy post-exploitation techniques targeting unmanaged or unprotected systems.

Unlocking adaptive protection for evolving cyber risks

Darktrace / NETWORK uses unique AI engines that learn what is normal behavior for an organization’s entire network, continuously analyzing, mapping and modeling every connection to create a full picture of your devices, identities, connections, and potential attack paths.

With its ability to uncover previously unknown threats as well as detect known threats using signatures and threat intelligence, Darktrace is an essential layer of the security stack. Darktrace has helped secure customers against attacks including 2024 threat actor campaigns against Fortinet’s FortiManager , Palo Alto firewall devices, and more.  

Stay tuned for part II of this series which dives deeper into the differences between NDR types.

Credit to Nathaniel Jones VP, Security & AI Strategy, FCISO & Ashanka Iddya, Senior Director of Product Marketing for their contribution to this blog.

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

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April 22, 2025

Obfuscation Overdrive: Next-Gen Cryptojacking with Layers

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Out of all the services honeypotted by Darktrace, Docker is the most commonly attacked, with new strains of malware emerging daily. This blog will analyze a novel malware campaign with a unique obfuscation technique and a new cryptojacking technique.

What is obfuscation?

Obfuscation is a common technique employed by threat actors to prevent signature-based detection of their code, and to make analysis more difficult. This novel campaign uses an interesting technique of obfuscating its payload.

Docker image analysis

The attack begins with a request to launch a container from Docker Hub, specifically the kazutod/tene:ten image. Using Docker Hub’s layer viewer, an analyst can quickly identify what the container is designed to do. In this case, the container is designed to run the ten.py script which is built into itself.

 Docker Hub Image Layers, referencing the script ten.py.
Figure 1: Docker Hub Image Layers, referencing the script ten.py.

To gain more information on the Python file, Docker’s built in tooling can be used to download the image (docker pull kazutod/tene:ten) and then save it into a format that is easier to work with (docker image save kazutod/tene:ten -o tene.tar). It can then be extracted as a regular tar file for further investigation.

Extraction of the resulting tar file.
Figure 2: Extraction of the resulting tar file.

The Docker image uses the OCI format, which is a little different to a regular file system. Instead of having a static folder of files, the image consists of layers. Indeed, when running the file command over the sha256 directory, each layer is shown as a tar file, along with a JSON metadata file.

Output of the file command over the sha256 directory.
Figure 3: Output of the file command over the sha256 directory.

As the detailed layers are not necessary for analysis, a single command can be used to extract all of them into a single directory, recreating what the container file system would look like:

find blobs/sha256 -type f -exec sh -c 'file "{}" | grep -q "tar archive" && tar -xf "{}" -C root_dir' \;

Result of running the command above.
Figure 4: Result of running the command above.

The find command can then be used to quickly locate where the ten.py script is.

find root_dir -name ten.py

root_dir/app/ten.py

Details of the above ten.py script.
Figure 5: Details of the above ten.py script.

This may look complicated at first glance, however after breaking it down, it is fairly simple. The script defines a lambda function (effectively a variable that contains executable code) and runs zlib decompress on the output of base64 decode, which is run on the reversed input. The script then runs the lambda function with an input of the base64 string, and then passes it to exec, which runs the decoded string as Python code.

To help illustrate this, the code can be cleaned up to this simplified function:

def decode(input):
   reversed = input[::-1]

   decoded = base64.decode(reversed)
   decompressed = zlib.decompress(decoded)
   return decompressed

decoded_string = decode(the_big_text_blob)
exec(decoded_string) # run the decoded string

This can then be set up as a recipe in Cyberchef, an online tool for data manipulation, to decode it.

Use of Cyberchef to decode the ten.py script.
Figure 6: Use of Cyberchef to decode the ten.py script.

The decoded payload calls the decode function again and puts the output into exec. Copy and pasting the new payload into the input shows that it does this another time. Instead of copy-pasting the output into the input all day, a quick script can be used to decode this.

The script below uses the decode function from earlier in order to decode the base64 data and then uses some simple string manipulation to get to the next payload. The script will run this over and over until something interesting happens.

# Decode the initial base64

decoded = decode(initial)
# Remove the first 11 characters and last 3

# so we just have the next base64 string

clamped = decoded[11:-3]

for i in range(1, 100):
   # Decode the new payload

   decoded = decode(clamped)
   # Print it with the current step so we

   # can see what’s going on

   print(f"Step {i}")

   print(decoded)
   # Fetch the next base64 string from the

   # output, so the next loop iteration will

   # decode it

   clamped = decoded[11:-3]

Result of the 63rd iteration of this script.
Figure 7: Result of the 63rd iteration of this script.

After 63 iterations, the script returns actual code, accompanied by an error from the decode function as a stopping condition was never defined. It not clear what the attacker’s motive to perform so many layers of obfuscation was, as one round of obfuscation versus several likely would not make any meaningful difference to bypassing signature analysis. It’s possible this is an attempt to stop analysts or other hackers from reverse engineering the code. However,  it took a matter of minutes to thwart their efforts.

Cryptojacking 2.0?

Cleaned up version of the de-obfuscated code.
Figure 8: Cleaned up version of the de-obfuscated code.

The cleaned up code indicates that the malware attempts to set up a connection to teneo[.]pro, which appears to belong to a Web3 startup company.

Teneo appears to be a legitimate company, with Crunchbase reporting that they have raised USD 3 million as part of their seed round [1]. Their service allows users to join a decentralized network, to “make sure their data benefits you” [2]. Practically, their node functions as a distributed social media scraper. In exchange for doing so, users are rewarded with “Teneo Points”, which are a private crypto token.

The malware script simply connects to the websocket and sends keep-alive pings in order to gain more points from Teneo and does not do any actual scraping. Based on the website, most of the rewards are gated behind the number of heartbeats performed, which is likely why this works [2].

Checking out the attacker’s dockerhub profile, this sort of attack seems to be their modus operandi. The most recent container runs an instance of the nexus network client, which is a project to perform distributed zero-knowledge compute tasks in exchange for cryptocurrency.

Typically, traditional cryptojacking attacks rely on using XMRig to directly mine cryptocurrency, however as XMRig is highly detected, attackers are shifting to alternative methods of generating crypto. Whether this is more profitable remains to be seen. There is not currently an easy way to determine the earnings of the attackers due to the more “closed” nature of the private tokens. Translating a user ID to a wallet address does not appear to be possible, and there is limited public information about the tokens themselves. For example, the Teneo token is listed as “preview only” on CoinGecko, with no price information available.

Conclusion

This blog explores an example of Python obfuscation and how to unravel it. Obfuscation remains a ubiquitous technique employed by the majority of malware to aid in detection/defense evasion and being able to de-obfuscate code is an important skill for analysts to possess.

We have also seen this new avenue of cryptominers being deployed, demonstrating that attackers’ techniques are still evolving - even tried and tested fields. The illegitimate use of legitimate tools to obtain rewards is an increasingly common vector. For example,  as has been previously documented, 9hits has been used maliciously to earn rewards for the attack in a similar fashion.

Docker remains a highly targeted service, and system administrators need to take steps to ensure it is secure. In general, Docker should never be exposed to the wider internet unless absolutely necessary, and if it is necessary both authentication and firewalling should be employed to ensure only authorized users are able to access the service. Attacks happen every minute, and even leaving the service open for a short period of time may result in a serious compromise.

References

1. https://www.crunchbase.com/funding_round/teneo-protocol-seed--a8ff2ad4

2. https://teneo.pro/

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About the author
Nate Bill
Threat Researcher
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