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January 7, 2020

Darktrace: Advanced Email Security Solutions

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07
Jan 2020
Learn about modern email security strategies with Darktrace. Stay ahead of threats using AI-driven insights and solutions.

When thinking about email security, a familiar story usually comes to mind: an attacker sends a malicious payload hidden in a link or attachment, and an unsuspecting recipient clicks and inadvertently downloads malware onto their device. But in reality, this kind of attack represents just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the broader spectrum of threats that target organizations via the inbox.

Criminals are increasingly turning to more subtle forms of attacks which involve sending ‘clean emails’ containing only text, and coaxing a recipient into replying, revealing sensitive information or performing an offline transaction. These methods easily bypass legacy security tools that rely on checking links and attachments against blacklists and signatures. Moreover, they generally involve registering new ‘look-a-like’ email addresses, which not only trick the recipient but also bypass traditional defenses set on identifying blacklisted domains.

A quick RE:ply

Solicitation attempts are impossible to stop without a comprehensive understanding of ‘normal’ across digital traffic from both email and the wider digital business. With every email analyzed in the wider context of the sender, the recipient, and the entire organization, seemingly harmless emails that bypass traditional security tools can be identified in seconds given a vast range of metrics, including suspicious similarities to known users, abnormal associations, and even anomalies in email content and subject line.

Darktrace recently discovered such an attack whereby a new Gmail domain was created in the name of the company’s CEO. From this address, an email was sent to a member of the payroll department requesting that the employee update the CEO’s direct deposit information. Since the email successfully mimicked the CEO’s typical writing style, it could have easily succeeded if Darktrace’s AI hadn’t been analyzing the organization’s mail flow in connection with the rest of the business.

Figure 1: An example of a ‘clean’ spoofing email, and Darktrace’s user interface showing Antigena’s decision to ‘Hold’ the email. The names and addresses have been anonymized to protect the customer.

A bleak outlook

Cyber-criminals are also turning to supply chains – comprised of vendors, partners and contractors – in their attacks to infiltrate an organization or establish offline communication. Having taken over a supplier’s account, attackers seek to reply to previous email exchanges in order to accomplish their goals. And with cases of credential compromise increasing 260% since 2016, this threat vector is only set to increase in the coming decade.

A customer trialing Darktrace Antigena Email recently caught an instance of this, whereby an attacker had taken over the account of a trusted consultancy firm. Darktrace recognized that the sender was well known to the company, and a number of internal users had in fact corresponded directly with them earlier that same day.

Less than two hours after a routine email exchange, the account was taken over by an attacker who sent emails to 39 users, each containing a phishing link. There was variation in the subject lines and links, suggesting highly targeted emails from a well-prepared attacker.

Figure 2: An attacker’s response to an existing email chain, seeking to contextualize and imitate previous communication between the senders.

Darktrace identified the full range of anomalies that are typically associated with account takeovers, including the unusual IP address, the inconsistency of the link based on its learned ‘pattern of life’, the unusual group of recipients, and in some emails, the topic anomaly.

FW: Thinking

In this instance, the attacker had taken the time to read the previous correspondence to contextualize their impersonation attempt. Going forward, artificial intelligence will increasingly be adopted to learn prior communication patterns between two senders to make for more legitimate-looking emails, which can be sent at machine-speed and scale. One of the most notorious pieces of contemporary malware – the Emotet trojan – is a prime example of a prototype-AI attack. Emotet’s main distribution mechanism is through email, usually via invoice scams.

‘Forward thinking’ attackers could easily use AI to supercharge attacks. With artificial intelligence analyzing the context of every email thread and replicating the language used, these email attacks could become highly tailored to individuals. This would mean that an AI-powered Emotet trojan could create entirely customized, more believable emails and, crucially, send these out at scale, allowing cyber-criminals to increase the yield of their operations enormously.

This possibility gives rise to a new chapter in email security, and one in which a holistic ‘immune system’ platform is necessary. Legacy security tools that are confined to the email gateway or inbox are no longer sufficient to stop this vast range of sophisticated attacks. By leveraging AI to learn ‘normal’ behavior across email traffic and the entire digital estate, Antigena Email is able to protect email users not only from traditional phishing attacks, but from every threatening email seeking to cause harm.

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
Mariana Pereira
VP, Field CISO

Mariana is the VP, Field CISO at Darktrace, and works closely with the development, analyst, and marketing teams to advise technical and non-technical audiences on how best to augment cyber resilience, and how to implement AI technology as a means of defense. She speaks regularly at international events, with a specialism in presenting on sophisticated, AI-powered email attacks. She holds an MBA from the University of Chicago, and speaks several languages including French, Italian, and Portuguese.

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April 4, 2025

Darktrace Named as Market Leader in the 2025 Omdia Market Radar for OT Cybersecurity Platforms

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We are pleased to announce that Darktrace / OT has been named a Market Leader in Omdia’s  2025 Market Radar for OT Cybersecurity Platforms. We believe this highlights our unique capabilities in the OT security market and follows similar recognition from Gartner who recently named Darktrace / OT as the sole Visionary in in the Magic Quadrant for Cyber Physical Systems (CPS) Protection Platforms market.

Historically, IT and OT systems have been managed separately, creating challenges due to the differences of priorities between the two domains. While both value availability, IT emphasizes confidentiality and integrity whereas OT focuses on safety and reliability. Organizations are increasingly converging these systems to reap the benefits of automation, efficiency, and productivity (1).

Omdia’s research highlights that decision makers are increasingly prioritizing comprehensive security coverage, centralized management, and advanced cybersecurity capabilities when selecting OT security solutions (1).

Rising productivity demands have driven the convergence of OT, IT, and cloud-connected systems, expanding attack surfaces and exposing vulnerabilities. Darktrace / OT provides a comprehensive OT security solution, purpose-built for critical infrastructure, offering visibility across OT, IoT, and IT assets, bespoke risk management, and industry-leading threat detection and response powered by Self-Learning AITM.

Figure 1: Omdia vendor overview for OT cybersecurity platforms
Figure 1: Omdia vendor overview for OT cybersecurity platforms

An AI-first approach to OT security  

Many OT security vendors have integrated AI into their offerings, often leveraging machine learning for anomaly detection and threat response. However, only a few have a deep-rooted history in AI, with longstanding expertise shaping their approach beyond surface-level adoption.

The Omdia Market Radar recognizes that Darktrace has extensive background in the AI space:

“Darktrace has invested extensively in AI research to fuel its capabilities since 2013 with 200-plus patent applications, providing anomaly detection with a significant level of customization, helping with SOC productivity and efficiency, streamlining to show what matters for OT.” (1)

Unlike other security approaches that rely on existing threat data, Darktrace / OT achieves this through Self-Learning AI that understands normal business operations, detecting and containing known and unknown threats autonomously, thereby reducing Sec Ops workload and ensuring minimal downtime

This approach extends to incident investigations where an industry-first Cyber AI AnalystTM automatically investigates all relevant threats across IT and OT, prioritizes critical incidents, and then summarizes findings in an easily understandable view—bringing production engineers and security analysts together to communicate and quickly take appropriate action.

Balancing autonomous response with human oversight

In OT environments where uptime is essential, autonomous response technology can be approached with apprehension. However, Darktrace offers customizable response actions that can be set to “human confirmation mode.”

Omdia recognizes that our approach provides customizable options for autonomous response:

“Darktrace’s autonomous response functionality enforces normal, expected behavior. This can be automated but does not need to be from the beginning, and it can be fine-tuned. Alternative step-by-step mitigations are clearly laid out step-by-step and updated based on organizational risk posture and current level of progress.” (1)

This approach allows security and production to keep humans-in-the-loop with pre-defined actions for potential attacks, enforcing normal to contain a threat, and allowing production to continue without disruption.  

Bespoke vulnerability and risk management

In the realm of OT security, asset management takes precedent as one of the key focus points for organizations. With a large quantity of assets to manage, practitioners are overwhelmed with information with no real way to prioritize or apply them to their unique environment.

Darktrace / OT is recognized by Omdia as having:

“Advanced risk management capabilities that showcase metrics on impact, exploit difficulty, and estimated cost of an attack […] Given the nascency of this capability (April 2024), it is remarkably granular in depth and insight.” (1)

Enabling this is Darktrace’s unique approach to AI extends to risk management capabilities for OT. Darktrace / OT understands customers’ unique risks by building a comprehensive and contextualized picture that goes beyond isolated CVE scoring. It combines attack path modeling with MITRE ATT&CK  techniques to provide hardening recommendations regardless of patching availability and gives you a clearer view of the potential impact of an attack from APT groups.

Modular, scalable security for industrial environments

Organizations need flexibility when it comes to OT security, some want a fully integrated IT-OT security stack, while others prefer a segregated approach due to compliance or operational concerns. The Darktrace ActiveAI Security Platform offers integrated security across multiple domains, allowing flexibility and unification across IT and OT security. The platform combines telemetry from all areas of your digital estate to detect and respond to threats, including OT, network, cloud, email, and user identities.

Omdia recognizes Darktrace’s expansive coverage across multiple domains as a key reason why organizations should consider Darktrace / OT:

“Darktrace’s modular and platform, approach offer’s integrated security across multiple domains. It offers the option of Darktrace / OT as a separate platform product for those that want to segregate IT and OT cybersecurity or are not yet in a position to secure both domains in tandem. The deployment of Darktrace’s platform is flexible—with nine different deployment options, including physical on-premises, virtual, cloud, and hybrid.” (1)

With flexible deployment options, Darktrace offers security teams the ability to choose a model that works best for their organization, ensuring that security doesn’t have to be a “one-size-fits-all” approach.

Conclusion: Why Darktrace / OT stands out in Omdia’s evaluation

Omdia’s 2025 Market Radar for OT Cybersecurity Platforms provides a technical-first, vendor-agnostic evaluation, offering critical insights for organizations looking to strengthen their OT security posture. Darktrace’s recognition as a Market Leader reinforces its unique AI-driven approach, flexible deployment options, and advanced risk management capabilities as key differentiators in an evolving threat landscape.

By leveraging Self-Learning AI, autonomous response, and real-world risk analysis, Darktrace / OT enables organizations to detect, investigate, and mitigate threats before they escalate, without compromising operational uptime.

Read the full report here!

References

  1. www.darktrace.com/resources/darktrace-named-a-market-leader-in-the-2025-omdia-market-radar-for-ot-cybersecurity-platforms
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About the author
Pallavi Singh
Product Marketing Manager, OT Security & Compliance

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Cloud

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April 2, 2025

Fusing Vulnerability and Threat Data: Enhancing the Depth of Attack Analysis

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Cado Security, recently acquired by Darktrace, is excited to announce a significant enhancement to its data collection capabilities, with the addition of a vulnerability discovery feature for Linux-based cloud resources. According to Darktrace’s Annual Threat Report 2024, the most significant campaigns observed in 2024 involved the ongoing exploitation of significant vulnerabilities in internet-facing systems. Cado’s new vulnerability discovery capability further deepens its ability to provide extensive context to security teams, enabling them to make informed decisions about threats, faster than ever.

Deep context to accelerate understanding and remediation

Context is critical when understanding the circumstances surrounding a threat. It can also take many forms – alert data, telemetry, file content, business context (for example asset criticality, core function of the resource), and risk context, such as open vulnerabilities.

When performing an investigation, it is common practice to understand the risk profile of the resource impacted, specifically determining open vulnerabilities and how they may relate to the threat. For example, if an analyst is triaging an alert related to an internet-facing Webserver running Apache, it would greatly benefit the analyst to understand open vulnerabilities in the Apache version that is running, if any of them are exploitable, whether a fix is available, etc. This dataset also serves as an invaluable source when developing a remediation plan, identifying specific vulnerabilities to be prioritised for patching.

Data acquisition in Cado

Cado is the only platform with the ability to perform full forensic captures as well as utilize instant triage collection methods, which is why fusing host-based artifact data with vulnerability data is such an exciting and compelling development.

The vulnerability discovery feature can be run as part of an acquisition – full or triage – as well as independently using a fast ‘Scan only’ mode.

Figure 1: A fast vulnerability scan being performed on the acquired evidence

Once the acquisition has completed, the user will have access to a ‘Vulnerabilities’ table within their investigation, where they are able to view and filter open vulnerabilities (by Severity, CVE ID, Resource, and other properties), as well as pivot to the full Event Timeline. In the Event Timeline, the user will be able to identify whether there is any malicious, suspicious or other interesting activity surrounding the vulnerable package, given the unified timeline presents a complete chronological dataset of all evidence and context collected.

Figure 2: Vulnerabilities discovered on the acquired evidence
Figure 3: Pivot from the Vulnerabilities table to the Event Timeline provides an in-depth view of file and process data associated with the vulnerable package selected. In this example, Apache2.

Future work

In the coming months, we’ll be releasing initial versions of highly anticipated integrations between Cado and Darktrace, including the ability to ingest Darktrace / CLOUD alerts which will automatically trigger a forensic capture (as well as a vulnerability discovery) of the impacted assets.

To learn more about how Cado and Darktrace will combine forces, request a demo today.

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About the author
Paul Bottomley
Director of Product Management, Cado
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