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June 19, 2019

How Autonomous Response AI is Winning Automated Extortion

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Jun 2019
Darktrace, creator of the first enterprise-grade autonomous response technology, leverages AI algorithms to stop malware in its tracks. Learn more here!

Just threat detection is not enough

At a time when automated cyber-attacks execute at machine speed, the reality is that merely detecting these attacks is no longer sufficient to stop them before the damage is done. According to the Ponemon Institute’s oft-cited study on the topic, US companies take an average of 206 days to identify a data breach. And even when security teams discover a potential compromise the moment it begins, human professionals are fundamentally overmatched by malicious code that can encrypt or exfiltrate data in under a minute.

In this era of fast-acting threats, the only way forward is to fight code with code, to pit algorithm against algorithm, and to counter machine-speed attacks with machine-speed defenses. Darktrace, creator of the first enterprise-grade autonomous response technology, leverages AI algorithms to stop malware in its tracks, allowing incident responders to investigate and take action at their own pace. And critically, Darktrace safeguards the digital estate day and night, weekend and holiday, because cyber-criminals don’t wait until business hours to strike.

Examined below are three sophisticated attacks that Darktrace neutralized on behalf of security teams that were either out of office or unable to react in time. Collectively, they demonstrate that the future of autonomous cyber defense has already arrived.

Automated extortion, absent security team

The quintessential example of a cyber-threat too rapid for human professionals to parry, ransomware has become a top-of-mind concern for organizations around the world. In fact, previous research has found that approximately 70% of companies simply hand over the ransom upon getting hit, regardless of the cost. However, Darktrace's Autonomous Response prevents ransomware from spreading by confining users and devices to their typical ‘patterns of life’. Rooted in a constantly refined understanding of ‘self’ versus ‘not self’, Darktrace AI surgically intervenes to shut off just the anomalous activity, while still allowing business operations to continue uninterrupted.

At 7:05 pm on a Friday, an employee at a large telecommunications firm accessed his personal email from a corporate smartphone and was tricked into downloading a malicious file that contained ransomware. Seconds later, the device began connecting to an external server on the Tor network — executing the attack just after the company’s security team had left the office for the weekend.

Darktrace AI, meanwhile, responded nine seconds after encryption began, raising a prioritized alert that called for immediate action. As the behavior persisted over the next few seconds, Darktrace activated AI-enabled autonomous response, which interrupted all attempts to write encrypted files before the ransomware spread across the telecom’s network. Critically, the autonomous response technology was on guard, even when the security team couldn’t be.

Darktrace anticipates the alphabet

Nearly 95% of all successful cyber-attacks begin with a phishing email, which dupe employees into breaching their organizations before the security team realizes that anything is wrong. Even more difficult to catch are personalized “spear phishing” emails that use reconnaissance gathered from either social media or physical surveillance to impersonate trusted colleagues. Thwarting an advanced spear phishing campaign requires understanding normal behavior for each user well enough to flag subtly suspicious emails, as well as the ability to autonomously disable their malicious links — a combination that only Darktrace AI has achieved.

On the network of a major US city, a sophisticated spear phishing campaign managed to bypass the city’s native email controls. The attackers, who had obtained the city’s address book, were emailing recipients alphabetically, from “A” to “Z,” with ostensibly harmless emails that contained a malicious payload. Despite the well-disguised nature of this attack, Darktrace immediately flagged the domain linked in the emails as abnormal for the city’s employees, an action only possible with the evolving understanding of ‘self’ that Darktrace AI learns.

Darktrace's Autonomouse Response was deployed in ‘Passive Mode’ at the time, a trust-building setting that restricts the AI to communicating what it would have done in response to the threat rather than actually interceding. Interestingly enough, however, this nuance served to demonstrate the technology’s ability to stop attacks that conventional tools miss. Whereas Darktrace detected the campaign at the letter “A,” the city’s array of legacy tools finally woke up to the threat at “R.” In ‘Active Mode’, Darktrace would have neutralized the attack before it reached a single user.

Serious threat at amusement park

Data exfiltration is among the most common objectives of cyber-criminals today, as stolen personal information and credentials can be sold on the Dark Web, used to commit identity theft, or leveraged to move laterally within a victim’s network. At a North American amusement park, an advanced attacker targeted an IoT device — a physical locker designed to store personal belongings — in an attempt to exfiltrate such data. As part of its default setting, the ‘smart’ locker regularly established contact with the supplier’s third-party online platform, a process that the attackers hijacked to compromise the device.

Once infiltrated, the locker started to transfer more than a gigabyte of unencrypted data across the network to a rare external site. The connections, which likely included identifying details and sensitive credentials, had the potential to be transmitted over the internet entirely unprotected — allowing the attackers to intercept the connections and use the information to breach the company’s network perimeter.

Due to the severity of the threat, Darktrace determined that an autonomous response was required. Within seconds, Darktrace AI took action by intelligently blocking all outgoing connections from the compromised locker. In doing so, it gave ample time for the security team to remove the smart locker from the internet — before any sensitive company or consumer data could be exfiltrated.

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
Justin Fier
SVP, Red Team Operations

Justin is one of the US’s leading cyber intelligence experts, and holds the position of SVP, Red Team Operations at Darktrace. His insights on cyber security and artificial intelligence have been widely reported in leading media outlets, including the Wall Street Journal, CNN, The Washington Post, and VICELAND. With over 10 years’ experience in cyber defense, Justin has supported various elements in the US intelligence community, holding mission-critical security roles with Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman Mission Systems and Abraxas. Justin is also a highly-skilled technical specialist, and works with Darktrace’s strategic global customers on threat analysis, defensive cyber operations, protecting IoT, and machine learning.

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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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