Employee Access: The Cyber Threat is Already Inside
05
Mar 2017
Disgruntled employees have the potential to do serious damage from within and cannot be ignored. Learn what steps you can take to mitigate risks!
Imagine a middle-aged middle manager at a multinational corporation. Joe is the kind of employee who’s always done just enough to get by, cutting corners when he can and flying under the radar. One day, Joe’s boss decides that enough is enough. She fires Joe.
Furious, Joe storms back to his desk to pack up his belongings. Halfway through cleaning out his filing cabinet, he remembers that he doesn’t have to go quietly into the night. He still has administrative access to edit the company website, he has valuable client information, and he’s on an email thread with compromising photos of his boss at the last holiday party.
Disgruntled employees like Joe may be in the minority, but their potential to do serious damage can’t be ignored. Posting those photos of his boss on the company website would be trivial, causing embarrassment at best and impacting financial performance and market confidence at worst. Another option at Joe’s disposal would be to make some money out of his trauma by selling client intelligence to a competitor.
Joe might even go a step further, obtaining access to supposedly secure documents via a new device called PoisonTap, a $5 USB that installs a backdoor onto locked computers. By handing over access to a sophisticated hacker on the Dark Web, Joe could undermine his former employer in the long term with surprising ease.
So even if Joe does take the high road, he may already have exposed his company to serious risk through using poor passwords, mishandling of sensitive documents, or becoming the victim of a well-disguised phishing attack. Despite our modern-day interest in foreign attackers, the biggest threat facing organizations isn’t nation-state hackers or anonymous saboteurs. It’s everyday employees like Joe.
So how do we stop Joe and people like him from exposing their companies to risk, either purposefully or on accident? The first step has to be educating employees on best practices, but education can only go so far. Defending against insider threat should be a core focus in our approach to security. To do that, we have to continuously monitor all users and devices and look out for the early signs of compromise. One thing is for sure in cyber security – the threat is already inside.
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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
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.
Darktrace Named as Market Leader in the 2025 Omdia Market Radar for OT Cybersecurity Platforms
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
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.
Product Marketing Manager, OT Security & Compliance
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April 2, 2025
Fusing Vulnerability and Threat Data: Enhancing the Depth of Attack Analysis
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.
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