July 17, 2024

What you need to know about the new SEC Cybersecurity rules

In July 2023, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) adopted new rules concerning cybersecurity incidents and disclosures. This blog describes the new rules and demonstrates how Darktrace can help organizations achieve compliance with these standards.

Written by

Kendra Gonzalez Duran

Principal Analyst

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

Kendra Gonzalez Duran

Principal Analyst

Jul 2024

What is new in 2023 to SEC cybersecurity rules?

Form 8-K Item 1.05: Requiring the timely disclosure of material cybersecurity incidents.

Regulation S-K item 106: requiring registrants’ annual reports on Form 10-K to address cybersecurity risk management, strategy, and governance processes.

Comparable disclosures are required for reporting foreign private issuers on Forms 6-K and 20-F respectively.

What is Form 8-K Item 1.05 SEC cybersecurity rules?‍

Form 8-K Item 1.05 requires the following to be reported within four business days from when an incident is determined to be “material” (1), unless extensions are granted by the SEC under certain qualifying conditions:

“If the registrant experiences a cybersecurity incident that is determined by the registrant to be material, describe the material aspects of the nature, scope, and timing of the incident, and the material impact or reasonably likely material impact on the registrant, including its financial condition and results of operations.” (2, 3)

How does the SEC define cybersecurity incident?

Cybersecurity incident defined by the SEC means an unauthorized occurrence, or a series of related unauthorized occurrences, on or conducted through a registrant’s information systems that jeopardizes the confidentiality, integrity, or availability of a registrant’s information systems or any information residing therein. (4)

How can Darktrace assist in the process of disclosing incidents to the SEC?

Accelerate reporting

Darktrace’s Cyber AI Analyst generates automated reports that synthesize discrete data points potentially indicative of cybersecurity threats, forming reports that provide an overview of the evolution and impact of a threat.

Thus, when a potential threat is identified by Darktrace, AI Analyst can quickly compile information that organizations might include in their disclosure of an occurrence they determined to be material, including the following: incident timelines, incident events, incident summary, related model breaches, investigation process (i.e., how Darktrace’s AI conducted the investigation), linked incident events, and incident details. The figure below illustrates how Darktrace compiles and presents incident information and insights in the UI.

Figure 1: Overview of information provided in an ‘AI Analyst Report’ that could be relevant to registrants reporting a material cybersecurity incident to the SEC

It should be noted that Instruction 4 to the new Form 8-K Item 1.05 specifies the “registrant need not disclose specific or technical information about its planned response to the incident or its cybersecurity systems, related networks and devices, or potential system vulnerabilities in such detail as would impede the registrant’s response or remediation of the incident” (5).

As such, the incident report generated by Darktrace may provide more information, including technical details, than is needed for the 8-K disclosure. In general, users should take appropriate measures to ensure that the information they provide in SEC reports meets the requirements outlined by the relevant regulations. Darktrace cannot recommend that an incident should be reported, nor report an incident itself.

Determine if a cybersecurity incident is material

Item 1.05 requires registrants to determine for themselves whether cybersecurity incidents qualify as ‘material’. This involves considerations such as ‘the nature scope and timing of the incident, and the material impact or reasonably likely material impact on the registrant, including its financial condition and results of operations.’

While it is up to the registrant to determine, consistent with existing legal standards, the materiality of an incident, Darktrace’s solution can provide relevant information which might aid in this evaluation. Darktrace’s Threat Visualizer user interface provides a 3-D visualization of an organization’s digital environment, allowing users to assess the likely degree to which an attack may have spread throughout their digital environment. Darktrace Cyber AI Analyst identifies connections among discrete occurrences of threatening activity, which can help registrants quickly assess the ‘scope and timing of an incident'.

Furthermore, in order to establish materiality it would be useful to understand how an attack might extend across recipients and environments. In the image below, Darktrace/Email identifies how a user was impacted across different platforms. In this example, Darktrace/Email identified an attacker that deployed a dual channel social engineering attack via both email and a SaaS platform in an effort to acquire login credentials. In this case, the attacker useding a legitimate SharePoint link that only reveals itself to be malicious upon click. Once the attacker gained the credentials, it proceeded to change email rules to obfuscate its activity.

Darktrace/Email presents this information in one location, making such investigations easier for the end user.

Figure 2: Darktrace/Email indicating a threat across SaaS and email

What is regulation S-K item 106 of the SEC cybersecurity rules?

The new rules add Item 106 to Regulation S-K requiring registrants to disclose certain information regarding their risk management, strategy, and governance relating to cybersecurity in their annual reports on Form 10-K. The new rules add Item 16K to Form 20-F to require comparable disclosure by [foreign private issuers] in their annual reports on Form 20-F. (6)

SEC cybersecurity rules: Risk management

Specifically, with respect to risk management, Item 106(b) and Item 16K(b) require registrants to describe their processes, if any, for assessing, identifying, and managing material risks from cybersecurity threats, as well as whether any risks from cybersecurity threats, including as a result of any previous cybersecurity incidents, have materially affected or are reasonably likely to materially affect them. The new rules include a non-exclusive list of disclosure items registrants should provide based on their facts and circumstances. (6)

SEC cybersecurity rules: Governance

With respect to governance, Item 106 and Item 16K require registrants to describe the board of directors’ oversight of risks from cybersecurity threats (including identifying any board committee or subcommittee responsible for such oversight) and management’s role in assessing and managing material risks from cybersecurity threats. (6)

How can Darktrace solutions aid in disclosing their risk management, strategy, and governance related to cybersecurity?

Impact scores

Darktrace End-to-End (E2E) leverages AI to understand the complex relationships across users and devices to model possible attack paths, giving security teams a contextual understanding of risk across their digital environments beyond isolated CVEs or CVSS scores. Additionally, teams can prioritize risk management actions to increase their cyber resilience through the E2E Advisory dashboard.

Attack paths consider:

‍Potential damages: Both the potential consequences if a given device was compromised and its immediate implications on other devices.‍
Exposure: Devices' level of interactivity and accessibility. For example, how many emails does a user get via mailing lists and from what kind of sources? ‍
Impact: Where a user or asset sits in terms of the IT or business hierarchy and how they communicate with each other. Darktrace can simulate a range of possible outcomes for an uncertain event. ‍
Weakness: A device’s patch latency and difficulty, a composite metric that looks at attacker MITRE methods and our own scores to determine how hard each stage of compromise is to achieve.

Because the SEC cybersecurity rules require “oversight of risks from cybersecurity threats” and “management’s role in assessing and managing material risks from cybersecurity threats” (6), the scores generated by Darktrace E2E can aid end-user’s ability to identify risks facing their organization and assign responsibilities to address those risks.

E2E attack paths leverage a deep understanding of a customer’ digital environment and highlight potential attack routes that an attacker could leverage to reach critical assets or entities. Difficulty scores (see Figure 5) allow security teams to measure potential damage, exposure, and impact of an attack on a specific asset or entity.

Figure 3: An example of an attack path in a digital environment

Automatic executive threat reports

Darktrace’s solution automatically produces Executive Threat Reports that present a simple visual overview of model breaches (i.e., indicators of unusual and threatening behaviors) and activity in the network environment. Reports can be customized to include extra details or restricted to high level information.

These reports can be generated on a weekly, quarterly, and yearly basis, and can be documented by registrants in relation to Item 106(b) to document parts of their efforts toward assessing, identifying, and managing material risks from cybersecurity threats.

Moreover, Cyber AI Analyst incident reports (described above) can be leveraged to document key details concerning significant previous incidents identified by the Darktrace solution that the registrant determined to be ‘material’.

While the disclosures required by Item 106(c) relate to the governance processes by which the board of directors, the management, and other responsible bodies within an organization oversee risks resulting from cybersecurity threats, the information provided by Darktrace’s Executive Threat Reports and Cyber AI Analyst incident reports can also help relevant stakeholders communicate more effectively regarding the threat landscape and previous incidents.

DISCLAIMER‍

The material above is provided for informational purposes only. This summary does not constitute legal or compliance advice, recommendations, or guidance. Darktrace encourages you to verify the contents of this summary with your own advisors.

References

Note that the rule does not set forth any specific timeline between the incident and the materiality determination, but the materiality determination should be made without unreasonable delay.
https://www.sec.gov/files/form8-k.pdf
https://www.sec.gov/news/press-release/2023-139
‍https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-17/chapter-II/part-229‍
https://www.sec.gov/files/form8-k.pdf
https://www.sec.gov/corpfin/secg-cybersecurity

Written by

Kendra Gonzalez Duran

Principal Analyst

Inside the SOC

Written by

Kendra Gonzalez Duran

Principal Analyst

VP, Security & AI Strategy, Field CISO

Senior Product Marketing Manager, Email

Watch the NIS2 Webinar

Blog

Identity

July 3, 2025

Top Eight Threats to SaaS Security and How to Combat Them

The latest on the identity security landscape

Following the mass adoption of remote and hybrid working patterns, more critical data than ever resides in cloud applications – from Salesforce and Google Workspace, to Box, Dropbox, and Microsoft 365.

On average, a single organization uses 130 different Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) applications, and 45% of organizations reported experiencing a cybersecurity incident through a SaaS application in the last year.

As SaaS applications look set to remain an integral part of the digital estate, organizations are being forced to rethink how they protect their users and data in this area.

What is SaaS security?

SaaS security is the protection of cloud applications. It includes securing the apps themselves as well as the user identities that engage with them.

Below are the top eight threats that target SaaS security and user identities.

1. Account Takeover (ATO)

Attackers gain unauthorized access to a user’s SaaS or cloud account by stealing credentials through phishing, brute-force attacks, or credential stuffing. Once inside, they can exfiltrate data, send malicious emails, or escalate privileges to maintain persistent access.

2. Privilege escalation

Cybercriminals exploit misconfigurations, weak access controls, or vulnerabilities to increase their access privileges within a SaaS or cloud environment. Gaining admin or superuser rights allows attackers to disable security settings, create new accounts, or move laterally across the organization.

3. Lateral movement

Once inside a network or SaaS platform, attackers move between accounts, applications, and cloud workloads to expand their foot- hold. Compromised OAuth tokens, session hijacking, or exploited API connections can enable adversaries to escalate access and exfiltrate sensitive data.

4. Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) bypass and session hijacking

Threat actors bypass MFA through SIM swapping, push bombing, or exploiting session cookies. By stealing an active authentication session, they can access SaaS environments without needing the original credentials or MFA approval.

5. OAuth token abuse

Attackers exploit OAuth authentication mechanisms by stealing or abusing tokens that grant persistent access to SaaS applications. This allows them to maintain access even if the original user resets their password, making detection and mitigation difficult.

6. Insider threats

Malicious or negligent insiders misuse their legitimate access to SaaS applications or cloud platforms to leak data, alter configurations, or assist external attackers. Over-provisioned accounts and poor access control policies make it easier for insiders to exploit SaaS environments.

7. Application Programming Interface (API)-based attacks

SaaS applications rely on APIs for integration and automation, but attackers exploit insecure endpoints, excessive permissions, and unmonitored API calls to gain unauthorized access. API abuse can lead to data exfiltration, privilege escalation, and service disruption.

8. Business Email Compromise (BEC) via SaaS

Adversaries compromise SaaS-based email platforms (e.g., Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace) to send phishing emails, conduct invoice fraud, or steal sensitive communications. BEC attacks often involve financial fraud or data theft by impersonating executives or suppliers.

BEC heavily uses social engineering techniques, tailoring messages for a specific audience and context. And with the growing use of generative AI by threat actors, BEC is becoming even harder to detect. By adding ingenuity and machine speed, generative AI tools give threat actors the ability to create more personalized, targeted, and convincing attacks at scale.

Protecting against these SaaS threats

Traditionally, security leaders relied on tools that were focused on the attack, reliant on threat intelligence, and confined to a single area of the digital estate.

However, these tools have limitations, and often prove inadequate for contemporary situations, environments, and threats. For example, they may lack advanced threat detection, have limited visibility and scope, and struggle to integrate with other tools and infrastructure, especially cloud platforms.

AI-powered SaaS security stays ahead of the threat landscape

New, more effective approaches involve AI-powered defense solutions that understand the digital business, reveal subtle deviations that indicate cyber-threats, and action autonomous, targeted responses.

[related-resource]

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About the author

Carlos Gray

Senior Product Marketing Manager, Email

Blog

Proactive Security

July 2, 2025

Pre-CVE Threat Detection: 10 Examples Identifying Malicious Activity Prior to Public Disclosure of a Vulnerability

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Vulnerabilities are weaknesses in a system that can be exploited by malicious actors to gain unauthorized access or to disrupt normal operations. Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (or CVEs) are a list of publicly disclosed cybersecurity vulnerabilities that can be tracked and mitigated by the security community.

When a vulnerability is discovered, the standard practice is to report it to the vendor or the responsible organization, allowing them to develop and distribute a patch or fix before the details are made public. This is known as responsible disclosure.

With a record-breaking 40,000 CVEs reported for 2024 and a predicted higher number for 2025 by the Forum for Incident Response and Security Teams (FIRST) [1], anomaly-detection is essential for identifying these potential risks. The gap between exploitation of a zero-day and disclosure of the vulnerability can sometimes be considerable, and retroactively attempting to identify successful exploitation on your network can be challenging, particularly if taking a signature-based approach.

Detecting threats without relying on CVE disclosure

Abnormal behaviors in networks or systems, such as unusual login patterns or data transfers, can indicate attempted cyber-attacks, insider threats, or compromised systems. Since Darktrace does not rely on rules or signatures, it can detect malicious activity that is anomalous even without full context of the specific device or asset in question.

‍For example, during the Fortinet exploitation late last year, the Darktrace Threat Research team were investigating a different Fortinet vulnerability, namely CVE 2024-23113, for exploitation when Mandiant released a security advisory around CVE 2024-47575, which aligned closely with Darktrace’s findings.

Retrospective analysis like this is used by Darktrace’s threat researchers to better understand detections across the threat landscape and to add additional context.

Below are ten examples from the past year where Darktrace detected malicious activity days or even weeks before a vulnerability was publicly disclosed.

ten examples from the past year where Darktrace detected malicious activity days or even weeks before a vulnerability was publicly disclosed.

Trends in pre-cve exploitation

Often, the disclosure of an exploited vulnerability can be off the back of an incident response investigation related to a compromise by an advanced threat actor using a zero-day. Once the vulnerability is registered and publicly disclosed as having been exploited, it can kick off a race between the attacker and defender: attack vs patch.

Nation-state actors, highly skilled with significant resources, are known to use a range of capabilities to achieve their target, including zero-day use. Often, pre-CVE activity is “low and slow”, last for months with high operational security. After CVE disclosure, the barriers to entry lower, allowing less skilled and less resourced attackers, like some ransomware gangs, to exploit the vulnerability and cause harm. This is why two distinct types of activity are often seen: pre and post disclosure of an exploited vulnerability.

Darktrace saw this consistent story line play out during several of the Fortinet and PAN OS threat actor campaigns highlighted above last year, where nation-state actors were seen exploiting vulnerabilities first, followed by ransomware gangs impacting organizations [2].

The same applies with the recent SAP Netweaver exploitations being tied to a China based threat actor earlier this spring with subsequent ransomware incidents being observed [3].

Autonomous Response

Anomaly-based detection offers the benefit of identifying malicious activity even before a CVE is disclosed; however, security teams still need to quickly contain and isolate the activity.

For example, during the Ivanti chaining exploitation in the early part of 2025, a customer had Darktrace’s Autonomous Response capability enabled on their network. As a result, Darktrace was able to contain the compromise and shut down any ongoing suspicious connectivity by blocking internal connections and enforcing a “pattern of life” on the affected device.

This pre-CVE detection and response by Darktrace occurred 11 days before any public disclosure, demonstrating the value of an anomaly-based approach.

In some cases, customers have even reported that Darktrace stopped malicious exploitation of devices several days before a public disclosure of a vulnerability.

For example, During the ConnectWise exploitation, a customer informed the team that Darktrace had detected malicious software being installed via remote access. Upon further investigation, four servers were found to be impacted, while Autonomous Response had blocked outbound connections and enforced patterns of life on impacted devices.

Conclusion

By continuously analyzing behavioral patterns, systems can spot unusual activities and patterns from users, systems, and networks to detect anomalies that could signify a security breach.

Through ongoing monitoring and learning from these behaviors, anomaly-based security systems can detect threats that traditional signature-based solutions might miss, while also providing detailed insights into threat tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs). This type of behavioral intelligence supports pre-CVE detection, allows for a more adaptive security posture, and enables systems to evolve with the ever-changing threat landscape.

Credit to Nathaniel Jones (VP, Security & AI Strategy, Field CISO), Emma Fougler (Global Threat Research Operations Lead), Ryan Traill (Analyst Content Lead)

References and further reading:

Related Darktrace blogs:

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*Self-reported by customer, confirmed afterwards.

**Updated January 2024 blog now reflects current findings

About the author

Nathaniel Jones

VP, Security & AI Strategy, Field CISO

Your data. Our AI.

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Check out this article by Darktrace: What you need to know about the new SEC Cybersecurity rules

What you need to know about the new SEC Cybersecurity rules

What is new in 2023 to SEC cybersecurity rules?

What is Form 8-K Item 1.05 SEC cybersecurity rules?‍

How does the SEC define cybersecurity incident?

How can Darktrace assist in the process of disclosing incidents to the SEC?

Accelerate reporting

Determine if a cybersecurity incident is material

What is regulation S-K item 106 of the SEC cybersecurity rules?

SEC cybersecurity rules: Risk management

SEC cybersecurity rules: Governance

How can Darktrace solutions aid in disclosing their risk management, strategy, and governance related to cybersecurity?

Impact scores

Automatic executive threat reports

DISCLAIMER‍

References

Pre-CVE Threat Detection: 10 Examples Identifying Malicious Activity Prior to Public Disclosure of a Vulnerability

Top Eight Threats to SaaS Security and How to Combat Them

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Blog

Identity

July 3, 2025

Top Eight Threats to SaaS Security and How to Combat Them

The latest on the identity security landscape

What is SaaS security?

1. Account Takeover (ATO)

2. Privilege escalation

3. Lateral movement

4. Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) bypass and session hijacking

5. OAuth token abuse

6. Insider threats

7. Application Programming Interface (API)-based attacks

8. Business Email Compromise (BEC) via SaaS

Protecting against these SaaS threats

AI-powered SaaS security stays ahead of the threat landscape

Blog

Proactive Security

July 2, 2025

Pre-CVE Threat Detection: 10 Examples Identifying Malicious Activity Prior to Public Disclosure of a Vulnerability

Detecting threats without relying on CVE disclosure

Below are ten examples from the past year where Darktrace detected malicious activity days or even weeks before a vulnerability was publicly disclosed.

Trends in pre-cve exploitation

Autonomous Response

Conclusion

References and further reading:

Related Darktrace blogs: