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November 25, 2024

Why Artificial Intelligence is the Future of Cybersecurity

This blog explores the impact of AI on the threat landscape, the benefits of AI in cybersecurity, and the role it plays in enhancing security practices and tools.
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
Brittany Woodsmall
Product Marketing Manager, AI & Attack Surface
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25
Nov 2024

Introduction: AI & Cybersecurity

In the wake of artificial intelligence (AI) becoming more commonplace, it’s no surprise to see that threat actors are also adopting the use of AI in their attacks at an accelerated pace. AI enables augmentation of complex tasks such as spear-phishing, deep fakes, polymorphic malware generation, and advanced persistent threat (APT) campaigns, which significantly enhances the sophistication and scale of their operations. This has put security professionals in a reactive state, struggling to keep pace with the proliferation of threats.

As AI reshapes the future of cyber threats, defenders are also looking to integrate AI technologies into their security stack. Adopting AI-powered solutions in cybersecurity enables security teams to detect and respond to these advanced threats more quickly and accurately as well as automate traditionally manual and routine tasks. According to research done by Darktrace in the 2024 State of AI Cybersecurity Report improving threat detection, identifying exploitable vulnerabilities, and automating low level security tasks were the top three ways practitioners saw AI enhancing their security team’s capabilities [1], underscoring the wide-ranging capabilities of AI in cyber.  

In this blog, we will discuss how AI has impacted the threat landscape, the rise of generative AI and AI adoption in security tools, and the importance of using multiple types of AI in cybersecurity solutions for a holistic and proactive approach to keeping your organization safe.  

The impact of AI on the threat landscape

The integration of AI and cybersecurity has brought about significant advancements across industries. However, it also introduces new security risks that challenge traditional defenses.  Three major concerns with the misuse of AI being leveraged by adversaries are: (1) the increase of novel social engineering attacks that are harder to detect and able to bypass traditional security tools,  (2) the ease of access for less experienced threat actors to now deliver advanced attacks at speed and scale and (3) the attacking of AI itself, to include machine learning models, data corpuses and APIs or interfaces.

In the context of social engineering, AI can be used to create more convincing phishing emails, conduct advanced reconnaissance, and simulate human-like interactions to deceive victims more effectively. Generative AI tools, such as ChatGPT, are already being used by adversaries to craft these sophisticated phishing emails, which can more aptly mimic human semantics without spelling or grammatical error and include personal information pulled from internet sources such as social media profiles. And this can all be done at machine speed and scale. In fact, Darktrace researchers observed a 135% rise in ‘novel social engineering attacks’ across Darktrace / EMAIL customers in 2023, corresponding to the widespread adoption and use of ChatGPT [2].  

Furthermore, these sophisticated social engineering attacks are now able to circumvent traditional security tools. In between December 21, 2023, and July 5, 2024, Darktrace / EMAIL detected 17.8 million phishing emails across the fleet, with 62% of these phishing emails successfully bypassing Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance (DMARC) verification checks [2].  

And while the proliferation of novel attacks fueled by AI is persisting, AI also lowers the barrier to entry for threat actors. Publicly available AI tools make it easy for adversaries to automate complex tasks that previously required advanced technical skills. Additionally, AI-driven platforms and phishing kits available on the dark web provide ready-made solutions, enabling even novice attackers to execute effective cyber campaigns with minimal effort.

The impact of adversarial use of AI on the ever-evolving threat landscape is important for organizations to understand as it fundamentally changes the way we must approach cybersecurity. However, while the intersection of cybersecurity and AI can have potentially negative implications, it is important to recognize that AI can also be used to help protect us.

A generation of generative AI in cybersecurity

When the topic of AI in cybersecurity comes up, it’s typically in reference to generative AI, which became popularized in 2023. While it does not solely encapsulate what AI cybersecurity is or what AI can do in this space, it’s important to understand what generative AI is and how it can be implemented to help organizations get ahead of today’s threats.  

Generative AI (e.g., ChatGPT or Microsoft Copilot) is a type of AI that creates new or original content. It has the capability to generate images, videos, or text based on information it learns from large datasets. These systems use advanced algorithms and deep learning techniques to understand patterns and structures within the data they are trained on, enabling them to generate outputs that are coherent, contextually relevant, and often indistinguishable from human-created content.

For security professionals, generative AI offers some valuable applications. Primarily, it’s used to transform complex security data into clear and concise summaries. By analyzing vast amounts of security logs, alerts, and technical data, it can contextualize critical information quickly and present findings in natural, comprehensible language. This makes it easier for security teams to understand critical information quickly and improves communication with non-technical stakeholders. Generative AI can also automate the creation of realistic simulations for training purposes, helping security teams prepare for various cyberattack scenarios and improve their response strategies.  

Despite its advantages, generative AI also has limitations that organizations must consider. One challenge is the potential for generating false positives, where benign activities are mistakenly flagged as threats, which can overwhelm security teams with unnecessary alerts. Moreover, implementing generative AI requires significant computational resources and expertise, which may be a barrier for some organizations. It can also be susceptible to prompt injection attacks and there are risks with intellectual property or sensitive data being leaked when using publicly available generative AI tools.  In fact, according to the MIT AI Risk Registry, there are potentially over 700 risks that need to be mitigated with the use of generative AI.

Generative AI impact on cyber attacks screenshot data sheet

For more information on generative AI's impact on the cyber threat landscape download the Darktrace Data Sheet

Beyond the Generative AI Glass Ceiling

Generative AI has a place in cybersecurity, but security professionals are starting to recognize that it’s not the only AI organizations should be using in their security tool kit. In fact, according to Darktrace’s State of AI Cybersecurity Report, “86% of survey participants believe generative AI alone is NOT enough to stop zero-day threats.” As we look toward the future of AI in cybersecurity, it’s critical to understand that different types of AI have different strengths and use cases and choosing the technologies based on your organization’s specific needs is paramount.

There are a few types of AI used in cybersecurity that serve different functions. These include:

Supervised Machine Learning: Widely used in cybersecurity due to its ability to learn from labeled datasets. These datasets include historical threat intelligence and known attack patterns, allowing the model to recognize and predict similar threats in the future. For example, supervised machine learning can be applied to email filtering systems to identify and block phishing attempts by learning from past phishing emails. This is human-led training facilitating automation based on known information.  

Large Language Models (LLMs): Deep learning models trained on extensive datasets to understand and generate human-like text. LLMs can analyze vast amounts of text data, such as security logs, incident reports, and threat intelligence feeds, to identify patterns and anomalies that may indicate a cyber threat. They can also generate detailed and coherent reports on security incidents, summarizing complex data into understandable formats.

Natural Language Processing (NLP): Involves the application of computational techniques to process and understand human language. In cybersecurity, NLP can be used to analyze and interpret text-based data, such as emails, chat logs, and social media posts, to identify potential threats. For instance, NLP can help detect phishing attempts by analyzing the language used in emails for signs of deception.

Unsupervised Machine Learning: Continuously learns from raw, unstructured data without predefined labels. It is particularly useful in identifying new and unknown threats by detecting anomalies that deviate from normal behavior. In cybersecurity, unsupervised learning can be applied to network traffic analysis to identify unusual patterns that may indicate a cyberattack. It can also be used in endpoint detection and response (EDR) systems to uncover previously unknown malware by recognizing deviations from typical system behavior.

Types of AI in cybersecurity
Figure 1: Types of AI in cybersecurity

Employing multiple types of AI in cybersecurity is essential for creating a layered and adaptive defense strategy. Each type of AI, from supervised and unsupervised machine learning to large language models (LLMs) and natural language processing (NLP), brings distinct capabilities that address different aspects of cyber threats. Supervised learning excels at recognizing known threats, while unsupervised learning uncovers new anomalies. LLMs and NLP enhance the analysis of textual data for threat detection and response and aid in understanding and mitigating social engineering attacks. By integrating these diverse AI technologies, organizations can achieve a more holistic and resilient cybersecurity framework, capable of adapting to the ever-evolving threat landscape.

A Multi-Layered AI Approach with Darktrace

AI-powered security solutions are emerging as a crucial line of defense against an AI-powered threat landscape. In fact, “Most security stakeholders (71%) are confident that AI-powered security solutions will be better able to block AI-powered threats than traditional tools.” And 96% agree that AI-powered solutions will level up their organization’s defenses.  As organizations look to adopt these tools for cybersecurity, it’s imperative to understand how to evaluate AI vendors to find the right products as well as build trust with these AI-powered solutions.  

Darktrace, a leader in AI cybersecurity since 2013, emphasizes interpretability, explainability, and user control, ensuring that our AI is understandable, customizable and transparent. Darktrace’s approach to cyber defense is rooted in the belief that the right type of AI must be applied to the right use cases. Central to this approach is Self-Learning AI, which is crucial for identifying novel cyber threats that most other tools miss. This is complemented by various AI methods, including LLMs, generative AI, and supervised machine learning, to support the Self-Learning AI.  

Darktrace focuses on where AI can best augment the people in a security team and where it can be used responsibly to have the most positive impact on their work. With a combination of these AI techniques, applied to the right use cases, Darktrace enables organizations to tailor their AI defenses to unique risks, providing extended visibility across their entire digital estates with the Darktrace ActiveAI Security Platform™.

Credit to: Ed Metcalf, Senior Director Product Marketing, AI & Innovations - Nicole Carignan VP of Strategic Cyber AI for their contribution to this blog.

CISOs guide to buying AI white paper cover

To learn more about Darktrace and AI in cybersecurity download the CISO’s Guide to Cyber AI here.

Download the white paper to learn how buyers should approach purchasing AI-based solutions. It includes:

  • Key steps for selecting AI cybersecurity tools
  • Questions to ask and responses to expect from vendors
  • Understand tools available and find the right fit
  • Ensure AI investments align with security goals and needs
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
Brittany Woodsmall
Product Marketing Manager, AI & Attack Surface

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April 16, 2025

Introducing Version 2 of Darktrace’s Embedding Model for Investigation of Security Threats (DEMIST-2)

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DEMIST-2 is Darktrace’s latest embedding model, built to interpret and classify security data with precision. It performs highly specialized tasks and can be deployed in any environment. Unlike generative language models, DEMIST-2 focuses on providing reliable, high-accuracy detections for critical security use cases.

DEMIST-2 Core Capabilities:  

  • Enhances Cyber AI Analyst’s ability to triage and reason about security incidents by providing expert representation and classification of security data, and as a part of our broader multi-layered AI system
  • Classifies and interprets security data, in contrast to language models that generate unpredictable open-ended text responses  
  • Incorporates new innovations in language model development and architecture, optimized specifically for cybersecurity applications
  • Deployable across cloud, on-prem, and edge environments, DEMIST-2 delivers low-latency, high-accuracy results wherever it runs. It enables inference anywhere.

Cybersecurity is constantly evolving, but the need to build precise and reliable detections remains constant in the face of new and emerging threats. Darktrace’s Embedding Model for Investigation of Security Threats (DEMIST-2) addresses these critical needs and is designed to create stable, high-fidelity representations of security data while also serving as a powerful classifier. For security teams, this means faster, more accurate threat detection with reduced manual investigation. DEMIST-2's efficiency also reduces the need to invest in massive computational resources, enabling effective protection at scale without added complexity.  

As an embedding language model, DEMIST-2 classifies and creates meaning out of complex security data. This equips our Self-Learning AI with the insights to compare, correlate, and reason with consistency and precision. Classifications and embeddings power core capabilities across our products where accuracy is not optional, as a part of our multi-layered approach to AI architecture.

Perhaps most importantly, DEMIST-2 features a compact architecture that delivers analyst-level insights while meeting diverse deployment needs across cloud, on-prem, and edge environments. Trained on a mixture of general and domain-specific data and designed to support task specialization, DEMIST-2 provides privacy-preserving inference anywhere, while outperforming larger general-purpose models in key cybersecurity tasks.

This proprietary language model reflects Darktrace's ongoing commitment to continually innovate our AI solutions to meet the unique challenges of the security industry. We approach AI differently, integrating diverse insights to solve complex cybersecurity problems. DEMIST-2 shows that a refined, optimized, domain-specific language model can deliver outsized results in an efficient package. We are redefining possibilities for cybersecurity, but our methods transfer readily to other domains. We are eager to share our findings to accelerate innovation in the field.  

The evolution of DEMIST-2

Key concepts:  

  • Tokens: The smallest units processed by language models. Text is split into fragments based on frequency patterns allowing models to handle unfamiliar words efficiently
  • Low-Rank Adaptors (LoRA): Small, trainable components added to a model that allow it to specialize in new tasks without retraining the full system. These components learn task-specific behavior while the original foundation model remains unchanged. This approach enables multiple specializations to coexist, and work simultaneously, without drastically increasing processing and memory requirements.

Darktrace began using large language models in our products in 2022. DEMIST-2 reflects significant advancements in our continuous experimentation and adoption of innovations in the field to address the unique needs of the security industry.  

It is important to note that Darktrace uses a range of language models throughout its products, but each one is chosen for the task at hand. Many others in the artificial intelligence (AI) industry are focused on broad application of large language models (LLMs) for open-ended text generation tasks. Our research shows that using LLMs for classification and embedding offers better, more reliable, results for core security use cases. We’ve found that using LLMs for open-ended outputs can introduce uncertainty through inaccurate and unreliable responses, which is detrimental for environments where precision matters. Generative AI should not be applied to use cases, such as investigation and threat detection, where the results can deeply matter. Thoughtful application of generative AI capabilities, such as drafting decoy phishing emails or crafting non-consequential summaries are helpful but still require careful oversight.

Data is perhaps the most important factor for building language models. The data used to train DEMIST-2 balanced the need for general language understanding with security expertise. We used both publicly available and proprietary datasets.  Our proprietary dataset included privacy-preserving data such as URIs observed in customer alerts, anonymized at source to remove PII and gathered via the Call Home and aianalyst.darktrace.com services. For additional details, read our Technical Paper.  

DEMIST-2 is our way of addressing the unique challenges posed by security data. It recognizes that security data follows its own patterns that are distinct from natural language. For example, hostnames, HTTP headers, and certificate fields often appear in predictable ways, but not necessarily in a way that mirrors natural language. General-purpose LLMs tend to break down when used in these types of highly specialized domains. They struggle to interpret structure and context, fragmenting important patterns during tokenization in ways that can have a negative impact on performance.  

DEMIST-2 was built to understand the language and structure of security data using a custom tokenizer built around a security-specific vocabulary of over 16,000 words. This tokenizer allows the model to process inputs more accurately like encoded payloads, file paths, subdomain chains, and command-line arguments. These types of data are often misinterpreted by general-purpose models.  

When the tokenizer encounters unfamiliar or irregular input, it breaks the data into smaller pieces so it can still be processed. The ability to fall back to individual bytes is critical in cybersecurity contexts where novel or obfuscated content is common. This approach combines precision with flexibility, supporting specialized understanding with resilience in the face of unpredictable data.  

Along with our custom tokenizer, we made changes to support task specialization without increasing model size. To do this, DEMIST-2 uses LoRA . LoRA is a technique that integrates lightweight components with the base model to allow it to perform specific tasks while keeping memory requirements low. By using LoRA, our proprietary representation of security knowledge can be shared and reused as a starting point for more highly specialized models, for example, it takes a different type of specialization to understand hostnames versus to understand sensitive filenames. DEMIST-2 dynamically adapts to these needs and performs them with purpose.  

The result is that DEMIST-2 is like having a room of specialists working on difficult problems together, while sharing a basic core set of knowledge that does not need to be repeated or reintroduced to every situation. Sharing a consistent base model also improves its maintainability and allows efficient deployment across diverse environments without compromising speed or accuracy.  

Tokenization and task specialization represent only a portion of the updates we have made to our embedding model. In conjunction with the changes described above, DEMIST-2 integrates several updated modeling techniques that reduce latency and improve detections. To learn more about these details, our training data and methods, and a full write-up of our results, please read our scientific whitepaper.

DEMIST-2 in action

In this section, we highlight DEMIST-2's embeddings and performance. First, we show a visualization of how DEMIST-2 classifies and interprets hostnames, and second, we present its performance in a hostname classification task in comparison to other language models.  

Embeddings can often feel abstract, so let’s make them real. Figure 1 below is a 2D visualization of how DEMIST-2 classifies and understands hostnames. In reality, these hostnames exist across many more dimensions, capturing details like their relationships with other hostnames, usage patterns, and contextual data. The colors and positions in the diagram represent a simplified view of how DEMIST-2 organizes and interprets these hostnames, providing insights into their meaning and connections. Just like an experienced human analyst can quickly identify and group hostnames based on patterns and context, DEMIST-2 does the same at scale.  

DEMIST-2 visualization of hostname relationships from a large web dataset.
Figure 1: DEMIST-2 visualization of hostname relationships from a large web dataset.

Next, let’s zoom in on two distinct clusters that DEMIST-2 recognizes. One cluster represents small businesses (Figure 2) and the other, Russian and Polish sites with similar numerical formats (Figure 3). These clusters demonstrate how DEMIST-2 can identify specific groupings based on real-world attributes such as regional patterns in website structures, common formats used by small businesses, and other properties such as its understanding of how websites relate to each other on the internet.

Cluster of small businesses
Figure 2: Cluster of small businesses
Figure 3: Cluster of Russian and Polish sites with a similar numerical format

The previous figures provided a view of how DEMIST-2 works. Figure 4 highlights DEMIST-2’s performance in a security-related classification task. The chart shows how DEMIST-2, with just 95 million parameters, achieves nearly 94% accuracy—making it the highest-performing model in the chart, despite being the smallest. In comparison, the larger model with 2.78 billion parameters achieves only about 89% accuracy, showing that size doesn’t always mean better performance. Small models don’t mean poor performance. For many security-related tasks, DEMIST-2 outperforms much larger models.

Hostname classification task performance comparison against comparable open source foundation models
Figure 4: Hostname classification task performance comparison against comparable open source foundation models

With these examples of DEMIST-2 in action, we’ve shown how it excels in embedding and classifying security data while delivering high performance on specialized security tasks.  

The DEMIST-2 advantage

DEMIST-2 was built for precision and reliability. Our primary goal was to create a high-performance model capable of tackling complex cybersecurity tasks. Optimizing for efficiency and scalability came second, but it is a natural outcome of our commitment to building a strong, effective solution that is available to security teams working across diverse environments. It is an enormous benefit that DEMIST-2 is orders of magnitude smaller than many general-purpose models. However, and much more importantly, it significantly outperforms models in its capabilities and accuracy on security tasks.  

Finding a product that fits into an environment’s unique constraints used to mean that some teams had to settle for less powerful or less performant products. With DEMIST-2, data can remain local to the environment, is entirely separate from the data of other customers, and can even operate in environments without network connectivity. The size of our model allows for flexible deployment options while at the same time providing measurable performance advantages for security-related tasks.  

As security threats continue to evolve, we believe that purpose-built AI systems like DEMIST-2 will be essential tools for defenders, combining the power of modern language modeling with the specificity and reliability that builds trust and partnership between security practitioners and AI systems.

Conclusion

DEMIST-2 has additional architectural and deployment updates that improve performance and stability. These innovations contribute to our ability to minimize model size and memory constraints and reflect our dedication to meeting the data handling and privacy needs of security environments. In addition, these choices reflect our dedication to responsible AI practices.

DEMIST-2 is available in Darktrace 6.3, along with a new DIGEST model that uses GNNs and RNNs to score and prioritize threats with expert-level precision.

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About the author
Margaret Cunningham, PhD
Director, Security & AI Strategy, Field CISO

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April 16, 2025

AI Uncovered: Introducing Darktrace Incident Graph Evaluation for Security Threats (DIGEST)

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DIGEST advances how Cyber AI Analyst scores and prioritizes incidents. Trained on over a million anonymized incident graphs, our model brings deeper context to severity scoring by analyzing how threats are structured and how they evolve. DIGEST assesses threats as an expert, before damage is done. For more details beyond this overview, please read our Technical Research Paper.

Darktrace combines machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) approaches using a multi-layered, multi-method approach. The result is an AI system that continuously ingests data from across an organization’s environment, learns from it, and adapts in real time. DIGEST adds a new layer to this system, specifically to our Cyber AI Analyst, the first and most experienced AI Analyst in cybersecurity, dedicated to refining how incidents are scored and prioritized. DIGEST improves what your team uses to focus on what matters the most first.

To build DIGEST, we combined Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) to interpret incident structure with Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) to analyze how incidents evolve over time. This pairing allows DIGEST to reliably determine the potential severity of an incident even at an early stage to give the Cyber AI Analyst a critical edge in identifying high-risk threats early and recognizing when activity is unlikely to escalate.

DIGEST works locally in real-time regardless of whether your Darktrace deployment is on prem or in the cloud, without requiring data to be sent externally for decisions to be made. It was built to support teams in all environments, including those with strict data controls and limited connectivity.

Our approach to AI is unique, drawing inspiration from multiple disciplines to tackle the toughest cybersecurity challenges. DIGEST demonstrates how a novel application of GNNs and RNNs improves the prioritization and triage of security incidents. By blending interdisciplinary expertise with innovative AI techniques, we are able to push the boundaries of what’s possible and deliver it where it is needed most. We are eager to share our findings to accelerate progress throughout the broader field of AI development.

DIGEST: Pattern, progression, and prioritization

Most security incidents start quietly. A device contacting an unusual domain. Credentials are used at unexpected hours. File access patterns shift. The fundamental challenge is not always detecting these anomalies but knowing what to address first. DIGEST gives us this capability.

To understand DIGEST, it helps to start with Cyber AI Analyst, a critical component of our Self-Learning AI system and a front-line triage partner in security investigations. It combines supervised and unsupervised machine learning (ML) techniques, natural language processing (NLP), and graph-based reasoning to investigate and summarize security incidents.

DIGEST was built as an additional layer of analysis within Cyber AI Analyst. It enhances its capabilities by refining how incidents are scored and prioritized, helping teams focus on what matters most more quickly. For a general view of the ML and AI methods that power Darktrace products, read our AI Arsenal whitepaper. This paper provides insights regarding the various approaches we use to detect, investigate, and prioritize threats.

Cyber AI Analyst is constantly investigating alerts and produces millions of critical incidents every year. The dynamic graphs produced by Cyber AI Analyst investigations represent an abstract understanding of security incidents that is fully anonymized and privacy preserving. This allowed us to use the Call Home and aianalyst.darktrace.com services to produce a dataset comprising the broad structure of millions of incidents that Cyber AI analyst detected on customer deployments, without containing any sensitive data. (Read our technical research paper for more details about our dataset).

The dynamic graphs from Cyber AI Analyst capture the structure of security incidents where nodes represent entities like users, devices or resources, and edges represent the multitude of relationships between them. As new activity is observed, the graph expands, capturing the progression of incidents over time. Our dataset contained everything from benign administrative behavior to full-scale ransomware attacks.

Unique data, unmatched insights

Key terms

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs): A type of neural network designed to analyze and interpret data structured as graphs, capturing relationships between nodes.

Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs): A type of neural network designed to model sequences where the order of events matters, like how activity unfolds in a security incident.

The Cyber AI Analyst dataset used to train DIGEST reflects over a decade of work in AI paired with unmatched expertise in cybersecurity. Prior to training DIGEST on our incident graph data set, we performed rigorous data preprocessing to ensure to remove issues such as duplicate or ill-formed incidents. Additionally, to validate DIGEST’s outputs, expert security analysts assessed and verified the model’s scoring.

Transforming data into insights requires using the right strategies and techniques. Given the graphical nature of Cyber AI Analyst incident data, we used GNNs and RNNs to train DIGEST to understand incidents and how they are likely to change over time. Change does not always mean escalation. DIGEST’s enhanced scoring also keeps potentially legitimate or low-severity activity from being prioritized over threats that are more likely to get worse. At the beginning, all incidents might look the same to a person. To DIGEST, it looks like the beginning of a pattern.

As a result, DIGEST enhances our understanding of security incidents by evaluating the structure of the incident, probable next steps in an incident’s trajectory, and how likely it is to grow into a larger event.

To illustrate these capabilities in action, we are sharing two examples of DIGEST’s scoring adjustments from use cases within our customers’ environments.

First, Figure 1 shows the graphical representation of a ransomware attack, and Figure 2 shows how DIGEST scored incident progression of that ransomware attack. At hour two, DIGEST’s score escalated to 95% well before observation of data encryption. This means that prior to seeing malicious encryption behaviors, DIGEST understood the structure of the incident and flagged these early activities as high-likelihood precursors to a severe event. Early detection, especially when flagged prior to malicious encryption behaviors, gives security teams a valuable head start and can minimize the overall impact of the threat, Darktrace Autonomous Response can also be enabled by Cyber AI Analyst to initiate an immediate action to stop the progression, allowing the human security team time to investigate and implement next steps.

Graph representation of a ransomware attack
Figure 1: Graph representation of a ransomware attack
Timeline of DIGEST incident score escalation. Note that timestep does not equate to hours, the spike in score to 95% occurred approximately 2 hours into the attack, prior to data encryption.
Figure 2:  Timeline of DIGEST incident score escalation. Note that timestep does not equate to hours, the spike in score to 95% occurred approximately 2 hours into the attack, prior to data encryption.

In contrast, our second example shown in Figure 3 and Figure 4 illustrates how DIGEST’s analysis of an incident can help teams avoid wasting time on lower risk scenarios. In this instance, Figure 3 illustrates a graph of unusual administrative activity, where we observed connection to a large group of devices. However, the incident score remained low because DIGEST determined that high risk malicious activity was unlikely. This determination was based on what DIGEST observed in the incident's structure, what it assessed as the probable next steps in the incident lifecycle and how likely it was to grow into a larger adverse event.

Graph representation of unusual admin activity connecting to a large group of devices.
Figure 3: Graph representation of unusual admin activity connecting to a large group of devices.
Timeline of DIGEST incident scoring, where the score remained low as the unusual event was determined to be low risk.
Figure 4: Timeline of DIGEST incident scoring, where the score remained low as the unusual event was determined to be low risk.

These examples show the value of enhanced scoring. DIGEST helps teams act sooner on the threats that count and spend less time chasing the ones that do not.

The next phase of advanced detection is here

Darktrace understands what incidents look like. We have seen, investigated, and learned from them at scale, including over 90 million investigations in 2024. With DIGEST, we can share our deep understanding of incidents and their behaviors with you and triage these incidents using Cyber AI Analyst.

Our ability to innovate in this space is grounded in the maturity of our team and the experiences we have built upon in over a decade of building AI solutions for cybersecurity. This experience, along with our depth of understanding of our data, techniques, and strategic layering of AI/ML components has shaped every one of our steps forward.

With DIGEST, we are entering a new phase, with another line of defense that helps teams prioritize and reason over incidents and threats far earlier in an incident’s lifecycle. DIGEST understands your incidents when they start, making it easier for your team to act quickly and confidently.

DIGEST is available in Darktrace 6.3, along with a new embedding model – DEMIST-2 – designed to provide reliable, high-accuracy detections for critical security use cases.

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About the author
Margaret Cunningham, PhD
Director, Security & AI Strategy, Field CISO
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