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May 3, 2021

Understanding Modern-Day Cyber Attacks

Discover how Darktrace detects and mitigates threats in IoT ecosystems and globalized supply chains that are constantly evolving.
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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.
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03
May 2021

It’s ten to five on a Friday afternoon. A technician has come in to perform a routine check on an electronic door. She enters the office with no issues – she works for a trusted third-party vendor, employees see her every week. She opens her laptop and connects to the Door Access Control Unit, a small Internet of Things (IoT) device used to operate the smart lock. Minutes later, trojans have been downloaded onto the company network, a crypto-mining operation has begun, and there is evidence of confidential data being exfiltrated. Where did things go wrong?

Threats in a business: A new dawn surfaces

As organizations keep pace with the demands of digital transformation, the attack surface has become broader than ever before. There are numerous points of entry for a cyber-criminal – from vulnerabilities in IoT ecosystems, to blind spots in supply chains, to insiders misusing their access to the business. Darktrace sees these threats every day. Sometimes, like in the real-world example above, which will be examined in this blog, they can occur in the very same attack.

Insider threats can use their familiarity and level of access to a system as a critical advantage when evading detection and launching an attack. But insiders don’t necessarily have to be malicious. Every employee or contractor is a potential threat: clicking on a phishing link or accidentally releasing data often leads to wide-scale breaches.

At the same time, connectivity in the workspace – with each IoT device communicating with the corporate network and the Internet on its own IP address – is an urgent security issue. Access control systems, for example, add a layer of physical security by tracking who enters the office and when. However, these same control systems imperil digital security by introducing a cluster of sensors, locks, alarm systems, and keypads, which hold sensitive user information and connect to company infrastructure.

Furthermore, a significant proportion of IoT devices are built without security in mind. Vendors prioritize time-to-market and often don’t have the resources to invest in baked-in security measures. Consider the number of start-ups which manufacture IoT – over 60% of home automation companies have fewer than ten employees.

Insider threat detected by Cyber AI

In January 2021, a medium-sized North American company suffered a supply chain attack when a third-party vendor connected to the control unit for a smart door.

Figure 1: The attack lasted 3.5 hours in total, commencing 16:50 local time.

The technician from the vendor’s company had come in to perform scheduled maintenance. They had been authorized to connect directly to the Door Access Control Unit, yet were unaware that the laptop they were using, brought in from outside of the organization, had been infected with malware.

As soon as the laptop connected with the control unit, the malware detected an open port, identified the vulnerability, and began moving laterally. Within minutes, the IoT device was seen making highly unusual connections to rare external IP addresses. The connections were made using HTTP and contained suspicious user agents and URIs.

Darktrace then detected that the control unit was attempting to download trojans and other payloads, including upsupx2.exe and 36BB9658.moe. Other connections were used to send base64 encoded strings containing the device name and the organization’s external IP address.

Cryptocurrency mining activity with a Monero (XMR) CPU miner was detected shortly afterwards. The device also utilized an SMB exploit to make external connections on port 445 while searching for vulnerable internal devices using the outdated SMBv1 protocol.

One hour later, the device connected to an endpoint related to the third-party remote access tool TeamViewer. After a few minutes, the device was seen uploading over 15 MB to a 100% rare external IP.

Figure 2: Timeline of the connections made by an example device on the days around an incident (blue). The connections associated with the compromise are a significant deviation from the device’s normal pattern of life, and result in multiple unusual activity events and repeated model breaches (orange).

Security threats in the supply chain

Cyber AI flagged the insider threat to the customer as soon as the control unit had been compromised. The attack had managed to bypass the rest of the organization’s security stack, for the simple reason that it was introduced directly from a trusted external laptop, and the IoT device itself was managed by the third-party vendor, so the customer had little visibility over it.

Traditional security tools are ineffective against supply chain attacks such as this. From the SolarWinds hack to Vendor Email Compromise, 2021 has put the nail in the coffin for signature-based security – proving that we cannot rely on yesterday’s attacks to predict tomorrow’s threats.

International supply chains and the sheer number of different partners and suppliers which modern organizations work with thus pose a serious security dilemma: how can we allow external vendors onto our network and keep an airtight system?

The first answer is zero-trust access. This involves treating every device as malicious, inside and outside the corporate network, and demanding verification at all stages. The second answer is visibility and response. Security products must shed a clear light into cloud and IoT infrastructure, and react autonomously as soon as subtle anomalies emerge across the enterprise.

IoT investigated

Darktrace’s Cyber AI Analyst reported on every stage of the attack, including the download of the first malicious executable file.

Figure 3: Example of Cyber AI Analyst detecting anomalous behavior on a device, including C2 connectivity and suspicious file downloads.

Cyber AI Analyst investigated the C2 connectivity, providing a high-level summary of the activity. The IoT device had accessed suspicious MOE files with randomly generated alphanumeric names.

Figure 4: A Cyber AI Analyst summary of C2 connectivity for a device.

Not only did the AI detect every stage of the activity, but the customer was also alerted via a Proactive Threat Notification following a high scoring model breach at 16:59, just minutes after the attack had commenced.

Stranger danger

Third parties coming in to tweak device settings and adjust the network can have unintended consequences. The hyper-connected world which we’re living in, with the advent of 5G and Industry 4.0, has become a digital playground for cyber-criminals.

In the real-world case study above, the IoT device was unsecured and misconfigured. With rushed creations of IoT ecosystems, intertwining supply chains, and a breadth of individuals and devices connecting to corporate infrastructure, modern-day organizations cannot expect simple security tools which rely on pre-defined rules to stop insider threats and other advanced cyber-attacks.

The organization did not have visibility over the management of the Door Access Control Unit. Despite this, and despite no prior knowledge of the attack type or the vulnerabilities present in the IoT device, Darktrace detected the behavioral anomalies immediately. Without Cyber AI, the infection could have remained on the customer’s environment for weeks or months, escalating privileges, silently crypto-mining, and exfiltrating sensitive company data.

Thanks to Darktrace analyst Grace Carballo for her insights on the above threat find.

Learn more about insider threats

Darktrace model detections:

  • Anomalous File/Anomalous Octet Stream
  • Anomalous Connection/New User Agent to IP Without Hostname
  • Unusual Activity/Unusual External Connectivity
  • Device/Increased External Connectivity
  • Anomalous Server Activity/Outgoing from Server
  • Device/New User Agent and New IP
  • Compliance/Cryptocurrency Mining Activity
  • Compliance/External Windows Connectivity
  • Anomalous File/Multiple EXE from Rare External Locations
  • Anomalous File/EXE from Rare External Location
  • Device/Large Number of Model Breaches
  • Anomalous File/Internet Facing System File Download
  • Device/Initial Breach Chain Compromise
  • Device/SMB Session Bruteforce
  • Device/Network Scan- Low Anomaly Score
  • Device/Large Number of Connections to New Endpoint
  • Anomalous Server Activity/Outgoing from Server
  • Compromise/Beacon to Young Endpoint
  • Anomalous Server Activity/Rare External from Server
  • Device/Multiple C2 Model Breaches
  • Compliance/Remote Management Tool on Server
  • Anomalous Connection/Data Sent to New External Device

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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.
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July 17, 2025

Introducing the AI Maturity Model for Cybersecurity

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AI adoption in cybersecurity: Beyond the hype

Security operations today face a paradox. On one hand, artificial intelligence (AI) promises sweeping transformation from automating routine tasks to augmenting threat detection and response. On the other hand, security leaders are under immense pressure to separate meaningful innovation from vendor hype.

To help CISOs and security teams navigate this landscape, we’ve developed the most in-depth and actionable AI Maturity Model in the industry. Built in collaboration with AI and cybersecurity experts, this framework provides a structured path to understanding, measuring, and advancing AI adoption across the security lifecycle.

Overview of AI maturity levels in cybersecurity

Why a maturity model? And why now?

In our conversations and research with security leaders, a recurring theme has emerged:

There’s no shortage of AI solutions, but there is a shortage of clarity and understanding of AI uses cases.

In fact, Gartner estimates that “by 2027, over 40% of Agentic AI projects will be canceled due to escalating costs, unclear business value, or inadequate risk controls. Teams are experimenting, but many aren’t seeing meaningful outcomes. The need for a standardized way to evaluate progress and make informed investments has never been greater.

That’s why we created the AI Security Maturity Model, a strategic framework that:

  • Defines five clear levels of AI maturity, from manual processes (L0) to full AI Delegation (L4)
  • Delineating the outcomes derived between Agentic GenAI and Specialized AI Agent Systems
  • Applies across core functions such as risk management, threat detection, alert triage, and incident response
  • Links AI maturity to real-world outcomes like reduced risk, improved efficiency, and scalable operations

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How is maturity assessed in this model?

The AI Maturity Model for Cybersecurity is grounded in operational insights from nearly 10,000 global deployments of Darktrace's Self-Learning AI and Cyber AI Analyst. Rather than relying on abstract theory or vendor benchmarks, the model reflects what security teams are actually doing, where AI is being adopted, how it's being used, and what outcomes it’s delivering.

This real-world foundation allows the model to offer a practical, experience-based view of AI maturity. It helps teams assess their current state and identify realistic next steps based on how organizations like theirs are evolving.

Why Darktrace?

AI has been central to Darktrace’s mission since its inception in 2013, not just as a feature, but the foundation. With over a decade of experience building and deploying AI in real-world security environments, we’ve learned where it works, where it doesn’t, and how to get the most value from it. This model reflects that insight, helping security leaders find the right path forward for their people, processes, and tools

Security teams today are asking big, important questions:

  • What should we actually use AI for?
  • How are other teams using it — and what’s working?
  • What are vendors offering, and what’s just hype?
  • Will AI ever replace people in the SOC?

These questions are valid, and they’re not always easy to answer. That’s why we created this model: to help security leaders move past buzzwords and build a clear, realistic plan for applying AI across the SOC.

The structure: From experimentation to autonomy

The model outlines five levels of maturity :

L0 – Manual Operations: Processes are mostly manual with limited automation of some tasks.

L1 – Automation Rules: Manually maintained or externally-sourced automation rules and logic are used wherever possible.

L2 – AI Assistance: AI assists research but is not trusted to make good decisions. This includes GenAI agents requiring manual oversight for errors.

L3 – AI Collaboration: Specialized cybersecurity AI agent systems  with business technology context are trusted with specific tasks and decisions. GenAI has limited uses where errors are acceptable.

L4 – AI Delegation: Specialized AI agent systems with far wider business operations and impact context perform most cybersecurity tasks and decisions independently, with only high-level oversight needed.

Each level reflects a shift, not only in technology, but in people and processes. As AI matures, analysts evolve from executors to strategic overseers.

Strategic benefits for security leaders

The maturity model isn’t just about technology adoption it’s about aligning AI investments with measurable operational outcomes. Here’s what it enables:

SOC fatigue is real, and AI can help

Most teams still struggle with alert volume, investigation delays, and reactive processes. AI adoption is inconsistent and often siloed. When integrated well, AI can make a meaningful difference in making security teams more effective

GenAI is error prone, requiring strong human oversight

While there is a lot of hype around GenAI agentic systems, teams will need to account for inaccuracy and hallucination in Agentic GenAI systems.

AI’s real value lies in progression

The biggest gains don’t come from isolated use cases, but from integrating AI across the lifecycle, from preparation through detection to containment and recovery.

Trust and oversight are key initially but evolves in later levels

Early-stage adoption keeps humans fully in control. By L3 and L4, AI systems act independently within defined bounds, freeing humans for strategic oversight.

People’s roles shift meaningfully

As AI matures, analyst roles consolidate and elevate from labor intensive task execution to high-value decision-making, focusing on critical, high business impact activities, improving processes and AI governance.

Outcome, not hype, defines maturity

AI maturity isn’t about tech presence, it’s about measurable impact on risk reduction, response time, and operational resilience.

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Outcomes across the AI Security Maturity Model

The Security Organization experiences an evolution of cybersecurity outcomes as teams progress from manual operations to AI delegation. Each level represents a step-change in efficiency, accuracy, and strategic value.

L0 – Manual Operations

At this stage, analysts manually handle triage, investigation, patching, and reporting manually using basic, non-automated tools. The result is reactive, labor-intensive operations where most alerts go uninvestigated and risk management remains inconsistent.

L1 – Automation Rules

At this stage, analysts manage rule-based automation tools like SOAR and XDR, which offer some efficiency gains but still require constant tuning. Operations remain constrained by human bandwidth and predefined workflows.

L2 – AI Assistance

At this stage, AI assists with research, summarization, and triage, reducing analyst workload but requiring close oversight due to potential errors. Detection improves, but trust in autonomous decision-making remains limited.

L3 – AI Collaboration

At this stage, AI performs full investigations and recommends actions, while analysts focus on high-risk decisions and refining detection strategies. Purpose-built agentic AI systems with business context are trusted with specific tasks, improving precision and prioritization.

L4 – AI Delegation

At this stage, Specialized AI Agent Systems performs most security tasks independently at machine speed, while human teams provide high-level strategic oversight. This means the highest time and effort commitment activities by the human security team is focused on proactive activities while AI handles routine cybersecurity tasks

Specialized AI Agent Systems operate with deep business context including impact context to drive fast, effective decisions.

Join the webinar

Get a look at the minds shaping this model by joining our upcoming webinar using this link. We’ll walk through real use cases, share lessons learned from the field, and show how security teams are navigating the path to operational AI safely, strategically, and successfully.

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July 17, 2025

Forensics or Fauxrensics: Five Core Capabilities for Cloud Forensics and Incident Response

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The speed and scale at which new cloud resources can be spun up has resulted in uncontrolled deployments, misconfigurations, and security risks. It has had security teams racing to secure their business’ rapid migration from traditional on-premises environments to the cloud.

While many organizations have successfully extended their prevention and detection capabilities to the cloud, they are now experiencing another major gap: forensics and incident response.

Once something bad has been identified, understanding its true scope and impact is nearly impossible at times. The proliferation of cloud resources across a multitude of cloud providers, and the addition of container and serverless capabilities all add to the complexities. It’s clear that organizations need a better way to manage cloud incident response.

Security teams are looking to move past their homegrown solutions and open-source tools to incorporate real cloud forensics capabilities. However, with the increased buzz around cloud forensics, it can be challenging to decipher what is real cloud forensics, and what is “fauxrensics.”

This blog covers the five core capabilities that security teams should consider when evaluating a cloud forensics and incident response solution.

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1. Depth of data

There have been many conversations among the security community about whether cloud forensics is just log analysis. The reality, however, is that cloud forensics necessitates access to a robust dataset that extends far beyond traditional log data sources.

While logs provide valuable insights, a forensics investigation demands a deeper understanding derived from multiple data sources, including disk, network, and memory, within the cloud infrastructure. Full disk analysis complements log analysis, offering crucial context for identifying the root cause and scope of an incident.

For instance, when investigating an incident involving a Kubernetes cluster running on an EC2 instance, access to bash history can provide insights into the commands executed by attackers on the affected instance, which would not be available through cloud logs alone.

Having all of the evidence in one place is also a capability that can significantly streamline investigations, unifying your evidence be it disk images, memory captures or cloud logs, into a single timeline allowing security teams to reconstruct an attacks origin, path and impact far more easily. Multi–cloud environments also require platforms that can support aggregating data from many providers and services into one place. Doing this enables more holistic investigations and reduces security blind spots.

There is also the importance of collecting data from ephemeral resources in modern cloud and containerized environments. Critical evidence can be lost in seconds as resources are constantly spinning up and down, so having the ability to capture this data before its gone can be a huge advantage to security teams, rather than having to figure out what happened after the affected service is long gone.

darktrace / cloud, cado, cloud logs, ost, and memory information. value of cloud combined analysis

2. Chain of custody

Chain of custody is extremely critical in the context of legal proceedings and is an essential component of forensics and incident response. However, chain of custody in the cloud can be extremely complex with the number of people who have access and the rise of multi-cloud environments.

In the cloud, maintaining a reliable chain of custody becomes even more complex than it already is, due to having to account for multiple access points, service providers and third parties. Having automated evidence tracking is a must. It means that all actions are logged, from collection to storage to access. Automation also minimizes the chance of human error, reducing the risk of mistakes or gaps in evidence handling, especially in high pressure fast moving investigations.

The ability to preserve unaltered copies of forensic evidence in a secure manner is required to ensure integrity throughout an investigation. It is not just a technical concern, its a legal one, ensuring that your evidence handling is documented and time stamped allows it to stand up to court or regulatory review.

Real cloud forensics platforms should autonomously handle chain of custody in the background, recording and safeguarding evidence without human intervention.

3. Automated collection and isolation

When malicious activity is detected, the speed at which security teams can determine root cause and scope is essential to reducing Mean Time to Response (MTTR).

Automated forensic data collection and system isolation ensures that evidence is collected and compromised resources are isolated at the first sign of malicious activity. This can often be before an attacker has had the change to move latterly or cover their tracks. This enables security teams to prevent potential damage and spread while a deeper-dive forensics investigation takes place. This method also ensures critical incident evidence residing in ephemeral environments is preserved in the event it is needed for an investigation. This evidence may only exist for minutes, leaving no time for a human analyst to capture it.

Cloud forensics and incident response platforms should offer the ability to natively integrate with incident detection and alerting systems and/or built-in product automation rules to trigger evidence capture and resource isolation.

4. Ease of use

Security teams shouldn’t require deep cloud or incident response knowledge to perform forensic investigations of cloud resources. They already have enough on their plates.

While traditional forensics tools and approaches have made investigation and response extremely tedious and complex, modern forensics platforms prioritize usability at their core, and leverage automation to drastically simplify the end-to-end incident response process, even when an incident spans multiple Cloud Service Providers (CSPs).

Useability is a core requirement for any modern forensics platform. Security teams should not need to have indepth knowledge of every system and resource in a given estate. Workflows, automation and guidance should make it possible for an analyst to investigate whatever resource they need to.

Unifying the workflow across multiple clouds can also save security teams a huge amount of time and resources. Investigations can often span multiple CSP’s. A good security platform should provide a single place to search, correlate and analyze evidence across all environments.

Offering features such as cross cloud support, data enrichment, a single timeline view, saved search, and faceted search can help advanced analysts achieve greater efficiency, and novice analysts are able to participate in more complex investigations.

5. Incident preparedness

Incident response shouldn't just be reactive. Modern security teams need to regularly test their ability to acquire new evidence, triage assets and respond to threats across both new and existing resources, ensuring readiness even in the rapidly changing environments of the cloud.  Having the ability to continuously assess your incident response and forensics workflows enables you to rapidly improve your processes and identify and mitigate any gaps identified that could prevent the organization from being able to effectively respond to potential threats.

Real forensics platforms deliver features that enable security teams to prepare extensively and understand their shortcomings before they are in the heat of an incident. For example, cloud forensics platforms can provide the ability to:

  • Run readiness checks and see readiness trends over time
  • Identify and mitigate issues that could prevent rapid investigation and response
  • Ensure the correct logging, management agents, and other cloud-native tools are appropriately configured and operational
  • Ensure that data gathered during an investigation can be decrypted
  • Verify that permissions are aligned with best practices and are capable of supporting incident response efforts

Cloud forensics with Darktrace

Darktrace delivers a proactive approach to cyber resilience in a single cybersecurity platform, including cloud coverage. Darktrace / CLOUD is a real time Cloud Detection and Response (CDR) solution built with advanced AI to make cloud security accessible to all security teams and SOCs. By using multiple machine learning techniques, Darktrace brings unprecedented visibility, threat detection, investigation, and incident response to hybrid and multi-cloud environments.

Darktrace’s cloud offerings have been bolstered with the acquisition of Cado Security Ltd., which enables security teams to gain immediate access to forensic-level data in multi-cloud, container, serverless, SaaS, and on-premises environments.

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