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June 16, 2021

Stopping Corp-Internal Phishing Attacks with Darktrace

Discover how Darktrace Email stopped a series of multi-language phishing attacks, including an Emotet campaign in Japanese. Learn how Darktrace can help!
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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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16
Jun 2021

Click here! Clique aqui! ここをクリック! Klikk here! !اینجا کلیک کنید naDev yIbej! Hic tange!

Language is deceptive. In the realm of email security, language can deceive a recipient into clicking a link or completing a transaction, and it can trick a security tool into thinking an email is legitimate.

It is for this reason that Darktrace/Email is not reliant on language, but rather uses mathematics to develop an understanding of ‘normal’ for every email user in an organization. This enables it to neutralize anomalous emails indicative of a threat around the world, no matter in what format or language they come.

Natural language processing

When it comes to catching a compromised account or impersonation email, how can you teach a computer to understand intent or a change of tone, compared to the normal way a person corresponds?

One of the most common approaches in email security is natural language processing. NLP looks at how to program computers to analyze natural language, commonly by exposing them to a large volume of data.

The result is a computer capable of ‘understanding’ the contents of documents, including the nuances of the language within them. The technology can then extract information in the documents as well as categorize and organize the documents themselves.

Modern-day limitations

However, using NLP is limited in scope for email security as it will often misunderstand specific jargon or colloquialisms, as well as terms that had not been invented when the computer was programmed, unless it is trained on these too. Each additional language requires the computer to learn from zero every time. NLP only works on the regional languages it has been trained on, and it is not commercially viable to teach the technology to work in all small markets.

If a company hires an email security vendor based in America, therefore, it is probable that the security vendor has invested most of their time in detecting English-based phishing threats. That is fine if the company only communicates in English, but this is often not the case. In a 21st century globalized world, the need for security technology to be language-agnostic is more critical than ever.

Not all AI is the same: Unsupervised machine learning

Darktrace/Email relies on unsupervised machine learning, which can learn on the job and does not need to be fed large data sets. It can glean insights from NLP for good measure, but it does not depend on NLP for detection or understanding.

When working with AI it is crucial to understand how the AI learns: does it learn on the job or was it trained with a labeled data set? This is particularly important when looking to understand the intent behind an email, specifically to uncover solicitation attempts either through spoofing, phishing, impersonation of a supplier or any other form of email attack.

Rather than teaching a computer to understand language in an email, Darktrace Cyber AI dynamically assesses activity across inbound and outbound emails including senders, recipients, links, IP addresses, and attachment types. The movement of all these objects are then used by the AI to create the ‘patterns of life’ for every user across all communications, including communications with external users who frequently correspond with a given business.

By taking a mathematical approach, Darktrace/Email is able to understand ‘normal’ for any user regardless of the dialect they are corresponding in, uniquely interpreting all languages from Norwegian to Latin and Persian, and subsequently identifying subtle anomalies indicative of a phishing attack or an account takeover.

Catching Emotet in Japanese

Last year, Darktrace uncovered a sophisticated Spamware campaign which leveraged Emotet, the infamous banking malware. The campaign targeted various industries with highly sophisticated phishing emails.

At a food production company in Japan, Darktrace detected six phishing emails sent over a two-day period in July.

Figure 1: An email from the Emotet campaign.

In the email above, both the subject line and the filename translate to “Regarding the invoice,” followed by a number and the date. The attacker was clearly trying to imitate a legitimate business email here, spoofing a well-known Japanese company (三菱食品(株)) and a common Japanese name (‘藤沢 昭彦’).

Darktrace/Email revealed key metrics behind the email including that the real sender was using a domain name from GMO, a Japanese company which offers cheap web email services, and that the sender’s location was actually Portugal, not Japan.

Figure 2: Darktrace/Email detects the attempt at inducement.

Darktrace/Email’s models recognized the topic anomalies and inducement attempts in the emails, regardless of the language they had been written in – giving a high anomaly score of 85. Furthermore, Darktrace’s AI determined that the extension and the MIME type in the attachments were anomalous, when compared to the documents which the user normally exchanges via email.

Portuguese threat find

In another instance, a series of malicious emails were sent to an organization in Europe. These emails used several tactics to bypass the company’s security tools, including personalized subject lines and hidden malicious URLs.

Figure 3: An interactive snapshot of Darktrace/Email’s user interface. The subject line reads ‘Notice of transfer.’

As displayed above, the email contained a link that appeared to lead to a CaixaBank domain. However, Darktrace/Email recognized this as a deliberate attempt to mislead the recipient and revealed that the link in fact led to a WordPress domain, which Cyber AI identified as 100% rare for the business.

A closer inspection revealed that these emails were sent from Vietnam. The sender had never been in any previous correspondence with the business, and the isolated link within the email was also marked as a 100% rare domain. Darktrace/Email held these malicious emails back, protecting the organization from harm.

Universal defense

These two examples demonstrate the benefits of an unsupervised machine learning approach. An AI security solution which analyzes hundreds of different metrics and does not rely on pre-existing data is a groundbreaking advantage when faced with global phishing threats that now utilize a wide range of languages.

Email-based attacks are becoming more targeted and more convincing by the day. Targeted social engineering and spear phishing with advanced translation tools bombard companies daily, in all languages.

Whether it’s a phishing attack against a local office in Korea or a solicitation attempt in Arabic – even a malicious email written in Klingon from a Star Trek convention – or any of the thousands of email exchanges which occur in countless vernaculars and tones, Darktrace/Email can keep your company safe across the world, and beyond.

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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 3, 2025

Top Eight Threats to SaaS Security and How to Combat Them

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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.

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About the author
Carlos Gray
Senior Product Marketing Manager, Email

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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:

  1. https://www.first.org/blog/20250607-Vulnerability-Forecast-for-2025
  2. https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/threat-intelligence/fortimanager-zero-day-exploitation-cve-2024-47575
  3. https://thehackernews.com/2025/05/china-linked-hackers-exploit-sap-and.html

Related Darktrace blogs:

*Self-reported by customer, confirmed afterwards.

**Updated January 2024 blog now reflects current findings

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