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May 25, 2022

Uncovering the Sysrv-Hello Crypto-Jacking Bonet

Discover the cyber kill chain of a Sysrv-hello botnet infection in France and gain insights into the latest TTPs of the botnet in March and April 2022.
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
Shuh Chin Goh
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25
May 2022

In recent years, the prevalence of crypto-jacking botnets has risen in tandem with the popularity and value of cryptocurrencies. Increasingly crypto-mining malware programs are distributed by botnets as they allow threat actors to harness the cumulative processing power of a large number of machines (discussed in our other Darktrace blogs.1 2 One of these botnets is Sysrv-hello, which in addition to crypto-mining, propagates aggressively across the Internet in a worm-like manner by trolling for Remote Code Execution (RCE) vulnerabilities and SSH worming from the compromised victim devices. This all has the purpose of expanding the botnet.

First identified in December 2020, Sysrv-hello’s operators constantly update and change the bots’ behavior to evolve and stay ahead of security researchers and law enforcement. As such, infected systems can easily go unnoticed by both users and organizations. This blog examines the cyber kill chain sequence of a Sysrv-hello botnet infection detected at the network level by Darktrace DETECT/Network, as well as the botnet’s tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) in March and April 2022.

Figure 1: Timeline of the attack

Delivery and exploitation

The organization, which was trialing Darktrace, had deployed the technology on March 2, 2022. On the very same day, the initial host infection was seen through the download of a first-stage PowerShell loader script from a rare external endpoint by a device in the internal network. Although initial exploitation of the device happened prior to the installation and was not observed, this botnet is known to target RCE vulnerabilities in various applications such as MySQL, Tomcat, PHPUnit, Apache Solar, Confluence, Laravel, JBoss, Jira, Sonatype, Oracle WebLogic and Apache Struts to gain initial access to internal systems.3 Recent iterations have also been reported to have been deployed via drive-by-downloads from an empty HTML iframe pointing to a malicious executable that downloads to the device from a user visiting a compromised website.4

Initial intrusion

The Sysrv-hello botnet is distributed for both Linux and Windows environments, with the corresponding compatible script pulled based on the architecture of the system. In this incident, the Windows version was observed.

On March 2, 2022 at 15:15:28 UTC, the device made a successful HTTP GET request to a malicious IP address5 that had a rarity score of 100% in the network. It subsequently downloaded a malicious PowerShell script named ‘ldr.ps1'6 onto the system. The associated IP address ‘194.145.227[.]21’ belongs to ‘ASN AS48693 Rices Privately owned enterprise’ and had been identified as a Sysrv-hello botnet command and control (C2) server in April the previous year. 3

Looking at the URI ‘/ldr.ps1?b0f895_admin:admin_81.255.222.82:8443_https’, it appears some form of query was being executed onto the object. The question mark ‘?’ in this URI is used to delimit the boundary between the URI of the queryable object and the set of strings used to express a query onto that object. Conventionally, we see the set of strings contains a list of key/value pairs with equal signs ‘=’, which are separated by the ampersand symbol ‘&’ between each of those parameters (e.g. www.youtube[.]com/watch?v=RdcCjDS0s6s&ab_channel=SANSCyberDefense), though the exact structure of the query string is not standardized and different servers may parse it differently. Instead, this case saw a set of strings with the hexadecimal color code #b0f895 (a light shade of green), admin username and password login credentials, and the IP address ‘81.255.222[.]82’ being applied during the object query (via HTTPS protocol on port 8443). In recent months this French IP has also had reports of abuse from the OSINT community.7

On March 2, 2022 at 15:15:33 UTC, the PowerShell loader script further downloaded second-stage executables named ‘sys.exe’ and ‘xmrig.2 sver.8 9 These have been identified as the worm and cryptocurrency miner payloads respectively.

Establish foothold

On March 2, 2022 at 17:46:55 UTC, after the downloads of the worm and cryptocurrency miner payloads, the device initiated multiple SSL connections in a regular, automated manner to Pastebin – a text storage website. This technique was used as a vector to download/upload data and drop further malicious scripts onto the host. OSINT sources suggest the JA3 client SSL fingerprint (05af1f5ca1b87cc9cc9b25185115607d) is associated with PowerShell usage, corroborating with the observation that further tooling was initiated by the PowerShell script ‘ldr.ps1’.

Continual Pastebin C2 connections were still being made by the device almost two months since the initiation of such connections. These Pastebin C2 connections point to new tactics and techniques employed by Sysrv-hello — reports earlier than May do not appear to mention any usage of the file storage site. These new TTPs serve two purposes: defense evasion using a web service/protocol and persistence. Persistence was likely achieved through scheduling daemons downloaded from this web service and shellcode executions at set intervals to kill off other malware processes, as similarly seen in other botnets.10 Recent reports have seen other malware programs also switch to Pastebin C2 tunnels to deliver subsequent payloads, scrapping the need for traditional C2 servers and evading detection.11

Figure 2: A section of the constant SSL connections that the device was still making to ‘pastebin[.]com’ even in the month of April, which resembles beaconing scheduled activity

Throughout the months of March and April, suspicious SSL connections were made from a second potentially compromised device in the internal network to the infected breach device. The suspicious French IP address ‘81.255.222[.]82’ previously seen in the URI object query was revealed as the value of the Server Name Indicator (SNI) in these SSL connections where, typically, a hostname or domain name is indicated.

After an initial compromise, attackers usually aim to gain long-term remote shell access to continue the attack. As the breach device does not have a public IP address and is most certainly behind a firewall, for it to be directly accessible from the Internet a reverse shell would need to be established. Outgoing connections often succeed because firewalls generally filter only incoming traffic. Darktrace observed the device making continuous outgoing connections to an external host listening on an unusual port, 8443, indicating the presence of a reverse shell for pivoting and remote administration.

Figure 3: SSL connections to server name ‘81.255.222[.]8’ at end of March and start of April

Accomplish mission

On March 4, 2022 at 15:07:04 UTC, the device made a total of 16,029 failed connections to a large volume of external endpoints on the same port (8080). This behavior is consistent with address scanning. From the country codes, it appears that public IP addresses for various countries around the world were contacted (at least 99 unique addresses), with the US being the most targeted.

From 19:44:36 UTC onwards, the device performed cryptocurrency mining using the Minergate mining pool protocol to generate profits for the attacker. A login credential called ‘x’ was observed in the Minergate connections to ‘194.145.227[.]21’ via port 5443. JSON-RPC methods of ‘login’ and ‘submit’ were seen from the connection originator (the infected breach device) and ‘job’ was seen from the connection responder (the C2 server). A high volume of connections using the JSON-RPC application protocol to ‘pool-fr.supportxmr[.]com’ were also made on port 80.

When the botnet was first discovered in December 2020, mining pools MineXMR and F2Pool were used. In February 2021, MineXMR was removed and in March 2021, Nanopool mining pool was added,12 before switching to the present SupportXMR and Minergate mining pools. Threat actors utilize such proxy pools to help hide the actual crypto wallet address where the contributions are made by the crypto-mining activity. From April onwards, the device appears to download the ‘xmrig.exe’ executable from a rare IP address ‘61.103.177[.]229’ in Korea every few days – likely in an attempt to establish persistency and ensure the cryptocurrency mining payload continues to exist on the compromised system for continued mining.

On March 9, 2022 from 18:16:20 UTC onwards, trolling for various RCE vulnerabilities (including but not limited to these four) was observed over HTTP connections to public IP addresses:

  1. Through March, the device made around 5,417 HTTP POSTs with the URI ‘/vendor/phpunit/phpunit/src/Util/PHP/eval-stdin.php’ to at least 99 unique public IPs. This appears to be related to CVE-2017-9841, which in PHPUnit allows remote attackers to execute arbitrary PHP code via HTTP POST data beginning with a ‘13 PHPUnit is a common testing framework for PHP, used for performing unit tests during application development. It is used by a variety of popular Content Management Systems (CMS) such as WordPress, Drupal and Prestashop. This CVE has been called “one of the most exploitable CVEs of 2019,” with around seven million attack attempts being observed that year.14 This framework is not designed to be exposed on the critical paths serving web pages and should not be reachable by external HTTP requests. Looking at the status messages of the HTTP POSTs in this incident, some ‘Found’ and ‘OK’ messages were seen, suggesting the vulnerable path could be accessible on some of those endpoints.

Figure 4: PCAP of CVE-2017-9841 vulnerability trolling

Figure 5: The CVE-2017-9841 vulnerable path appears to be reachable on some endpoints

  1. Through March, the device also made around 5,500 HTTP POSTs with the URI ‘/_ignition/execute-solution’ to at least 99 unique public IPs. This appears related to CVE-2021-3129, which allows unauthenticated remote attackers to execute arbitrary code using debug mode with Laravel, a PHP web application framework in versions prior to 8.4.2.15 The POST request below makes the variable ‘username’ optional, and the ‘viewFile’ parameter is empty, as a test to see if the endpoint is vulnerable.16

Figure 6: PCAP of CVE-2021-3129 vulnerability trolling

  1. The device made approximately a further 252 HTTP GETs with URIs containing ‘invokefunction&function’ to another minimum of 99 unique public IPs. This appears related to a RCE vulnerability in ThinkPHP, an open-source web framework.17

Figure 7: Some of the URIs associated with ThinkPHP RCE vulnerability

  1. A HTTP header related to a RCE vulnerability for the Jakarta Multipart parser used by Apache struts2 in CVE-2017-563818 was also seen during the connection attempts. In this case the payload used a custom Content-Type header.

Figure 8: PCAP of CVE-2017-5638 vulnerability trolling

Two widely used methods of SSH authentication are public key authentication and password authentication. After gaining a foothold in the network, previous reports3 19 have mentioned that Sysrv-hello harvests private SSH keys from the compromised device, along with identifying known devices. Being a known device means the system can communicate with the other system without any further authentication checks after the initial key exchange. This technique was likely performed in conjunction with password brute-force attacks against the known devices. Starting from March 9, 2022 at 20:31:25 UTC, Darktrace observed the device making a large number of SSH connections and login failures to public IP ranges. For example, between 00:05:41 UTC on March 26 and 05:00:02 UTC on April 14, around 83,389 SSH connection attempts were made to 31 unique public IPs.

Figure 9: Darktrace’s Threat Visualizer shows large spikes in SSH connections by the breach device

Figure 10: Beaconing SSH connections to a single external endpoint, indicating a potential brute-force attack

Darktrace coverage

Cyber AI Analyst was able to connect the events and present them in a digestible, chronological order for the organization. In the aftermath of any security incidents, this is a convenient way for security users to conduct assisted investigations and reduce the workload on human analysts. However, it is good to note that this activity was also easily observed in real time from the model section on the Threat Visualizer due to the large number of escalating model breaches.

Figure 11: Cyber AI Analyst consolidating the events in the month of March into a summary

Figure 12: Cyber AI Analyst shows the progression of the attack through the month of March

As this incident occurred during a trial, Darktrace RESPOND was enabled in passive mode – with a valid license to display the actions that it would have taken, but with no active control performed. In this instance, no Antigena models breached for the initial compromised device as it was not tagged to be eligible for Antigena actions. Nonetheless, Darktrace was able to provide visibility into these anomalous connections.

Had Antigena been deployed in active mode, and the breach device appropriately tagged with Antigena All or Antigena External Threat, Darktrace would have been able to respond and neutralize different stages of the attack through network inhibitors Block Matching Connections and Enforce Group Pattern of Life, and relevant Antigena models such as Antigena Suspicious File Block, Antigena Suspicious File Pattern of Life Block, Antigena Pastebin Block and Antigena Crypto Currency Mining Block. The first of these inhibitors, Block Matching Connections, will block the specific connection and all future connections that matches the same criteria (e.g. all future outbound HTTP connections from the breach device to destination port 80) for a set period of time. Enforce Group Pattern of Life allows a device to only make connections and data transfers that it or any of its peer group typically make.

Conclusion

Resource hijacking results in unauthorized consumption of system resources and monetary loss for affected organizations. Compromised devices can potentially be rented out to other threat actors and botnet operators could switch from conducting crypto-mining to other more destructive illicit activities (e.g. DDoS or dropping of ransomware) whilst changing their TTPs in the future. Defenders are constantly playing catch-up to this continual evolution, and retrospective rules and signatures solutions or threat intelligence that relies on humans to spot future threats will not be able to keep up.

In this case, it appears the botnet operator has added an object query in the URL of the initial PowerShell loader script download, added Pastebin C2 for evasion and persistence, and utilized new cryptocurrency mining pools. Despite this, Darktrace’s Self-Learning AI was able to identify the threats the moment attackers changed their approach, detecting every step of the attack in the network without relying on known indicators of threat.

Appendix

Darktrace model detections

  • Anomalous File / Script from Rare Location
  • Anomalous File / EXE from Rare External Location
  • Compromise / Agent Beacon (Medium Period)
  • Compromise / Slow Beaconing Activity To External Rare
  • Compromise / Beaconing Activity To External Rare
  • Device / External Address Scan
  • Compromise / Crypto Currency Mining Activity
  • Compromise / High Priority Crypto Currency Mining
  • Compromise / High Volume of Connections with Beacon Score
  • Compromise / SSL Beaconing to Rare Destination
  • Anomalous Connection / Multiple HTTP POSTs to Rare Hostname
  • Device / Large Number of Model Breaches
  • Anomalous Connection / Multiple Failed Connections to Rare Endpoint
  • Anomalous Connection / SSH Brute Force
  • Compromise / SSH Beacon
  • Compliance / SSH to Rare External AWS
  • Compromise / High Frequency SSH Beacon
  • Compliance / SSH to Rare External Destination
  • Device / Multiple C2 Model Breaches
  • Anomalous Connection / POST to PHP on New External Host

MITRE ATT&CK techniques observed:

IoCs

Thanks to Victoria Baldie and Yung Ju Chua for their contributions.

Footnotes

1. https://www.darktrace.com/en/blog/crypto-botnets-moving-laterally

2. https://www.darktrace.com/en/blog/how-ai-uncovered-outlaws-secret-crypto-mining-operation

3. https://www.lacework.com/blog/sysrv-hello-expands-infrastructure

4. https://www.riskiq.com/blog/external-threat-management/sysrv-hello-cryptojacking-botnet

5. https://www.virustotal.com/gui/ip-address/194.145.227.21

6. https://www.virustotal.com/gui/url/c586845daa2aec275453659f287dcb302921321e04cb476b0d98d731d57c4e83?nocache=1

7. https://www.abuseipdb.com/check/81.255.222.82

8. https://www.virustotal.com/gui/file/586e271b5095068484446ee222a4bb0f885987a0b77e59eb24511f6d4a774c30

9. https://www.virustotal.com/gui/file/f5bef6ace91110289a2977cfc9f4dbec1e32fecdbe77326e8efe7b353c58e639

10. https://www.ironnet.com/blog/continued-exploitation-of-cve-2021-26084

11. https://www.zdnet.com/article/njrat-trojan-operators-are-now-using-pastebin-as-alternative-to-central-command-server

12. https://blogs.juniper.net/en-us/threat-research/sysrv-botnet-expands-and-gains-persistence

13. https://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi?name=CVE-2017-9841

14. https://www.imperva.com/blog/the-resurrection-of-phpunit-rce-vulnerability

15. https://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi?name=CVE-2021-3129

16. https://isc.sans.edu/forums/diary/Laravel+v842+exploit+attempts+for+CVE20213129+debug+mode+Remote+code+execution/27758

17. https://securitynews.sonicwall.com/xmlpost/thinkphp-remote-code-execution-rce-bug-is-actively-being-exploited

18. https://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi?name=CVE-2017-5638

19. https://sysdig.com/blog/crypto-sysrv-hello-wordpress

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
Shuh Chin Goh

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October 20, 2025

Salty Much: Darktrace’s view on a recent Salt Typhoon intrusion

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What is Salt Typhoon?

Salt Typhoon represents one of the most persistent and sophisticated cyber threats targeting global critical infrastructure today. Believed to be linked to state-sponsored actors from the People’s Republic of China (PRC), this advanced persistent threat (APT) group has executed a series of high-impact campaigns against telecommunications providers, energy networks, and government systems—most notably across the United States.

Active since at least 2019, the group—also tracked as Earth Estries, GhostEmperor, and UNC2286—has demonstrated advanced capabilities in exploiting edge devices, maintaining deep persistence, and exfiltrating sensitive data across more than 80 countries. While much of the public reporting has focused on U.S. targets, Salt Typhoon’s operations have extended into Europe, the Middle East, and Africa (EMEA) where it has targeted telecoms, government entities, and technology firms. Its use of custom malware and exploitation of high-impact vulnerabilities (e.g., Ivanti, Fortinet, Cisco) underscores the strategic nature of its campaigns, which blend intelligence collection with geopolitical influence [1].

Leveraging zero-day exploits, obfuscation techniques, and lateral movement strategies, Salt Typhoon has demonstrated an alarming ability to evade detection and maintain long-term access to sensitive environments. The group’s operations have exposed lawful intercept systems, compromised metadata for millions of users, and disrupted essential services, prompting coordinated responses from intelligence agencies and private-sector partners worldwide. As organizations reassess their threat models, Salt Typhoon serves as a stark reminder of the evolving nature of nation-state cyber operations and the urgent need for proactive defense strategies.

Darktrace’s coverage

In this case, Darktrace observed activity in a European telecommunications organisation consistent with Salt Typhoon’s known tactics, techniques and procedures (TTPs), including dynamic-link library (DLL) sideloading and abuse of legitimate software for stealth and execution.

Initial access

The intrusion likely began with exploitation of a Citrix NetScaler Gateway appliance in the first week of July 2025. From there, the actor pivoted to Citrix Virtual Delivery Agent (VDA) hosts in the client’s Machine Creation Services (MCS) subnet. Initial access activities in the intrusion originated from an endpoint potentially associated with the SoftEther VPN service, suggesting infrastructure obfuscation from the outset.

Tooling

Darktrace subsequently observed the threat actor delivering a backdoor assessed with high confidence to be SNAPPYBEE (also known as Deed RAT) [2][3] to multiple Citrix VDA hosts. The backdoor was delivered to these internal endpoints as a DLL alongside legitimate executable files for antivirus software such as Norton Antivirus, Bkav Antivirus, and IObit Malware Fighter. This pattern of activity indicates that the attacker relied on DLL side-loading via legitimate antivirus software to execute their payloads. Salt Typhoon and similar groups have a history of employing this technique [4][5], enabling them to execute payloads under the guise of trusted software and bypassing traditional security controls.

Command-and-Control (C2)

The backdoor delivered by the threat actor leveraged LightNode VPS endpoints for C2, communicating over both HTTP and an unidentified TCP-based protocol. This dual-channel setup is consistent with Salt Typhoon’s known use of non-standard and layered protocols to evade detection. The HTTP communications displayed by the backdoor included POST requests with an Internet Explorer User-Agent header and Target URI patterns such as “/17ABE7F017ABE7F0”. One of the C2 hosts contacted by compromised endpoints was aar.gandhibludtric[.]com (38.54.63[.]75), a domain recently linked to Salt Typhoon [6].

Detection timeline

Darktrace produced high confidence detections in response to the early stages of the intrusion, with both the initial tooling and C2 activities being strongly covered by both investigations by Darktrace Cyber AI AnalystTM investigations and Darktrace models. Despite the sophistication of the threat actor, the intrusion activity identified and remediated before escalating beyond these early stages of the attack, with Darktrace’s timely high-confidence detections likely playing a key role in neutralizing the threat.

Cyber AI Analyst observations

Darktrace’s Cyber AI Analyst autonomously investigated the model alerts generated by Darktrace during the early stages of the intrusion. Through its investigations, Cyber AI Analyst discovered the initial tooling and C2 events and pieced them together into unified incidents representing the attacker’s progression.

Cyber AI Analyst weaved together separate events from the intrusion into broader incidents summarizing the attacker’s progression.
Figure 1: Cyber AI Analyst weaved together separate events from the intrusion into broader incidents summarizing the attacker’s progression.

Conclusion

Based on overlaps in TTPs, staging patterns, infrastructure, and malware, Darktrace assesses with moderate confidence that the observed activity was consistent with Salt Typhoon/Earth Estries (ALA GhostEmperor/UNC2286). Salt Typhoon continues to challenge defenders with its stealth, persistence, and abuse of legitimate tools. As attackers increasingly blend into normal operations, detecting behavioral anomalies becomes essential for identifying subtle deviations and correlating disparate signals. The evolving nature of Salt Typhoon’s tradecraft, and its ability to repurpose trusted software and infrastructure, ensures it will remain difficult to detect using conventional methods alone. This intrusion highlights the importance of proactive defense, where anomaly-based detections, not just signature matching, play a critical role in surfacing early-stage activity.

Credit to Nathaniel Jones (VP, Security & AI Strategy, FCISO), Sam Lister (Specialist Security Researcher), Emma Foulger (Global Threat Research Operations Lead), Adam Potter (Senior Cyber Analyst)

Edited by Ryan Traill (Analyst Content Lead)

Appendices

Indicators of Compromise (IoCs)

IoC-Type-Description + Confidence

89.31.121[.]101 – IP Address – Possible C2 server

hxxp://89.31.121[.]101:443/WINMM.dll - URI – Likely SNAPPYBEE download

b5367820cd32640a2d5e4c3a3c1ceedbbb715be2 - SHA1 – Likely SNAPPYBEE download

hxxp://89.31.121[.]101:443/NortonLog.txt - URI - Likely DLL side-loading activity

hxxp://89.31.121[.]101:443/123.txt - URI - Possible DLL side-loading activity

hxxp://89.31.121[.]101:443/123.tar - URI - Possible DLL side-loading activity

hxxp://89.31.121[.]101:443/pdc.exe - URI - Possible DLL side-loading activity

hxxp://89.31.121[.]101:443//Dialog.dat - URI - Possible DLL side-loading activity

hxxp://89.31.121[.]101:443/fltLib.dll - URI - Possible DLL side-loading activity

hxxp://89.31.121[.]101:443/DisplayDialog.exe - URI - Possible DLL side-loading activity

hxxp://89.31.121[.]101:443/DgApi.dll - URI - Likely DLL side-loading activity

hxxp://89.31.121[.]101:443/dbindex.dat - URI - Likely DLL side-loading activity

hxxp://89.31.121[.]101:443/1.txt - URI - Possible DLL side-loading activity

hxxp://89.31.121[.]101:443/imfsbDll.dll – Likely DLL side-loading activity

hxxp://89.31.121[.]101:443/imfsbSvc.exe - URI – Likely DLL side-loading activity

aar.gandhibludtric[.]com – Hostname – Likely C2 server

38.54.63[.]75 – IP – Likely C2 server

156.244.28[.]153 – IP – Possible C2 server

hxxp://156.244.28[.]153/17ABE7F017ABE7F0 - URI – Possible C2 activity

MITRE TTPs

Technique | Description

T1190 | Exploit Public-Facing Application - Citrix NetScaler Gateway compromise

T1105 | Ingress Tool Transfer – Delivery of backdoor to internal hosts

T1665 | Hide Infrastructure – Use of SoftEther VPN for C2

T1574.001 | Hijack Execution Flow: DLL – Execution of backdoor through DLL side-loading

T1095 | Non-Application Layer Protocol – Unidentified application-layer protocol for C2 traffic

T1071.001| Web Protocols – HTTP-based C2 traffic

T1571| Non-Standard Port – Port 443 for unencrypted HTTP traffic

Darktrace Model Alerts during intrusion

Anomalous File::Internal::Script from Rare Internal Location

Anomalous File::EXE from Rare External Location

Anomalous File::Multiple EXE from Rare External Locations

Anomalous Connection::Possible Callback URL

Antigena::Network::External Threat::Antigena Suspicious File Block

Antigena::Network::Significant Anomaly::Antigena Significant Server Anomaly Block

Antigena::Network::Significant Anomaly::Antigena Controlled and Model Alert

Antigena::Network::Significant Anomaly::Antigena Alerts Over Time Block

Antigena::Network::External Threat::Antigena File then New Outbound Block  

References

[1] https://www.cisa.gov/news-events/cybersecurity-advisories/aa25-239a

[2] https://www.trendmicro.com/en_gb/research/24/k/earth-estries.html

[3] https://www.trendmicro.com/content/dam/trendmicro/global/en/research/24/k/earth-estries/IOC_list-EarthEstries.txt

[4] https://www.trendmicro.com/en_gb/research/24/k/breaking-down-earth-estries-persistent-ttps-in-prolonged-cyber-o.html

[5] https://lab52.io/blog/deedrat-backdoor-enhanced-by-chinese-apts-with-advanced-capabilities/

[6] https://www.silentpush.com/blog/salt-typhoon-2025/

The content provided in this blog is published by Darktrace for general informational purposes only and reflects our understanding of cybersecurity topics, trends, incidents, and developments at the time of publication. While we strive to ensure accuracy and relevance, the information is provided “as is” without any representations or warranties, express or implied. Darktrace makes no guarantees regarding the completeness, accuracy, reliability, or timeliness of any information presented and expressly disclaims all warranties.

Nothing in this blog constitutes legal, technical, or professional advice, and readers should consult qualified professionals before acting on any information contained herein. Any references to third-party organizations, technologies, threat actors, or incidents are for informational purposes only and do not imply affiliation, endorsement, or recommendation.

Darktrace, its affiliates, employees, or agents shall not be held liable for any loss, damage, or harm arising from the use of or reliance on the information in this blog.

The cybersecurity landscape evolves rapidly, and blog content may become outdated or superseded. We reserve the right to update, modify, or remove any content.

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Nathaniel Jones
VP, Security & AI Strategy, Field CISO

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October 15, 2025

How a Major Civil Engineering Company Reduced MTTR across Network, Email and the Cloud with Darktrace

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Asking more of the information security team

“What more can we be doing to secure the company?” is a great question for any cyber professional to hear from their Board of Directors. After successfully defeating a series of attacks and seeing the potential for AI tools to supercharge incoming threats, a UK-based civil engineering company’s security team had the answer: Darktrace.

“When things are coming at you at machine speed, you need machine speed to fight it off – it’s as simple as that,” said their Information Security Manager. “There were incidents where it took us a few hours to get to the bottom of what was going on. Darktrace changed that.”

Prevention was also the best cure. A peer organization in the same sector was still in business continuity measures 18 months after an attack, and the security team did not want to risk that level of business disruption.

Legacy tools were not meeting the team’s desired speed or accuracy

The company’s native SaaS email platform took between two and 14 days to alert on suspicious emails, with another email security tool flagging malicious emails after up to 24 days. After receiving an alert, responses often took a couple of days to coordinate. The team was losing precious time.

Beyond long detection and response times, the old email security platform was no longer performing: 19% of incoming spam was missed. Of even more concern: 6% of phishing emails reached users’ inboxes, and malware and ransomware email was also still getting through, with 0.3% of such email-borne payloads reaching user inboxes.

Choosing Darktrace

“When evaluating tools in 2023, only Darktrace had what I was looking for: an existing, mature, AI-based cybersecurity solution. ChatGPT had just come out and a lot of companies were saying ‘AI this’ and ‘AI that’. Then you’d take a look, and it was all rules- and cases-based, not AI at all,” their Information Security Manager.

The team knew that, with AI-enabled attacks on the horizon, a cybersecurity company that had already built, fielded, and matured an AI-powered cyber defense would give the security team the ability to fend off machine-speed attacks at the same pace as the attackers.

Darktrace accomplishes this with multi-layered AI that learns each organization’s normal business operations. With this detailed level of understanding, Darktrace’s Self-Learning AI can recognize unusual activity that may indicate a cyber-attack, and works to neutralize the threat with precise response actions. And it does this all at machine speed and with minimal disruption.

On the morning the team was due to present its findings, the session was cancelled – for a good reason. The Board didn’t feel further discussion was necessary because the case for Darktrace was so conclusive. The CEO described the Darktrace option as ‘an insurance policy we can’t do without’.

Saving time with Darktrace / EMAIL

Darktrace / EMAIL reduced the discovery, alert, and response process from days or weeks to seconds .

Darktrace / EMAIL automates what was originally a time-consuming and repetitive process. The team has recovered between eight and 10 working hours a week by automating much of this process using / EMAIL.

Today, Darktrace / EMAIL prevents phishing emails from reaching employees’ inboxes. The volume of hostile and unsolicited email fell to a third of its original level after Darktrace / EMAIL was set up.

Further savings with Darktrace / NETWORK and Darktrace / IDENTITY

Since its success with Darktrace / EMAIL, the company adopted two more products from the Darktrace ActiveAI Security Platform – Darktrace / NETWORK and Darktrace / IDENTITY.

These have further contributed to cost savings. An initial plan to build a 24/7 SOC would have required hiring and retaining six additional analysts, rather than the two that currently use Darktrace, costing an additional £220,000 per year in salary. With Darktrace, the existing analysts have the tools needed to become more effective and impactful.

An additional benefit: Darktrace adoption has lowered the company’s cyber insurance premiums. The security team can reallocate this budget to proactive projects.

Detection of novel threats provides reassurance

Darktrace’s unique approach to cybersecurity added a key benefit. The team’s previous tool took a rules-based approach – which was only good if the next attack featured the same characteristics as the ones on which the tool was trained.

“Darktrace looks for anomalous behavior, and we needed something that detected and responded based on use cases, not rules that might be out of date or too prescriptive,” their Information Security Manager. “Our existing provider could take a couple of days to update rules and signatures, and in this game, speed is of the essence. Darktrace just does everything we need - without delay.”

Where rules-based tools must wait for a threat to emerge before beginning to detect and respond to it, Darktrace identifies and protects against unknown and novel threats, speeding identification, response, and recovery, minimizing business disruption as a result.

Looking to the future

With Darktrace in place, the UK-based civil engineering company team has reallocated time and resources usually spent on detection and alerting to now tackle more sophisticated, strategic challenges. Darktrace has also equipped the team with far better and more regularly updated visibility into potential vulnerabilities.

“One thing that frustrates me a little is penetration testing; our ISO accreditation mandates a penetration test at least once a year, but the results could be out of date the next day,” their Information Security Manager. “Darktrace / Proactive Exposure Management will give me that view in real time – we can run it daily if needed - and that’s going to be a really effective workbench for my team.”

As the company looks to further develop its security posture, Darktrace remains poised to evolve alongside its partner.

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