Darktrace continues to innovate with Microsoft in the shared mission to deliver proactive cyber protection tailored to every organization. Joint customers benefit from two distinct, complementary security approaches – combining large scale threat intelligence with enterprise-native security insights – to address the full range of email threats.
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
Francesca Bowen
Global VP, Strategic Alliances
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27
Jun 2024
Darktrace has been named as Microsoft UK Partner of the Year for 2024! The Microsoft Partner Awards recognize winners for their commitment to customers, impact of solutions, and exemplary use of Microsoft technologies.
Whilst the award was granted based on our innovations combining Darktrace/Email and Microsoft Defender for Office 365, our shared values go beyond technology. Darktrace stood out for the integration of our products to deliver exceptional security value to customers, as well as our investment in partnerships, marketplace and go to market. Microsoft was also impressed with our strong commitment to diversity and inclusion and our broader contribution to both the UK economy and the UK tech sector.
Microsoft Defender for Office 365 + Darktrace/Email leave attackers nowhere to hide
The email threat landscape is constantly evolving. Attacks are becoming more sophisticated, more targeted and increasing in multi-stage payload attacks. Across the Darktrace customer base in 2023 alone, we have seen a 135% increase in ‘novel social engineering attacks’, corresponding with the rise of ChatGPT, 45% of phishing emails were identified as spear phishing attempts and a 59% increase in multi-stage payload attacks.
Legacy defenses were built to address a high volume of unsophisticated attacks, but generative AI has shifted the threats towards lower quantity yet very sophisticated, high impact targeted attacks. Microsoft Defender for Office 365’s rapid innovation has outpaced the Secure Email Gateway’s rule and signature based historical data approach. Customers no longer need email gateways which duplicate workflows and add expense native to their Defender for O365 solution.
Point email solutions overlap with Microsoft in 3 key areas: detection approach, workflows, capabilities
Detection - Microsoft receives trillions threat signals daily, giving customers the broadest scope of the attack landscape. Darktrace combined with Microsoft unites business and attack centric approaches
Workflows – any Microsoft configurations are reflected automatically in Darktrace/Email. Users can keep daily workflow in Microsoft, while a traditional SEG requires duplicated workflows
Capabilities – Microsoft handles foundational elements like archiving/encryption/signature matching while Darktrace handles advanced threat security
Darktrace/Email is built to elevate, not duplicate, Microsoft email security – removing the burden of operating legacy point solutions and blocking 25% more threats. Robust account takeover protections to stop the 38% of sophisticated threats other tools miss. Customers can seamlessly correlate activity and insights across Microsoft email, DMARC and Teams to stop threats on average 13 days earlier.
Azure Marketplace
Microsoft Azure customers can access Darktrace in the Azure Marketplace to take advantage of the scalability, reliability, and agility of Azure to drive rapid IT operations and security integrations across the enterprise. Customers can leverage their Microsoft Azure Consumption Commitments (MACC), making procurement simple. As UK Partner of the Year winner, customers know they have a trusted partner with Darktrace and a proven solution to work seamlessly with Azure.
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.
Why Organizations are Moving to Label-free, Behavioral DLP for Outbound Email
Modern data loss doesn’t always look like a regex match. It can look like everyday communication slightly out of context. Here’s how a domain specific language model paired with behavioral learning protects labeled and unlabeled data without slowing business down.
Beyond MFA: Detecting Adversary-in-the-Middle Attacks and Phishing with Darktrace
During a customer trial of Darktrace / EMAIL and Darktrace / IDENTITY, Darktrace detected an adversary-in-the-middle (AiTM) attack that compromised a user’s Office 365 account via a business email compromise (BEC) phishing email. Following the breach, the compromised account was used to launch both internal and external phishing campaigns.
How Darktrace is ending email security silos with new capabilities in cross-domain detection, DLP, and native Microsoft integrations
Darktrace is delivering a major evolution in email security, uniting true AI-powered cross-domain detection, label-free behavioral DLP, and Microsoft-native automation – to catch the 17% of threats that SEGs miss.
NetSupport RAT: How Legitimate Tools Can Be as Damaging as Malware
What is NetSupport Manager?
NetSupport Manager is a legitimate IT tool used by system administrators for remote support, monitoring, and management. In use since 1989, NetSupport Manager enables users to remotely access and navigate systems across different platforms and operating systems [1].
What is NetSupport RAT?
Although NetSupport Manager is a legitimate tool that can be used by IT and security professionals, there has been a rising number of cases in which it is abused to gain unauthorized access to victim systems. This misuse has become so prevalent that, in recent years, security researchers have begun referring to NetSupport as a Remote Access Trojan (RAT), a term typically used for malware that enables a threat actor to remotely access or control an infected device [2][3][4].
NetSupport RAT activity summary
The initial stages of NetSupport RAT infection may vary depending on the source of the initial compromise. Using tactics such as the social engineering tactic ClickFix, threat actors attempt to trick users into inadvertently executing malicious PowerShell commands under the guise of resolving a non-existent issue or completing a fake CAPTCHA verification [5]. Other attack vectors such as phishing emails, fake browser updates, malicious websites, search engine optimization (SEO) poisoning, malvertising and drive-by downloads are also employed to direct users to fraudulent pages and fake reCAPTCHA verification checks, ultimately inducing them to execute malicious PowerShell commands [5][6][7]. This leads to the successful installation of NetSupport Manager on the compromised device, which is often placed in non-standard directories such as AppData, ProgramData, or Downloads [3][8].
Once installed, the adversary is able to gain remote access to the affected machine, monitor user activity, exfiltrate data, communicate with the command-and-control (C2) server, and maintain persistence [5]. External research has also highlighted that post-exploitation of NetSupport RAT has involved the additional download of malicious payloads [2][5].
Figure 1: Attack flow diagram highlighting key events across each phase of the attack phase [2][5].
Darktrace coverage
In November of 2025, suspicious behavior indicative of the malicious abuse of NetSupport Manager was observed on multiple customers across Europe, the Middle East, and Africa (EMEA) and the Americas (AMS).
While open-source intelligence (OSINT) has reported that, in a recent campaign, a threat actor impersonated government entities to trick users in organizations in the InformationTechnology, Government and FinancialServices sectors in CentralAsia into downloading NetSupport Manager [8], approximately a third of Darktrace’s affected customers in November were based in the US while the rest were based in EMEA. This contrast underscores how widely NetSupport Manager is leveraged by threat actors and highlights its accessibility as an initial access tool.
The Darktrace customers affected were in sectors including Information andCommunication, Manufacturing and Arts, entertainment and recreation.
The ClickFix social engineering tactic typically used to distribute the NetSupport RAT is known to target multiple industries, including Technology, Manufacturing and Energy sectors [9]. It also reflects activity observed in the campaign targeting Central Asia, where the Information Technology sector was among those affected [8].
The prevalence of affected Education customers highlights NetSupport’s marketing focus on the Education sector [10]. This suggests that threat actors are also aware of this marketing strategy and have exploited the trust it creates to deploy NetSupport Manager and gain access to their targets’ systems. While the execution of the PowerShell commands that led to the installation of NetSupport Manager falls outside of Darktrace's purview in cases identified, Darktrace was still able to identify a pattern of devices making connections to multiple rare external domains and IP addresses associated with the NetSupport RAT, using a wide range of ports over the HTTP protocol. A full list of associated domains and IP addresses is provided in the Appendices of this blog.
Although OSINT identifies multiple malicious domains and IP addresses as used as C2 servers, signature-based detections of NetSupport RAT indicators of compromise (IoCs) may miss broader activity, as new malicious websites linked to the RAT continue to appear.
Darktrace’s anomaly‑based approach allows it to establish a normal ‘pattern of life’ for each device on a network and identify when behavior deviates from this baseline, enabling the detection of unusual activity even when it does not match known IoCs or tactics, techniques and procedures (TTPs).
In one customer environment in late 2025, Darktrace / NETWORK detected a device initiating new connections to the rare external endpoint, thetavaluemetrics[.]com (74.91.125[.]57), along with the use of a previously unseen user agent, which it recognized as highly unusual for the network.
Figure 2: Darktrace’s detection of HTTP POST requests to a suspicious URI and new user agent usage.
Darktrace identified that user agent present in connections to this endpoint was the ‘NetSupport Manager/1.3’, initially suggesting legitimate NetSupport Manager activity. Subsequent investigation, however, revealed that the endpoint was in fact a malicious NetSupportRAT C2 endpoint [12]. Shortly after, Darktrace detected the same device performing HTTP POST requests to the URI fakeurl[.]htm. This pattern of activity is consistent with OSINT reporting that details communication between compromised devices and NetSupport Connectivity Gateways functioning as C2 servers [11].
Conclusion
As seen not only with NetSupport Manager but with any legitimate or open‑source software used by IT and security professionals, the legitimacy of a tool does not prevent it from being abused by threat actors. Open‑source software, especially tools with free or trial versions such as NetSupport Manager, remains readily accessible for malicious use, including network compromise. In an age where remote work is still prevalent, validating any anomalous use of software and remote management tools is essential to reducing opportunities for unauthorized access.
Darktrace’s anomaly‑based detection enables security teams to identify malicious use of legitimate tools, even when clear signatures or indicators of compromise are absent, helping to prevent further impact on a network.
Credit to George Kim (Analyst Consulting Lead – AMS), Anna Gilbertson (Senior Cyber Analyst)
Edited by Ryan Traill (Analyst Content Lead)
Appendices
Darktrace Model Alerts
· Compromise / Suspicious HTTP and Anomalous Activity
· Compromise / New User Agent and POST
· Device / New User Agent
· Anomalous Connection / New User Agent to IP Without Hostname
· Anomalous Connection / Posting HTTP to IP Without Hostname
· Anomalous Connection / Multiple Failed Connections to Rare Endpoint
· Anomalous Connection / Application Protocol on Uncommon Port
· Anomalous Connection / Multiple HTTP POSTs to Rare Hostname
· Compromise / Beaconing Activity To External Rare
· Compromise / HTTP Beaconing to Rare Destination
· Compromise / Agent Beacon (Medium Period)
· Compromise / Agent Beacon (Long Period)
· Compromise / Quick and Regular Windows HTTP Beaconing
· Compromise / Sustained TCP Beaconing Activity To Rare Endpoint
Investigating cloud attacks with Darktrace/ Forensic Acquisition & Investigation
Darktrace / Forensic Acquisition & Investigation™ is the industry’s first truly automated forensic solution purpose-built for the cloud. This blog will demonstrate how an investigation can be carried out against a compromised cloud server in minutes, rather than hours or days.
The compromised server investigated in this case originates from Darktrace’s Cloudypots system, a global honeypot network designed to observe adversary activity in real time across a wide range of cloud services. Whenever an attacker successfully compromises one of these honeypots, a forensic copy of the virtual server's disk is preserved for later analysis. Using Forensic Acquisition & Investigation, analysts can then investigate further and obtain detailed insights into the compromise including complete attacker timelines and root cause analysis.
Forensic Acquisition & Investigation supports importing artifacts from a variety of sources, including EC2 instances, ECS, S3 buckets, and more. The Cloudypots system produces a raw disk image whenever an attack is detected and stores it in an S3 bucket. This allows the image to be directly imported into Forensic Acquisition & Investigation using the S3 bucket import option.
As Forensic Acquisition & Investigation runs cloud-natively, no additional configuration is required to add a specific S3 bucket. Analysts can browse and acquire forensic assets from any bucket that the configured IAM role is permitted to access. Operators can also add additional IAM credentials, including those from other cloud providers, to extend access across multiple cloud accounts and environments.
Forensic Acquisition & Investigation then retrieves a copy of the file and automatically begins running the analysis pipeline on the artifact. This pipeline performs a full forensic analysis of the disk and builds a timeline of the activity that took place on the compromised asset. By leveraging Forensic Acquisition & Investigation’s cloud-native analysis system, this process condenses hour of manual work into just minutes.
Figure 2: Successful import of a forensic artifact and initiation of the analysis pipeline.
Once processing is complete, the preserved artifact is visible in the Evidence tab, along with a summary of key information obtained during analysis, such as the compromised asset’s hostname, operating system, cloud provider, and key event count.
Figure 3: The Evidence overview showing the acquired disk image.
Clicking on the “Key events” field in the listing opens the timeline view, automatically filtered to show system- generated alarms.
The timeline provides a chronological record of every event that occurred on the system, derived from multiple sources, including:
Parsed log files such as the systemd journal, audit logs, application specific logs, and others.
Parsed history files such as .bash_history, allowing executed commands to be shown on the timeline.
File-specific events, such as files being created, accessed, modified, or executables being run, etc.
This approach allows timestamped information and events from multiple sources to be aggregated and parsed into a single, concise view, greatly simplifying the data review process.
Alarms are created for specific timeline events that match either a built-in system rule, curated by Darktrace’s Threat Research team or an operator-defined rule created at the project level. These alarms help quickly filter out noise and highlight on events of interest, such as the creation of a file containing known malware, access to sensitive files like Amazon Web Service (AWS) credentials, suspicious arguments or commands, and more.
Figure 4: The timeline view filtered to alarm_severity: “1” OR alarm_severity: “3”, showing only events that matched an alarm rule.
In this case, several alarms were generated for suspicious Base64 arguments being passed to Selenium. Examining the event data, it appears the attacker spawned a Selenium Grid session with the following payload:
This is a common attack vector for Selenium Grid. The chromeOptions object is intended to specify arguments for how Google Chrome should be launched; however, in this case the attacker has abused the binary field to execute the Python3 binary instead of Chrome. Combined with the option to specify command-line arguments, the attacker can use Python3’s -c option to execute arbitrary Python code, in this instance, decoding and executing a Base64 payload.
Selenium’s logs truncate the Arguments field automatically, so an alternate method is required to retrieve the full payload. To do this, the search bar can be used to find all events that occurred around the same time as this flagged event.
Figure 5: Pivoting off the previous event by filtering the timeline to events within the same window using timestamp: [“2026-02-18T09:09:00Z” TO “2026-02-18T09:12:00Z”].
Scrolling through the search results, an entry from Java’s systemd journal can be identified. This log contains the full, unaltered payload. GCHQ’s CyberChef can then be used to decode the Base64 data into the attacker’s script, which will ultimately be executed.
Figure 6: Decoding the attacker’s payload in CyberChef.
In this instance, the malware was identified as a variant of a campaign that has been previously documented in depth by Darktrace.
Investigating Perfctl Malware
This campaign deploys a malware sample known as ‘perfctl to the compromised host. The script executed by the attacker downloads a Go binary named “promocioni.php” from 200[.]4.115.1. Its functionality is consistent with previously documented perfctl samples, with only minor changes such as updated filenames and a new command-and-control (C2) domain.
Perfctl is a stealthy malware that has several systems designed to evade detection. The main binary is packed with UPX, with the header intentionally tampered with to prevent unpacking using regular tools. The binary also avoids executing any malicious code if it detects debugging or tracing activity, or if artifacts left by earlier stages are missing.
To further aid its evasive capabilities, perfctl features a usermode rootkit using an LD preload. This causes dynamically linked executables to load perfctl’s rootkit payload before other system modules, allowing it to override functions, such as intercepting calls to list files and hiding output from the returned list. Perfctl uses this to hide its own files, as well as other files like the ld.so.preload file, preventing users from identifying that a rootkit is present in the first place.
This also makes it difficult to dynamically analyze, as even analysts aware of the rootkit will struggle to get around it due to its aggressiveness in hiding its components. A useful trick is to use the busybox-static utilities, which are statically linked and therefore immune to LD preloading.
Perfctl will attempt to use sudo to escalate its permissions to root if the user it was executed as has the required privileges. Failing this, it will attempt to exploit the vulnerability CVE-2021-4034.
Ultimately, perfctl will attempt to establish a C2 link via Tor and spawn an XMRig miner to mine the Monero cryptocurrency. The traffic to the mining pool is encapsulated within Tor to limit network detection of the mining traffic.
Darktrace’s Cloudypots system has observed 1,959 infections of the perfctl campaign across its honeypot network in the past year, making it one of the most aggressive campaigns seen by Darktrace.
Key takeaways
This blog has shown how Darktrace / Forensic Acquisition & Investigation equips defenders in the face of a real-world attacker campaign. By using this solution, organizations can acquire forensic evidence and investigate intrusions across multiple cloud resources and providers, enabling defenders to see the full picture of an intrusion on day one. Forensic Acquisition & Investigation’s patented data-processing system takes advantage of the cloud’s scale to rapidly process large amounts of data, allowing triage to take minutes, not hours.
Darktrace / Forensic Acquisition & Investigation is available as Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) but can also be deployed on-premises as a virtual application or natively in the cloud, providing flexibility between convenience and data sovereignty to suit any use case.
Support for acquiring traditional compute instances like EC2, as well as more exotic and newly targeted platforms such as ECS and Lambda, ensures that attacks taking advantage of Living-off-the-Cloud (LOTC) strategies can be triaged quickly and easily as part of incident response. As attackers continue to develop new techniques, the ability to investigate how they use cloud services to persist and pivot throughout an environment is just as important to triage as a single compromised EC2 instance.
Credit to Nathaniel Bill (Malware Research Engineer)
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