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March 11, 2020

How Darktrace Antigena Email Caught A Fearware Email Attack

Darktrace effectively detects and neutralizes fearware attacks evading gateway security tools. Learn more about how Antigena Email outsmarts cyber-criminals.
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
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11
Mar 2020

The cyber-criminals behind email attacks are well-researched and highly responsive to human behaviors and emotions, often seeking to evoke a specific reaction by leveraging topical information and current news. It’s therefore no surprise that attackers have attempted to latch onto COVID-19 in their latest effort to convince users to open their emails and click on seemingly benign links.

The latest email trend involves attackers who claim to be from the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, purporting to have emergency information about COVID-19. This is typical of a recent trend we’re calling ‘fearware’: cyber-criminals exploit a collective sense of fear and urgency, and coax users into clicking a malicious attachment or link. While the tactic is common, the actual campaigns contain terms and content that’s unique. There are a few patterns in the emails we’ve seen, but none reliably predictable enough to create hard and fast rules that will stop emails with new wording without causing false positives.

For example, looking for the presence of “CDC” in the email sender would easily fail when the emails begin to use new wording, like “WHO”. We’ve also seen a mismatch of links and their display text – with display text that reads “https://cdc.gov/[random-path]” while the actual link is a completely arbitrary URL. Looking for a pattern match on this would likely lead to false positives and would serve as a weak indicator at best.

The majority of these emails, especially the early ones, passed most of our customers’ existing defenses including Mimecast, Proofpoint, and Microsoft’s ATP, and were approved to be delivered directly to the end user’s inbox. Fortunately, these emails were immediately identified and actioned by Antigena Email, Darktrace’s Autonomous Response technology for the inbox.

Gateways: The Current Approach

Most organizations employ Secure Email Gateways (SEGs), like Mimecast or Proofpoint, which serve as an inline middleman between the email sender and the recipient’s email provider. SEGs have largely just become spam-detection engines, as these emails are obvious to spot when seen at scale. They can identify low-hanging fruit (i.e. emails easily detectable as malicious), but they fail to detect and respond when attacks become personalized or deviate even slightly from previously-seen attacks.

Figure 1: A high-level diagram depicting an Email Secure Gateway’s inline position.

SEGs tend to use lists of ‘known-bad’ IPs, domains, and file hashes to determine an email’s threat level – inherently failing to stop novel attacks when they use IPs, domains, or files which are new and have not yet been triaged or reported as malicious.

When advanced detection methods are used in gateway technologies, such as anomaly detection or machine learning, these are performed after the emails have been delivered, and require significant volumes of near-identical emails to trigger. The end result is very often to take an element from one of these emails and simply deny-list it.

When a SEG can’t make the determination on these factors, they may resort to a technique known as sandboxing, which creates an isolated environment for testing links and attachments seen in emails. Alternatively, they may turn to basic levels of anomaly detection that are inadequate due to their lack of context of data outside of emails. For sandboxing, most advanced threats now typically employ evasion techniques like an activation time that waits until a certain date before executing. When deployed, the sandboxing attempts see a harmless file, not recognizing the sleeping attack waiting within.

Figure 2: This email was registered only 2 hours prior to an email we processed.

Taking a sample COVID-19 email seen in a Darktrace customer’s environment, we saw a mix of domains used in what appears to be an attempt to avoid pattern detection. It would be improbable to have the domains used on a list of ‘known-bad’ domains anywhere at the time of the first email, as it was received a mere two hours after the domain was registered.

Figure 3: While other defenses failed to block these emails, Antigena Email immediately marked them as 100% unusual and held them back from delivery.

Antigena Email sits behind all other defenses, meaning we only see emails when those defenses fail to block a malicious email or deem an email is safe for delivery. In the above COVID-19 case, the first 5 emails were marked by MS ATP with a spam confidence score of 1, indicating Microsoft scanned the email and it was determined to be clean – so Microsoft took no action whatsoever.

The Cat and Mouse Game

Cyber-criminals are permanently in flux, quickly moving to outsmart security teams and bypass current defenses. Recognizing email as the easiest entry point into an organization, they are capitalizing on the inadequate detection of existing tools by mass-producing personalized emails through factory-style systems that machine-research, draft, and send with minimal human interaction.

Domains are cheap, proxies are cheap, and morphing files slightly to change the entire fingerprint of a file is easy – rendering any list of ‘known-bads’ as outdated within seconds.

Cyber AI: The New Approach

A new approach is required that relies on business context and an inside-out understanding of a corporation, rather than analyzing emails in isolation.

An Immune System Approach

Darktrace’s core technology uses AI to detect unusual patterns of behavior in the enterprise. The AI is able to do this successfully by following the human immune system’s core principles: develop an innate sense of ‘self’, and use that understanding to detect abnormal activity indicative of a threat.

In order to identify threats across the entire enterprise, the AI is able to understand normal patterns of behavior beyond just the network. This is crucial when working towards a goal of full business understanding. There’s a clear connection between activity in, for example, a SaaS application and a corresponding network event, or an event in the cloud and a corresponding event elsewhere within the business.

There’s an explicit relationship between what people do on their computers and the emails they send and receive. Having the context that a user has just visited a website before they receive an email from the same domain lends credibility to that email: it’s very common to visit a website, subscribe to a mailing list, and then receive an email within a few minutes. On the contrary, receiving an email from a brand-new sender, containing a link that nobody in the organization has ever been to, lends support to the fact that the link is likely no good and that perhaps the email should be removed from the user’s inbox.

Enterprise-Wide Context

Darktrace’s Antigena Email extends this interplay of data sources to the inbox, providing unique detection capabilities by leveraging full business context to inform email decisions.

The design of Antigena Email provides a fundamental shift in email security – from where the tool sits to how it understands and processes data. Unlike SEGs, which sit inline and process emails only as they first pass through and never again, Antigena Email sits passively, ingesting data that is journaled to it. The technology doesn’t need to wait until a domain is fingerprinted or sandboxed, or until it is associated with a campaign that has a famous name and all the buzz.

Antigena Email extends its unique position of not sitting inline to email re-assessment, processing emails millions of times instead of just once, enabling actions to be taken well after delivery. A seemingly benign email with popular links may become more interesting over time if there’s an event within the enterprise that was determined to have originated via an email, perhaps when a trusted site becomes compromised. While Antigena Network will mitigate the new threat on the network, Antigena Email will neutralize the emails that contain links associated with those found in the original email.

Figure 4: Antigena Email sits passively off email providers, continuously re-assessing and issuing updated actions as new data is introduced.

When an email first arrives, Antigena Email extracts its raw metadata, processes it multiple times at machine speed, and then many millions of times subsequently as new evidence is introduced (typically based on events seen throughout the business). The system corroborates what it is seeing with what it has previously understood to be normal throughout the corporate environment. For example, when domains are extracted from envelope information or links in the email body, they’re compared against the popularity of the domain on the company’s network.

Figure 5: The link above was determined to be 100% rare for the enterprise.

Dissecting the above COVID-19 linked email, we can extract some of the data made available in the Antigena Email user interface to see why Darktrace thought the email was so unusual. The domain in the ‘From’ address is rare, which is supplemental contextual information derived from data across the customer’s entire digital environment, not limited to just email but including network data as well. The emails’ KCE, KCD, and RCE indicate that it was the first time the sender had been seen in any email: there had been no correspondence with the sender in any way, and the email address had never been seen in the body of any email.

Figure 6: KCE, KCD, and RCE scores indicate no sender history with the organization.

Correlating the above, Antigena Email deemed these emails 100% anomalous to the business and immediately removed them from the recipients’ inboxes. The platform did this for the very first email, and every email thereafter – not a single COVID-19-based email got by Antigena Email.

Conclusion

Cyber AI does not distinguish ‘good’ from ‘bad’; rather whether an event is likely to belong or not. The technology looks only to compare data with the learnt patterns of activity in the environment, incorporating the new email (alongside its own scoring of the email) into its understanding of day-to-day context for the organization.

By asking questions like “Does this email appear to belong?” or “Is there an existing relationship between the sender and recipient?”, the AI can accurately discern the threat posed by a given email, and incorporate these findings into future modelling. A model cannot be trained to think just because the corporation received a higher volume of emails from a specific sender, these emails are all of a sudden considered normal for the environment. By weighing human interaction with the emails or domains to make decisions on math-modeling reincorporation, Cyber AI avoids this assumption, unless there’s legitimate correspondence from within the corporation back out to the sender.

The inbox has traditionally been the easiest point of entry into an organization. But the fundamental differences in approach offered by Cyber AI drastically increase Antigena Email’s detection capability when compared with gateway tools. Customers with and without email gateways in place have therefore seen a noticeable curbing of their email problem. In the continuous cat-and-mouse game with their adversaries, security teams augmenting their defenses with Cyber AI are finally regaining the advantage.

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

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July 17, 2025

Introducing the AI Maturity Model for Cybersecurity

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AI adoption in cybersecurity: Beyond the hype

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

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

Overview of AI maturity levels in cybersecurity

Why a maturity model? And why now?

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

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

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

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

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

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How is maturity assessed in this model?

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

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

Why Darktrace?

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

Security teams today are asking big, important questions:

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

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

The structure: From experimentation to autonomy

The model outlines five levels of maturity :

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

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

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

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

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

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

Strategic benefits for security leaders

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

SOC fatigue is real, and AI can help

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

GenAI is error prone, requiring strong human oversight

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

AI’s real value lies in progression

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

Trust and oversight are key initially but evolves in later levels

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

People’s roles shift meaningfully

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

Outcome, not hype, defines maturity

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

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Outcomes across the AI Security Maturity Model

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

L0 – Manual Operations

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

L1 – Automation Rules

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

L2 – AI Assistance

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

L3 – AI Collaboration

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

L4 – AI Delegation

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

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

Join the webinar

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

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July 17, 2025

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

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

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

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

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

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

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1. Depth of data

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

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

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

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

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

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

2. Chain of custody

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

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

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

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

3. Automated collection and isolation

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

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

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

4. Ease of use

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

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

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

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

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

5. Incident preparedness

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

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

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

Cloud forensics with Darktrace

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

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

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