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April 8, 2025

Cloud Security Evolution: Why Security Teams are Taking the Lead

While many internal teams contribute to general cloud hygiene, the security team has increasingly taken the lead on cloud security. Learn how AI-powered cloud detection and response tools can help these teams with new responsibilities.
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
Pallavi Singh
Product Marketing Manager, OT Security & Compliance
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08
Apr 2025

Cloud adoption is rapidly on the rise. Gartner estimates that 90% of organizations will adopt hybrid clouds through 2027 [1].  

There are many reasons why organizations are migrating on-premises infrastructure to the cloud. It can increase the speed and scale of computing resources, improve reliability and resilience, and save time by outsourcing the spinning up, patching, and updating of infrastructure.  

However, despite these benefits, it is complex to secure. Public clouds operate with a shared responsibility model, meaning that while the Cloud Service Provider (CSP) maintains the physical infrastructure and services, customer organizations are responsible for their own security and compliance in their cloud deployments.  

This customer responsibility is crucial. Gartner forecasted that through 2025, 99% of cloud security failures would be the customer’s fault [2]. As cloud environments grow, security teams are taking on a greater share of the responsibility to protect these assets.

The many teams involved in cloud security

Several teams work across the cloud, and all of them can contribute to cloud security. For example, basic cyber-hygiene and Identity and Access Management (IAM) should be practiced across teams.  

Not every organization has the same categorization of teams, but some common ones include:

  • Security: assessing and mitigating vulnerabilities, risks, and threats. This team must be ready to identify, investigate, respond, and recover from incidents.
  • Infrastructure and ITOps: deploying and maintaining resources. Security must be considered across all layers of the cloud, including gateways, identity, encryption, and attack surface.
  • Research & development: building cloud-based applications. Security must be baked into code, referenced data, access, APIs, and third-party integrations.
  • DevOps: improving the software development process. Security must be applied to code across the development and production stages.
  • Compliance: adhering to industry standards and frameworks. Security often comes up in compliance regulations.  
  • End users: working in the cloud. Security must be taught through employee training sessions to adopt best practices and increase resistance against threats like phishing or data loss.

Traditionally, many organizations left cloud security to dedicated cloud teams. However, it is becoming more and more common for security teams to take on the responsibilities of securing the cloud. This is also true of organizations undergoing cloud migration and spinning up cloud infrastructure for the first time.

The complexity of cloud security

Most organizations using the cloud today have hybrid and/or multi-cloud deployments. Hybrid deployments combine public and private cloud environments and multi-cloud deployments use a combination of public cloud providers or regions where servers are stored. In fact, Deloitte reports that as many as 85% of businesses, a vast majority, use two or more cloud platforms, and 25% use at least five [3].

While these diverse deployments can boost resiliency, they also complicate security. Multiple environments increase the attack surface and reduce architectural visibility, making misconfigurations, unmanaged access, and inconsistent policies more likely. This complexity creates gaps in security that often require specialized teams and expert personnel to address.  

Challenges driving security teams’ responsibility

The usual approaches to other types of cybersecurity can’t be applied the exact same way to the cloud. With the inherent dynamism and flexibility of the cloud, the necessary security mindset differs greatly from those for networks or data centers, with which security teams may be more familiar.

For example, IAM is both critical and distinct to cloud computing, and the associated policies, rules, and downstream impacts require intentional care. IAM rules not only govern people, but also non-human entities like service accounts, API keys, and OAuth tokens. These considerations are unique to cloud security, and established teams may need to learn new skills to reduce security gaps in the cloud.

Additionally, there are greater compliance pressures from GDPR, CCPA, and industry-specific regulations. While some companies have dedicated compliance teams, not every organization does and others are not always familiar with working in cloud environments. In these cases, responsibilities may fall to the security team.  

Finally, there has been a rise in sophisticated, cloud-based threats, such as account takeovers and misconfigurations. Preparing, responding to, and recovering from these cloud-specific threats lie with the security team as well.  

Learn more about the top risks and attacks faced in the cloud in the white paper: “Tackling the 11 Biggest Cloud Threats with AI-Powered Defense.

Solutions empowering security teams

The leading role of security teams in cloud security can put a strain on existing resources as well as exacerbate skills gaps. In response, security teams can turn to AI-powered tools like Darktrace / CLOUD to provide real-time detection and response in cloud environments.  

Darktrace uses multi-layered AI to learn normal ‘patterns of life’ for all users, technologies, and resources across the organization, enabling it to recognize the subtlest anomalies that point to an emerging threat.  

The use of AI allows for automation that reduces manual workloads and saves teams time. The self-learning capabilities also help the human team detect subtle indicators that can be hard to spot amid the immense noise of legitimate, day-to-day digital interactions.

With these, Darktrace can respond to both known and novel threats, helping security teams keep pace with today’s sophisticated threats, even if team members feel less confident in cloud environments.  

Crucially, Darktrace / CLOUD can enable proactive risk management as well. Attack Path Modeling for the cloud identifies exposed assets and highlights internal attack paths to give a dynamic view of the riskiest paths across cloud environments, network environments, and between – enabling security teams to prioritize based on unique business risk and address gaps to prevent future attacks.  

Darktrace / CLOUD dynamically adjusts its focus based on evolving risks, analyzing misconfigurations, and anomalous activity to prevent potential attacks. Its Entitlement Enumeration capability helps security teams gain visibility into all identities, roles, and permissions, allowing dynamic adjustments to stop insider threats and lateral movement.

In these ways, the AI-powered Darktrace / CLOUD can support security teams as they take on the lion’s share of responsibility in securing the cloud, regardless of any resource limitations or skills gaps.

Conclusion

Cloud security is both vital under the shared responsibility model and complex with hybrid and multi-cloud deployments and strict regulatory demands. While many teams contribute to cloud security, more and more responsibilities are shifting to security teams specifically.

AI-powered solutions that can detect and respond to threats spanning a wide range of risks and attack types can support security teams as they protect dynamic cloud environments. By adopting real-time cloud detection and response tools, security teams have more time to dedicate to proactive projects and high-level tasks as well as reduced burden on less specialized team members.  

Discover how advanced AI solutions like Darktrace / CLOUD can address evolving cloud security needs in the solution brief.  

Read more about the latest trends in cloud security in the blog “Protecting Your Hybrid Cloud: The Future of Cloud Security in 2025 and Beyond.”

References:

1. Gartner, November 19, 2024, “Cloud End-User Spending to Total $723 Billion in 2025”  

2. Gartner, October 10, 2019, “Is the Cloud Secure?

3. Deloitte, December 6, 2022, “Above the clouds: Taming multicloud chaos”  

Protect Your Hybrid Cloud

Discover how advanced AI solutions like Darktrace / CLOUD can address evolving cloud security needs in this solution brief

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
Pallavi Singh
Product Marketing Manager, OT Security & Compliance

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April 24, 2025

The Importance of NDR in Resilient XDR

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As threat actors become more adept at targeting and disabling EDR agents, relying solely on endpoint detection leaves critical blind spots.

Network detection and response (NDR) offers the visibility and resilience needed to catch what EDR can’t especially in environments with unmanaged devices or advanced threats that evade local controls.

This blog explores how threat actors can disable or bypass EDR-based XDR solutions and demonstrates how Darktrace’s approach to NDR closes the resulting security gaps with Self-Learning AI that enables autonomous, real-time detection and response.

Threat actors see local security agents as targets

Recent research by security firms has highlighted ‘EDR killers’: tools that deliberately target EDR agents to disable or damage them. These include the known malicious tool EDRKillShifter, the open source EDRSilencer, EDRSandblast and variants of Terminator, and even the legitimate business application HRSword.

The attack surface of any endpoint agent is inevitably large, whether the software is challenged directly, by contesting its local visibility and access mechanisms, or by targeting the Operating System it relies upon. Additionally, threat actors can readily access and analyze EDR tools, and due to their uniformity across environments an exploit proven in a lab setting will likely succeed elsewhere.

Sophos have performed deep research into the EDRShiftKiller tool, which ESET have separately shown became accessible to multiple threat actor groups. Cisco Talos have reported via TheRegister observing significant success rates when an EDR kill was attempted by ransomware actors.

With the local EDR agent silently disabled or evaded, how will the threat be discovered?

What are the limitations of relying solely on EDR?

Cyber attackers will inevitably break through boundary defences, through innovation or trickery or exploiting zero-days. Preventive measures can reduce but not completely stop this. The attackers will always then want to expand beyond their initial access point to achieve persistence and discover and reach high value targets within the business. This is the primary domain of network activity monitoring and NDR, which includes responsibility for securing the many devices that cannot run endpoint agents.

In the insights from a CISA Red Team assessment of a US CNI organization, the Red Team was able to maintain access over the course of months and achieve their target outcomes. The top lesson learned in the report was:

“The assessed organization had insufficient technical controls to prevent and detect malicious activity. The organization relied too heavily on host-based endpoint detection and response (EDR) solutions and did not implement sufficient network layer protections.”

This proves that partial, isolated viewpoints are not sufficient to track and analyze what is fundamentally a connected problem – and without the added visibility and detection capabilities of NDR, any downstream SIEM or MDR services also still have nothing to work with.

Why is network detection & response (NDR) critical?

An effective NDR finds threats that disable or can’t be seen by local security agents and generally operates out-of-band, acquiring data from infrastructure such as traffic mirroring from physical or virtual switches. This means that the security system is extremely inaccessible to a threat actor at any stage.

An advanced NDR such as Darktrace / NETWORK is fully capable of detecting even high-end novel and unknown threats.

Detecting exploitation of Ivanti CS/PS with Darktrace / NETWORK

On January 9th 2025, two new vulnerabilities were disclosed in Ivanti Connect Secure and Policy Secure appliances that were under malicious exploitation. Perimeter devices, like Ivanti VPNs, are designed to keep threat actors out of a network, so it's quite serious when these devices are vulnerable.

An NDR solution is critical because it provides network-wide visibility for detecting lateral movement and threats that an EDR might miss, such as identifying command and control sessions (C2) and data exfiltration, even when hidden within encrypted traffic and which an EDR alone may not detect.

Darktrace initially detected suspicious activity connected with the exploitation of CVE-2025-0282 on December 29, 2024 – 11 days before the public disclosure of the vulnerability, this early detection highlights the benefits of an anomaly-based network detection method.

Throughout the campaign and based on the network telemetry available to Darktrace, a wide range of malicious activities were identified, including the malicious use of administrative credentials, the download of suspicious files, and network scanning in the cases investigated.

Darktrace / NETWORK’s autonomous response capabilities played a critical role in containment by autonomously blocking suspicious connections and enforcing normal behavior patterns. At the same time, Darktrace Cyber AI Analyst™ automatically investigated and correlated the anomalous activity into cohesive incidents, revealing the full scope of the compromise.

This case highlights the importance of real-time, AI-driven network monitoring to detect and disrupt stealthy post-exploitation techniques targeting unmanaged or unprotected systems.

Unlocking adaptive protection for evolving cyber risks

Darktrace / NETWORK uses unique AI engines that learn what is normal behavior for an organization’s entire network, continuously analyzing, mapping and modeling every connection to create a full picture of your devices, identities, connections, and potential attack paths.

With its ability to uncover previously unknown threats as well as detect known threats using signatures and threat intelligence, Darktrace is an essential layer of the security stack. Darktrace has helped secure customers against attacks including 2024 threat actor campaigns against Fortinet’s FortiManager , Palo Alto firewall devices, and more.  

Stay tuned for part II of this series which dives deeper into the differences between NDR types.

Credit to Nathaniel Jones VP, Security & AI Strategy, FCISO & Ashanka Iddya, Senior Director of Product Marketing for their contribution to this blog.

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About the author
Nathaniel Jones
VP, Security & AI Strategy, Field CISO

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April 22, 2025

Obfuscation Overdrive: Next-Gen Cryptojacking with Layers

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Out of all the services honeypotted by Darktrace, Docker is the most commonly attacked, with new strains of malware emerging daily. This blog will analyze a novel malware campaign with a unique obfuscation technique and a new cryptojacking technique.

What is obfuscation?

Obfuscation is a common technique employed by threat actors to prevent signature-based detection of their code, and to make analysis more difficult. This novel campaign uses an interesting technique of obfuscating its payload.

Docker image analysis

The attack begins with a request to launch a container from Docker Hub, specifically the kazutod/tene:ten image. Using Docker Hub’s layer viewer, an analyst can quickly identify what the container is designed to do. In this case, the container is designed to run the ten.py script which is built into itself.

 Docker Hub Image Layers, referencing the script ten.py.
Figure 1: Docker Hub Image Layers, referencing the script ten.py.

To gain more information on the Python file, Docker’s built in tooling can be used to download the image (docker pull kazutod/tene:ten) and then save it into a format that is easier to work with (docker image save kazutod/tene:ten -o tene.tar). It can then be extracted as a regular tar file for further investigation.

Extraction of the resulting tar file.
Figure 2: Extraction of the resulting tar file.

The Docker image uses the OCI format, which is a little different to a regular file system. Instead of having a static folder of files, the image consists of layers. Indeed, when running the file command over the sha256 directory, each layer is shown as a tar file, along with a JSON metadata file.

Output of the file command over the sha256 directory.
Figure 3: Output of the file command over the sha256 directory.

As the detailed layers are not necessary for analysis, a single command can be used to extract all of them into a single directory, recreating what the container file system would look like:

find blobs/sha256 -type f -exec sh -c 'file "{}" | grep -q "tar archive" && tar -xf "{}" -C root_dir' \;

Result of running the command above.
Figure 4: Result of running the command above.

The find command can then be used to quickly locate where the ten.py script is.

find root_dir -name ten.py

root_dir/app/ten.py

Details of the above ten.py script.
Figure 5: Details of the above ten.py script.

This may look complicated at first glance, however after breaking it down, it is fairly simple. The script defines a lambda function (effectively a variable that contains executable code) and runs zlib decompress on the output of base64 decode, which is run on the reversed input. The script then runs the lambda function with an input of the base64 string, and then passes it to exec, which runs the decoded string as Python code.

To help illustrate this, the code can be cleaned up to this simplified function:

def decode(input):
   reversed = input[::-1]

   decoded = base64.decode(reversed)
   decompressed = zlib.decompress(decoded)
   return decompressed

decoded_string = decode(the_big_text_blob)
exec(decoded_string) # run the decoded string

This can then be set up as a recipe in Cyberchef, an online tool for data manipulation, to decode it.

Use of Cyberchef to decode the ten.py script.
Figure 6: Use of Cyberchef to decode the ten.py script.

The decoded payload calls the decode function again and puts the output into exec. Copy and pasting the new payload into the input shows that it does this another time. Instead of copy-pasting the output into the input all day, a quick script can be used to decode this.

The script below uses the decode function from earlier in order to decode the base64 data and then uses some simple string manipulation to get to the next payload. The script will run this over and over until something interesting happens.

# Decode the initial base64

decoded = decode(initial)
# Remove the first 11 characters and last 3

# so we just have the next base64 string

clamped = decoded[11:-3]

for i in range(1, 100):
   # Decode the new payload

   decoded = decode(clamped)
   # Print it with the current step so we

   # can see what’s going on

   print(f"Step {i}")

   print(decoded)
   # Fetch the next base64 string from the

   # output, so the next loop iteration will

   # decode it

   clamped = decoded[11:-3]

Result of the 63rd iteration of this script.
Figure 7: Result of the 63rd iteration of this script.

After 63 iterations, the script returns actual code, accompanied by an error from the decode function as a stopping condition was never defined. It not clear what the attacker’s motive to perform so many layers of obfuscation was, as one round of obfuscation versus several likely would not make any meaningful difference to bypassing signature analysis. It’s possible this is an attempt to stop analysts or other hackers from reverse engineering the code. However,  it took a matter of minutes to thwart their efforts.

Cryptojacking 2.0?

Cleaned up version of the de-obfuscated code.
Figure 8: Cleaned up version of the de-obfuscated code.

The cleaned up code indicates that the malware attempts to set up a connection to teneo[.]pro, which appears to belong to a Web3 startup company.

Teneo appears to be a legitimate company, with Crunchbase reporting that they have raised USD 3 million as part of their seed round [1]. Their service allows users to join a decentralized network, to “make sure their data benefits you” [2]. Practically, their node functions as a distributed social media scraper. In exchange for doing so, users are rewarded with “Teneo Points”, which are a private crypto token.

The malware script simply connects to the websocket and sends keep-alive pings in order to gain more points from Teneo and does not do any actual scraping. Based on the website, most of the rewards are gated behind the number of heartbeats performed, which is likely why this works [2].

Checking out the attacker’s dockerhub profile, this sort of attack seems to be their modus operandi. The most recent container runs an instance of the nexus network client, which is a project to perform distributed zero-knowledge compute tasks in exchange for cryptocurrency.

Typically, traditional cryptojacking attacks rely on using XMRig to directly mine cryptocurrency, however as XMRig is highly detected, attackers are shifting to alternative methods of generating crypto. Whether this is more profitable remains to be seen. There is not currently an easy way to determine the earnings of the attackers due to the more “closed” nature of the private tokens. Translating a user ID to a wallet address does not appear to be possible, and there is limited public information about the tokens themselves. For example, the Teneo token is listed as “preview only” on CoinGecko, with no price information available.

Conclusion

This blog explores an example of Python obfuscation and how to unravel it. Obfuscation remains a ubiquitous technique employed by the majority of malware to aid in detection/defense evasion and being able to de-obfuscate code is an important skill for analysts to possess.

We have also seen this new avenue of cryptominers being deployed, demonstrating that attackers’ techniques are still evolving - even tried and tested fields. The illegitimate use of legitimate tools to obtain rewards is an increasingly common vector. For example,  as has been previously documented, 9hits has been used maliciously to earn rewards for the attack in a similar fashion.

Docker remains a highly targeted service, and system administrators need to take steps to ensure it is secure. In general, Docker should never be exposed to the wider internet unless absolutely necessary, and if it is necessary both authentication and firewalling should be employed to ensure only authorized users are able to access the service. Attacks happen every minute, and even leaving the service open for a short period of time may result in a serious compromise.

References

1. https://www.crunchbase.com/funding_round/teneo-protocol-seed--a8ff2ad4

2. https://teneo.pro/

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About the author
Nate Bill
Threat Researcher
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