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February 12, 2018

The Rise of Cryptocurrency Attacks & Cyber Defense Solutions

Darktrace can detect cryptocurrency-related attacks with machine learning. Identify nefarious use of resources and protect against Coinhive drive-by mining.
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
Max Heinemeyer
Global Field CISO
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12
Feb 2018

Prelude

The last 12 months have shown tremendous volatility in the value of cryptocurrencies, of which Bitcoin is the most prominent example. At the start of 2017, Bitcoin lingered around the $2,000 mark before suddenly taking off, climbing to historic highs of close to $20,000 in December 2017. Demand has since subsided, and at the time of writing, the price of Bitcoin is near to $10,772.

While Bitcoin is the most popular cryptocurrency, numerous alternatives, often called ‘altcoins’ have emerged and grown in value in the last 12 months. For example, Dogecoin, originally created to be a spoof cryptocurrency after a widespread internet meme, reached a notable market capitalization milestone of $2bn in January 2018.

Nowadays it is almost impossible to profitably mine Bitcoin on commodity hardware such as laptops, smartphones or desktop computers. At this late state, it just takes too long to perform the relevant calculations, and the cost of electricity is higher than the anticipated revenue in most cases. Other altcoins such as Monero use different algorithms, making them viable alternatives for aspiring crypto miners. It is often still feasible to mine altcoins on commodity hardware and see a return on investment.

The value of most altcoins is closely tied to the value of Bitcoin and, in many cases, the relationship is broadly proportional – a rise in Bitcoin prompting a similar lift in the altcoins. Monero, which has been rapidly adopted by Darknet markets, has profited from this effect. While Monero was valued at around $10 in January 2017, its price has been pumped up to $419 a year later.

There is much that is still not clear about the cryptocurrency phenomenon. Debate as to its relative value and its status as a currency rages, and will not be resolved any time soon. However, from a cyber security perspective there can be no doubt that the combination of altcoins being mineable on commodity hardware, the fact that mining is now becoming profitable as a side-effect of Bitcoin’s rise, and a maturity in cryptocurrency-related tech has led to a surge in cryptocurrency-related attacks.

Attack vectors

Darktrace has observed an abrupt increase of cryptocurrency-related attacks over the last 12 months. Both the frequency and the diversity of these attacks has grown significantly and largely mirrors the remarkable rise in the value of Bitcoin over that period.

Previously, cyber-criminals monetized their operations via banking Trojans/credit card fraud, selling stolen data and ransomware on the Darknet. However, criminals are notoriously adaptable and will follow the money wherever it leads, leading to an increase in cryptojacking’s popularity.

Cryptocurrency mining might not be as profitable as ransomware is upfront, but it can be secretly pursued for months without creating the havoc that characterizes ransomware attacks. Most users and security products might not notice a cryptocurrency miner being installed on a corporate device as it does not show obvious threats or messages to a user, except for an occasional increase in CPU or RAM usage.

Identifying these attacks can be very difficult for traditional security tools as they were not originally designed to catch this type of threat. Nor was Darktrace, but its approach – which relies on its evolving understanding of patterns of behavior – means that it can detect such attacks without having to know what to look for in advance.

Darktrace has detected a number of different attack vectors related to cryptocurrency attacks.

  1. Nefarious use of corporate resources
    Darktrace has detected a range of incidents where employees were intentionally installing cryptocurrency mining software on their corporate devices to mine for personal gain. These employees do not have to pay for the electricity used to run the corporate device in the office – they are basically turning their employer’s electricity into cash by commandeering it for mining operations.

    This is commonly seen as a compliance breach and increases the attack surface of a device that has mining software installed. It puts the corporate device at risk and also increases operational costs as the power consumption usually goes up for mining devices. The most popular cryptocurrency choices for this kind of mining in the last 12 months were Etherium and Monero – altcoins that can profitably be mined without the need for inordinate electricity.
  2. Coinhive drive-by mining
    Coinhive is a technology that allows website owners to use their visitors’ computing power to mine a tiny fraction of cryptocurrency for the website owner. Visitors will experience a small increase in computer resource consumption while browsing the website. Some websites experiment with this model to create new forms of revenue streams alternative to advertisement and banner placements.

    Coinhive usage is often not an opt-in process. Darktrace has observed various customer devices that regularly visit websites leveraging Coinhive technology. While the power consumption increase for a device browsing a website with Coinhive is ultimately negligible, the cumulative effect of a sizeable portion of the workforce unwittingly browsing websites using Coinhive results in increased power consumption cost for the organization as a whole.
  3. Malicious insider
    A malicious insider compromised his employer’s website to put a Coinhive script on there. This then mined Monero for every visitor on the employer’s website for the malicious insider’s personal gain.
  4. Traditional malware
    Cyber criminals are constantly looking to improve the return on investment of their operations. Reports suggest that criminals are starting to adjust their monetization methods based on the financial means of their targets. Suppose you can’t pay the fee extorted in a ransomware attack? They’ll just install a crypto miner on your device instead to ensure that the attack is not completely fruitless.

    As malware authors become more sophisticated, they often deploy multi-staged malware that can swap weaponized payloads. Once malware has infected a system successfully, its authors can often decide what actions to take next. Encrypt the device and extort a ransom? Install a banking Trojan to harvest credit card details? Install more spyware modules to look for data exfiltration? Or, now, install a cryptocurrency miner.

    These pieces of malware operate stealthily and often go undetected for several weeks. An infection might start with a phishing email that contains a macro-enabled document. As soon as a user enabled the macro, the malware will download a file-less stager that lives in memory and cannot be detected by traditional antivirus. Command and control communication is usually maintained via IP addresses that change on a daily basis in order to outrun threat intelligence and blacklisting attempts. As no obvious damage is done straight away, these attacks often stay under the radar for prolonged times, so long as self-learning technology such as Darktrace is not employed.

    This becomes much more concerning as malware authors could swap one payload for another overnight if they deem it more profitable, switching from a furtive crypto mining Trojan to ransomware the next day. While we have not observed this kind of attack in the wild yet, it is plausible, and in cyberspace what can be done, will be done.

Conclusions

Revolutionary technologies like cryptocurrencies have both their dark and light aspects. For all of the creative energy released by the crypto-blockchain revolution, Bitcoin and its alternatives have quickly become the universal currency of the criminal underworld. Indeed, the former Chief Economist of the World Bank, Joseph Stiglitz – an adamant critic of cryptocurrencies – has said that the whole value of Bitcoin resides in its “potential for circumvention” and “lack of oversight”.

While Stiglitz’s case may be overstated, there can be no question that cyber criminals have sensed a new opportunity to make money. A lot of organizations still regard crypto mining as a compliance incident. This can lead to grave consequences as a cryptocurrency mining device might lead to more severe incidents that can have a serious effect on business operations.

This kind of threat is difficult to detect as no obvious damage is done. However, with Darktrace’s machine learning we can correlate even the weakest indicators of such an attack into a compelling picture of threat. While traditional tools may struggle to see these deviations, Darktrace can pinpoint the changes in behavior effected by cryptocurrency miners without having to rely on any blacklists or signatures.

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
Max Heinemeyer
Global Field CISO

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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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About the author
Ashanka Iddya
Senior Director, Product Marketing

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Cloud

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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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About the author
Calum Hall
Technical Content Researcher
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