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May 20, 2024

Don’t Take the Bait: How Darktrace Keeps Microsoft Teams Phishing Attacks at Bay

In this blog we examine how Darktrace was able to detect and block malicious phishing emails sent via Microsoft Teams that were impersonating an international hotel chain.
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
Min Kim
Cyber Security Analyst
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20
May 2024

Social Engineering in Phishing Attacks

Faced with increasingly cyber-aware endpoint users and vigilant security teams, more and more threat actors are forced to think psychologically about the individuals they are targeting with their phishing attacks. Social engineering methods like taking advantage of the human emotions of their would-be victims, pressuring them to open emails or follow links or face financial or legal repercussions, and impersonating known and trusted brands or services, have become common place in phishing campaigns in recent years.

Phishing with Microsoft Teams

The malicious use of the popular communications platform Microsoft Teams has become widely observed and discussed across the threat landscape, with many organizations adopting it as their primary means of business communication, and many threat actors using it as an attack vector. As Teams allows users to communicate with people outside of their organization by default [1], it becomes an easy entry point for potential attackers to use as a social engineering vector.

In early 2024, Darktrace/Apps™ identified two separate instances of malicious actors using Microsoft Teams to launch a phishing attack against Darktrace customers in the Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA) region. Interestingly, in this case the attackers not only used a well-known legitimate service to carry out their phishing campaign, but they were also attempting to impersonate an international hotel chain.

Despite these attempts to evade endpoint users and traditional security measures, Darktrace’s anomaly detection enabled it to identify the suspicious phishing messages and bring them to the customer’s attention. Additionally, Darktrace’s autonomous response capability, was able to follow-up these detections with targeted actions to contain the suspicious activity in the first instance.

Darktrace Coverage of Microsoft Teams Phishing

Chats Sent by External User and Following Actions by Darktrace

On February 29, 2024, Darktrace detected the presence of a new external user on the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) environment of an EMEA customer for the first time. The user, “REDACTED@InternationalHotelChain[.]onmicrosoft[.]com” was only observed on this date and no further activities were detected from this user after February 29.

Later the same day, the unusual external user created its first chat on Microsoft Teams named “New Employee Loyalty Program”. Over the course of around 5 minutes, the user sent 63 messages across 21 different chats to unique internal users on the customer’s SaaS platform. All these chats included the ‘foreign tenant user’ and one of the customer’s internal users, likely in an attempt to remain undetected. Foreign tenant user, in this case, refers to users without access to typical internal software and privileges, indicating the presence of an external user.

Darktrace’s detection of unusual messages being sent by a suspicious external user via Microsoft Teams.
Figure 1: Darktrace’s detection of unusual messages being sent by a suspicious external user via Microsoft Teams.
Advanced Search results showing the presence of a foreign tenant user on the customer’s SaaS environment.
Figure 2: Advanced Search results showing the presence of a foreign tenant user on the customer’s SaaS environment.

Darktrace identified that the external user had connected from an unusual IP address located in Poland, 195.242.125[.]186. Darktrace understood that this was unexpected behavior for this user who had only previously been observed connecting from the United Kingdom; it further recognized that no other users within the customer’s environment had connected from this external source, thereby deeming it suspicious. Further investigation by Darktrace’s analyst team revealed that the endpoint had been flagged as malicious by several open-source intelligence (OSINT) vendors.

External Summary highlighting the rarity of the rare external source from which the Teams messages were sent.
Figure 3: External Summary highlighting the rarity of the rare external source from which the Teams messages were sent.

Following Darktrace’s initial detection of these suspicious Microsoft Teams messages, Darktrace's autonomous response was able to further support the customer by providing suggested mitigative actions that could be applied to stop the external user from sending any additional phishing messages.

Unfortunately, at the time of this attack Darktrace's autonomous response capability was configured in human confirmation mode, meaning any autonomous response actions had to be manually actioned by the customer. Had it been enabled in autonomous response mode, it would have been able promptly disrupt the attack, disabling the external user to prevent them from continuing their phishing attempts and securing precious time for the customer’s security team to begin their own remediation procedures.

Darktrace autonomous response actions that were suggested following the ’Large Volume of Messages Sent from New External User’ detection model alert.
Figure 4: Darktrace autonomous response actions that were suggested following the ’Large Volume of Messages Sent from New External User’ detection model alert.

External URL Sent within Teams Chats

Within the 21 Teams chats created by the threat actor, Darktrace identified 21 different external URLs being sent, all of which included the domain "cloud-sharcpoint[.]com”. Many of these URLs had been recently established and had been flagged as malicious by OSINT providers [3]. This was likely an attempt to impersonate “cloud-sharepoint[.]com”, the legitimate domain of Microsoft SharePoint, with the threat actor attempting to ‘typo-squat’ the URL to convince endpoint users to trust the legitimacy of the link. Typo-squatted domains are commonly misspelled URLs registered by opportunistic attackers in the hope of gaining the trust of unsuspecting targets. They are often used for nefarious purposes like dropping malicious files on devices or harvesting credentials.

Upon clicking this malicious link, users were directed to a similarly typo-squatted domain, “InternatlonalHotelChain[.]sharcpoInte-docs[.]com”. This domain was likely made to appear like the SharePoint URL used by the international hotel chain being impersonated.

Redirected link to a fake SharePoint page attempting to impersonate an international hotel chain.
Figure 5: Redirected link to a fake SharePoint page attempting to impersonate an international hotel chain.

This fake SharePoint page used the branding of the international hotel chain and contained a document named “New Employee Loyalty Program”; the same name given to the phishing messages sent by the attacker on Microsoft Teams. Upon accessing this file, users would be directed to a credential harvester, masquerading as a Microsoft login page, and prompted to enter their credentials. If successful, this would allow the attacker to gain unauthorized access to a user’s SaaS account, thereby compromising the account and enabling further escalation in the customer’s environment.

Figure 6: A fake Microsoft login page that popped-up when attempting to open the ’New Employee Loyalty Program’ document.

This is a clear example of an attacker attempting to leverage social engineering tactics to gain the trust of their targets and convince them to inadvertently compromise their account. Many corporate organizations partner with other companies and well-known brands to offer their employees loyalty programs as part of their employment benefits and perks. As such, it would not necessarily be unexpected for employees to receive such an offer from an international hotel chain. By impersonating an international hotel chain, threat actors would increase the probability of convincing their targets to trust and click their malicious messages and links, and unintentionally compromising their accounts.

In spite of the attacker’s attempts to impersonate reputable brands, platforms, Darktrace/Apps was able to successfully recognize the malicious intent behind this phishing campaign and suggest steps to contain the attack. Darktrace recognized that the user in question had deviated from its ‘learned’ pattern of behavior by connecting to the customer’s SaaS environment from an unusual external location, before proceeding to send an unusually large volume of messages via Teams, indicating that the SaaS account had been compromised.

A Wider Campaign?

Around a month later, in March 2024, Darktrace observed a similar incident of a malicious actor impersonating the same international hotel chain in a phishing attacking using Microsoft Teams, suggesting that this was part of a wider phishing campaign. Like the previous example, this customer was also based in the EMEA region.  

The attack tactics identified in this instance were very similar to the previously example, with a new external user identified within the network proceeding to create a series of Teams messages named “New Employee Loyalty Program” containing a typo-squatted external links.

There were a few differences with this second incident, however, with the attacker using the domain “@InternationalHotelChainExpeditions[.]onmicrosoft[.]com” to send their malicious Teams messages and using differently typo-squatted URLs to imitate Microsoft SharePoint.

As both customers targeted by this phishing campaign were subscribed to Darktrace’s Proactive Threat Notification (PTN) service, this suspicious SaaS activity was promptly escalated to the Darktrace Security Operations Center (SOC) for immediate triage and investigation. Following their investigation, the SOC team sent an alert to the customers informing them of the compromise and advising urgent follow-up.

Conclusion

While there are clear similarities between these Microsoft Teams-based phishing attacks, the attackers here have seemingly sought ways to refine their tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs), leveraging new connection locations and creating new malicious URLs in an effort to outmaneuver human security teams and conventional security tools.

As cyber threats grow increasingly sophisticated and evasive, it is crucial for organizations to employ intelligent security solutions that can see through social engineering techniques and pinpoint suspicious activity early.

Darktrace’s Self-Learning AI understands customer environments and is able to recognize the subtle deviations in a device’s behavioral pattern, enabling it to effectively identify suspicious activity even when attackers adapt their strategies. In this instance, this allowed Darktrace to detect the phishing messages, and the malicious links contained within them, despite the seemingly trustworthy source and use of a reputable platform like Microsoft Teams.

Credit to Min Kim, Cyber Security Analyst, Raymond Norbert, Cyber Security Analyst and Ryan Traill, Threat Content Lead

Appendix

Darktrace Model Detections

SaaS Model

Large Volume of Messages Sent from New External User

SaaS / Unusual Activity / Large Volume of Messages Sent from New External User

Indicators of Compromise (IoCs)

IoC – Type - Description

https://cloud-sharcpoint[.]com/[a-zA-Z0-9]{15} - Example hostname - Malicious phishing redirection link

InternatlonalHotelChain[.]sharcpolnte-docs[.]com – Hostname – Redirected Link

195.242.125[.]186 - External Source IP Address – Malicious Endpoint

MITRE Tactics

Tactic – Technique

Phishing – Initial Access (T1566)

References

[1] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/trusted-organizations-external-meetings-chat?tabs=organization-settings

[2] https://www.virustotal.com/gui/ip-address/195.242.125.186/detection

[3] https://www.virustotal.com/gui/domain/cloud-sharcpoint.com

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
Min Kim
Cyber Security Analyst

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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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