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June 3, 2024

Exploring the Benefits and Risks of Third-Party Data Solutions

Many companies use third-party data management for efficiency, global access, collaboration, and reliability. Find out what those organizations need to know about addressing the security risks and best practices associated with third-party data management.
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
Oakley Cox
Director of Product
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03
Jun 2024

Why do companies allow third parties to handle their data?

Companies seek out third parties to handle their data for operational efficiency.

The scale and cost of maintaining in-house infrastructure can be outsourced to third parties who specialize in data management or in certain business functions.

Third parties who handle an organization’s data can range from large public cloud providers such as Azure or AWS, to boutique companies who handle specific business functions such as telemarketing, payment systems, or webpage hosting.

The operational efficiencies gained through third-party data management can be summarized by three key benefits:

  • Global accessibility: Third-party data storage enables data access across the globe, allowing businesses to access data from anywhere.
  • Enhanced collaboration: Third-party data storage allows for file sharing, real-time editing, and integration with other applications and services enhancing a business’s collaboration efforts.
  • Reliability and uptime: Reputable third-party storage providers offer high reliability and uptime guarantees, ensuring that data is available whenever needed. They typically have robust disaster recovery and backup systems in place to prevent data loss.

Given these benefits, it is no surprise that businesses are using these services to expand their operations and scale efforts with the need of a growing business. This strategic move not only optimizes resource allocation but also enhances operational agility, enabling businesses to adapt swiftly to evolving data demands and maintain a competitive edge in a dynamic market.

Security risks of entrusted data to third-party vendors

Entrusting data to third parties can expose businesses to supply chain risks and increase the risk of data breaches and unauthorized access. A business has less control over its data and becomes dependent on the third party's policies, practices, and uptime. Many third-party vendors are the target of hackers who specialize in monetizing sensitive data and exploiting gray areas around who is responsible for securing the data.

Thus, businesses are vulnerable when they entrust sensitive data to third-party platforms, which often lack transparency about data usage and security. The platforms, chosen mainly for cost, efficiency, and user experience, are frequent targets for cyber criminals, hacktivists, and opportunistic lone hackers looking for sensitive data accidentally exposed due to misconfigurations or poor data management policies.

Consumers are putting pressure on businesses to improve cybersecurity when handling their personal data. Businesses who suffer a data breach face a high level of scrutiny from customers, investors, the media, and governments, even when the data breach is the result of a third party’s being hacked. For example, Uber made headlines in 2022 for a data breach which was the result of a compromised vendor who had access to data regarding Uber’s employees.

Similarly, the UK’s Ministry of Defence was the victim of a data breach earlier this year when hackers targeted a third party payroll system used by the government department.

Why do cyber-criminals target third parties?

Cyber-criminals can potentially gain access to multiple networks when targeting a third-party storage provider. A successful attack could give attackers access to the networks and systems of all its clients, amplifying the impact of a single breach.

For example, when Illuminate Education was the target of a cyber-attack, the data of 23 US School Districts was stolen via its student-tracking software. It included student data from the country's two largest school systems - New York City Public Schools and Los Angeles Unified School District.

Common third-party security risks

When collaborating with third parties, organizations should be aware of the most common types of security risks posed to their cybersecurity.

  • Software supply chain attacks: Software supply chain attacks occur when cyber criminals infiltrate and compromise software products or updates at any point in the development or distribution process. This allows attackers to insert malicious code into legitimate software, which then gets distributed to users through trusted channels.
  • Human error: Human error in cybersecurity refers to mistakes made by individuals that lead to security breaches or vulnerabilities. These errors can result from lack of awareness, insufficient training, negligence, or simple mistakes.
  • Privileged access misuse: Privileged access misuse involves the inappropriate or unauthorized use of elevated access rights by individuals within an organization. This can include intentionally malicious actions or unintentional misuse of administrative privileges.

What to look for in a security solution when using third parties to store or manage data

Understanding the security posture of a third party is important when partnering with it and entrusting it with your organization’s data. Understanding how basic cyber hygiene policies are implemented is a good place to start, such as data retention policies, use of encryption for data in storage, and how identity and access are managed.

In some circumstances, it is important to understand who is responsible for the data’s security. For example, when using public cloud infrastructure, it is generally the responsibility of the data owner to manage how the data is accessed and stored.

In that situation, an organization needs to ensure it has solutions in place which gives it full visibility of that third-party environment, and which can proactively identify misconfigurations and detect and respond to suspicious activity in real time.

Benefits of using AI tools to aid in managing sensitive data

According to research performed by IBM, organizations with extensive use of security AI and automation identified and contained a data breach 108 days faster in 2023 than organizations that did not use AI for cybersecurity. (1) This figure is only likely to improve as companies mature in their adoption of AI for cyber security and can be a key indicator in the security posture of a third-party vendor.

Example of third-party security incidents

Sumo data breach

Sumo, an Australian energy and internet provider, suffered a data breach which they became aware of on May 13th, 2024. Further investigation into the cyber incident has found that “the personal details of approximately 40,000 customers were compromised, including approximately 3,000 Australian passport numbers.” (2)

While none of Sumo’s systems were allegedly accessed or affected and the third-party application also worked as designed (3), the incident was blamed on an unnamed third party. The breach may have been the result of a misconfiguration or human error.

This incident underscores the importance of not only selecting third-party providers with robust security measures but also continuously monitoring and assessing their security practices.

How Darktrace helps monitor third-party data usage

Darktrace/Cloud uses Self-Learning AI to provide complete cyber resilience for multi-cloud environments.

Benefits of Darktrace/Cloud:

Architectural awareness: Gives users an understanding of their cloud footprint, including real-time visibility into cloud assets, architectures, users and permissions. Combines asset enumeration, modeled architectures, and flow log analysis. Cost insights give a better understanding of resource allocation, helping teams contextualize resources.

Cloud-native detection and response: AI understands ‘normal’ for your unique business and stops cyber-threats with autonomous response. Near-real-time response goes beyond simple email alerts or opening a ticket; and includes cloud-native actions like detaching EC2 instances and applying security groups to contain risky assets.

Cloud protection and compliance: Identify compliance issues and potential misconfigurations with attack path modeling and prioritized remediation steps. Darktrace’s attack surface management (ASM) adds a critical external view of your organization, highlighting vulnerabilities most impactful to your specific situation and revealing shadow IT.

Learn more about securing cloud environments by reading: The CISO’s Guide to Cloud Security here.

References

1.    https://www.ibm.com/reports/data-breach

2.    https://www.passports.gov.au/news/sumo-data-breach

3.    https://www.smh.com.au/technology/sumo-slammed-by-data-breach-as-energy-and-internet-customers-have-details-leaked-20240515-p5jdwp.html

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
Oakley Cox
Director of Product

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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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