May 8, 2024

How Empowering End Users can Improve Your Email Security and Decrease the Burden on the SOC

Most email security solutions either assume end-user reporting is of poor quality, so don’t prioritize it, or triage every user-reported email equally without any attempt to improve long-term efficiency. This blog explores how Darktrace aims to improve user reporting from the ground up, reducing the 90% falsely reported phishing and decreasing the load on security teams.

Written by

Carlos Gray

Senior Product Marketing Manager, Email

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

Carlos Gray

Senior Product Marketing Manager, Email

May 2024

Why do we pay attention to the end user?

Every email security solution filters inbound mail, then typically hands over false positives and false negatives to the security team for manual triage. A crucial problem with this lifecycle is that it ignores the inevitability of end users being at the front line of any organization. Employees may receive point in time security awareness training, but it is rarely engaging or contextualized to their reality. While an employee may report a suspicious-looking email to the security team, they will rarely get to understand the outcome or impact of that decision. This means that the quality of reporting never improves, so the burden on the security team of triaging these emails – of which 90% are falsely reported – persists and grows with the business over time.

At Darktrace, we recognize that employees will always be on the front line of email security. That’s why we aim to improve end-user reporting from the ground up, reducing the overall number of emails needing triage and saving security team resource.

How does Darktrace improve the quality of end-user reporting?

Darktrace prioritizes improving users’ security awareness to increase the quality of end-user reporting from day one. We train users and optimize their experience, which in turn provides better detection. 

That starts with training and security awareness. Traditionally, organizations oblige employees to attend point-in-time training sessions which interrupt their daily work schedules. With Darktrace/Email, if a message contains some potentially suspicious markers but is most likely safe, Darktrace takes a specific action to neutralize the risky components and presents it to the user with a simple narrative explaining why certain elements have been held back. The user can then decide whether to report this email to the security team. 

Figure 1: AI shares its analysis in context and in real time at the moment a user is questioning an email

The AI narrative gives the user context for why their specific email may carry risk, putting their security awareness training into practice. This creates an element of trust with the security solution, rather than viewing it as outside of daily workflows. Users may also receive a daily or weekly digest of their held emails and make a decision on whether to release or report them.  

Whatever the user’s existing workflow is for reporting emails, Darktrace/Email can integrate with it and improve its quality. Our add-in for Outlook gives users a fully optimized experience, allowing them to engage with the narratives for each email, as well as non-productive mail management. However, if teams want to integrate Darktrace into an existing workflow, it can analyze emails reported to an internal SOC mailbox, the native email provider’s 'Report Phish’ button, or the ‘Knowbe4’ button.

By empowering the user with contextual feedback on each unique email, we foster employee engagement and elevate both reporting quality and security awareness. In fact, 60% fewer benign emails are reported because of the extra context supplied by Darktrace to end users. The eventual report is then fed back to the detection algorithm, improving future decision-making.  

Reducing the amount of emails that reach the SOC

Out of the higher-quality emails that do end up being reported by users, the next step is to reduce the amount of emails that reach the SOC. 

Once a user reports an email, Darktrace will independently determine if the mail should be automatically remediated based on second level triage. Darktrace/Email’s Mailbox Security Assistant automates secondary triage by combining additional behavioral signals and the most advanced link analysis engine we have ever built. It detects 70% more sophisticated malicious phishing links by looking at an additional twenty times more context than at the primary analysis stage, revealing the hidden intent within interactive and dynamic webpages. This directly alleviates the burden of manual triage for security analysts.

Following this secondary triage the emails that are deemed worthy of security team attention are then passed over, resulting in a lower quantity and higher quality of emails for SOC manual triage.

Centralizing and speeding analysis for investigations

For those emails that are received by the SOC, Darktrace also helps to improve triage time for manual remediation.

AI-generated narratives and automated remediation actions empower teams to fast-track manual triage and remediation, while still providing security analysts with the necessary depth. With live inbox view, security teams gain access to a centralized platform that combines intuitive search capabilities, Cyber AI Analyst reports, and mobile application access. With all security workflows consolidated within a unified interface, users can analyze and take remediation actions without the need to navigate multiple tools, such as e-discovery platforms – eliminating console hopping and accelerating incident response.

Our customers tell us that our AI allows them to go in-depth quickly for investigations, versus other solutions that only provide a high-level view.

Figure 2: Cyber AI Analyst provides a simple language narrative for each reported email, allowing teams to quickly understand why it may be suspicious

Conclusion

Unlike our competitors, we believe that improving the quality of users’ experience is not only a nice-to-have, but a fundamental means for improving security. Any modern solution should consider end users as a key source of information as well as an opportunity for defense. Darktrace does both – optimizing the user experience as well as our AI learning from the user to augment detection.

The benefits of empowering users are ultimately felt by the security team, who benefit from improved detection, a reduction in manual triage of benign emails, and faster investigation workflows.

Augmented end user reporting is just one of a range of features new to Darktrace/Email. Check out the latest Innovations to Darktrace/Email in our recent blog.

Written by

Carlos Gray

Senior Product Marketing Manager, Email

Inside the SOC

Written by

Carlos Gray

Senior Product Marketing Manager, Email

Global Threat Research Operations Lead

Product Marketing Manager, Network Detection & Response

Watch the NIS2 Webinar

Blog

Network

September 9, 2025

The benefits of bringing together network and email security

In many organizations, network and email security operate in isolation. Each solution is tasked with defending its respective environment, even though both are facing the same advanced, multi-domain threats.

This siloed approach overlooks a critical reality: email remains the most common vector for initiating cyber-attacks, while the network is the primary stage on which those attacks progress. Without direct integration between these two domains, organizations risk leaving blind spots that adversaries can exploit.

A modern security strategy needs to unify email and network defenses, not just in name, but in how they share intelligence, conduct investigations, and coordinate response actions. Let’s take a look at how this joined-up approach delivers measurable technical, operational, and commercial benefits.

Technical advantages

Pre-alert intelligence: Gathering data before the threat strikes

Most security tools start working when something goes wrong – an unusual login, a flagged attachment, a confirmed compromise. But by then, attackers may already be a step ahead.

By unifying network and email security under a single AI platform (like the Darktrace Active AI Security Platform), you can analyze patterns across both environments in real time, even when there are no alerts. This ongoing monitoring builds a behavioral understanding of every user, device, and domain in your ecosystem.

That means when an email arrives from a suspicious domain, the system already knows whether that domain has appeared on your network before – and whether its behavior has been unusual. Likewise, when new network activity involves a domain first spotted in an email, it’s instantly placed in the right context.

This intelligence isn’t built on signatures or after-the-fact compromise indicators – it’s built on live behavioral baselines, giving your defenses the ability to flag threats before damage is done.

Alert-related intelligence: Connecting the dots in real time

Once an alert does fire, speed and context matter. The Darktrace Cyber AI Analyst can automatically investigate across both environments, piecing together network and email evidence into a single, cohesive incident.

Instead of leaving analysts to sift through fragmented logs, the AI links events like a phishing email to suspicious lateral movement on the recipient’s device, keeping the full attack chain intact. Investigations that might take hours – or even days – can be completed in minutes, with far fewer false positives to wade through.

This is more than a time-saver. It ensures defenders maintain visibility after the first sign of compromise, following the attacker as they pivot into network infrastructure, cloud services, or other targets. That cross-environment continuity is impossible to achieve with disconnected point solutions or siloed workflows.

Operational advantages

Streamlining SecOps across teams

In many organizations, email security is managed by IT, while network defense belongs to the SOC. The result? Critical information is scattered between tools and teams, creating blind spots just when you need clarity.

When email and network data flow into a single platform, everyone is working from the same source of truth. SOC analysts gain immediate visibility into email threats without opening another console or sending a request to another department. The IT team benefits from the SOC’s deeper investigative context.

The outcome is more than convenience: it’s faster, more informed decision-making across the board.

Reducing time-to-meaning and enabling faster response

A unified platform removes the need to manually correlate alerts between tools, reducing time-to-meaning for every incident. Built-in AI correlation instantly ties together related events, guiding analysts toward coordinated responses with higher confidence.

Instead of relying on manual SIEM rules or pre-built SOAR playbooks, the platform connects the dots in real time, and can even trigger autonomous response actions across both environments simultaneously. This ensures attacks are stopped before they can escalate, regardless of where they begin.

Commercial advantages

While purchasing “best-of-breed" for all your different tools might sound appealing, it often leads to a patchwork of solutions with overlapping costs and gaps in coverage. However good a “best-in-breed" email security solution might be in the email realm, it won't be truly effective without visibility across domains and an AI analyst piecing intelligence together. That’s why we think “best-in-suite" is the only “best-in-breed" approach that works – choosing a high-quality platform ensures that every new capability strengthens the whole system.

On top of that, security budgets are under constant pressure. Managing separate vendors for email and network defense means juggling multiple contracts, negotiating different SLAs, and stitching together different support models.

With a single provider for both, procurement and vendor management become far simpler. You deal with one account team, one support channel, and one unified strategy for both environments. If you choose to layer on managed services, you get consistent expertise across your whole security footprint.

Even more importantly, an integrated AI platform sets the stage for growth. Once email and network are under the same roof, adding coverage for other attack surfaces – like cloud or identity – is straightforward. You’re building on the same architecture, not bolting on new point solutions that create more complexity.

Check out the white paper, The Modern Security Stack: Why Your NDR and Email Security Solutions Need to Work Together, to explore these benefits in more depth, with real-world examples and practical steps for unifying your defenses.

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About the author

Mikey Anderson

Product Marketing Manager, Network Detection & Response

Blog

Cloud

September 9, 2025

Unpacking the Salesloft Incident: Insights from Darktrace Observations

Introduction

On August 26, 2025, Google Threat intelligence Group released a report detailing a widespread data theft campaign targeting the sales automation platform Salesloft, via compromised OAuth tokens used by the third-party Drift AI chat agent [1][2]. The attack has been attributed to the threat actor UNC6395 by Google Threat Intelligence and Mandiant [1].

The attack is believed to have begun in early August 2025 and continued through until mid-August 2025 [1], with the threat actor exporting significant volumes of data from multiple Salesforce instances [1]. Then sifting through this data for anything that could be used to compromise the victim’s environments such as access keys, tokens or passwords. This had led to Google Threat Intelligence Group assessing that the primary intent of the threat actor is credential harvesting, and later reporting that it was aware of in excess of 700 potentially impacted organizations [3].

Salesloft previously stated that, based on currently available data, customers that do not integrate with Salesforce are unaffected by this campaign [2]. However, on August 28, Google Threat Intelligence Group announced that “Based on new information identified by GTIG, the scope of this compromise is not exclusive to the Salesforce integration with Salesloft Drift and impacts other integrations” [2]. Google Threat Intelligence has since advised that any and all authentication tokens stored in or connected to the Drift platform be treated as potentially compromised [1].

This campaign demonstrates how attackers are increasingly exploiting trusted Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) integrations as a pathway into enterprise environment.

By abusing these integrations, threat actors were able to exfiltrate sensitive business data at scale, bypassing traditional security controls. Rather than relying on malware or obvious intrusion techniques, the adversaries leveraged legitimate credentials and API traffic that resembled legitimate Salesforce activity to achieve their goals. This type of activity is far harder to detect with conventional security tools, since it blends in with the daily noise of business operations.

The incident underscores the escalating significance of autonomous coverage within SaaS and third-party ecosystems. As businesses increasingly depend on interconnected platforms, visibility gaps become evident that cannot be managed by conventional perimeter and endpoint defenses.

By developing a behavioral comprehension of each organization's distinct use of cloud services, anomalies can be detected, such as logins from unexpected locations, unusually high volumes of API requests, or unusual document activity. These indications serve as an early alert system, even when intruders use legitimate tokens or accounts, enabling security teams to step in before extensive data exfiltration takes place

What happened?

The campaign is believed to have started on August 8, 2025, with malicious activity continuing until at least August 18. The threat actor, tracked as UNC6395, gained access via compromised OAuth tokens associated with Salesloft Drift integrations into Salesforce [1]. Once tokens were obtained, the attackers were able to issue large volumes of Salesforce API requests, exfiltrating sensitive customer and business data.

Initial Intrusion

The attackers first established access by abusing OAuth and refresh tokens from the Drift integration. These tokens gave them persistent access into Salesforce environments without requiring further authentication [1]. To expand their foothold, the threat actor also made use of TruffleHog [4], an open-source secrets scanner, to hunt for additional exposed credentials. Logs later revealed anomalous IAM updates, including unusual UpdateAccessKey activity, which suggested attempts to ensure long-term persistence and control within compromised accounts.

Internal Reconnaissance & Data Exfiltration

Once inside, the adversaries began exploring the Salesforce environments. They ran queries designed to pull sensitive data fields, focusing on objects such as Cases, Accounts, Users, and Opportunities [1]. At the same time, the attackers sifted through this information to identify secrets that could enable access to other systems, including AWS keys and Snowflake credentials [4]. This phase demonstrated the opportunistic nature of the campaign, with the actors looking for any data that could be repurposed for further compromise.

Lateral Movement

Salesloft and Mandiant investigations revealed that the threat actor also created at least one new user account in early September. Although follow-up activity linked to this account was limited, the creation itself suggested a persistence mechanism designed to survive remediation efforts. By maintaining a separate identity, the attackers ensured they could regain access even if their stolen OAuth tokens were revoked.

Accomplishing the mission

The data taken from Salesforce environments included valuable business records, which attackers used to harvest credentials and identify high-value targets. According to Mandiant, once the data was exfiltrated, the actors actively sifted through it to locate sensitive information that could be leveraged in future intrusions [1]. In response, Salesforce and Salesloft revoked OAuth tokens associated with Drift integrations on August 20 [1], a containment measure aimed at cutting off the attackers’ primary access channel and preventing further abuse.

How did the attack bypass the rest of the security stack?

The campaign effectively bypassed security measures by using legitimate credentials and OAuth tokens through the Salesloft Drift integration. This rendered traditional security defenses like endpoint protection and firewalls ineffective, as the activity appeared non-malicious [1]. The attackers blended into normal operations by using common user agents and making queries through the Salesforce API, which made their activity resemble legitimate integrations and scripts. This allowed them to operate undetected in the SaaS environment, exploiting the trust in third-party connections and highlighting the limitations of traditional detection controls.

Darktrace Coverage

Anomalous activities have been identified across multiple Darktrace deployments that appear associated with this campaign. This included two cases on customers based within the United States who had a Salesforce integration, where the pattern of activities was notably similar.

On August 17, Darktrace observed an account belonging to one of these customers logging in from the rare endpoint 208.68.36[.]90, while the user was seen active from another location. This IP is a known indicator of compromise (IoC) reported by open-source intelligence (OSINT) for the campaign [2].

Figure 1: Cyber AI Analyst Incident summarizing the suspicious login seen for the account.

The login event was associated with the application Drift, further connecting the events to this campaign.

Figure 2: Advanced Search logs showing the Application used to login.

Following the login, the actor initiated a high volume of Salesforce API requests using methods such as GET, POST, and DELETE. The GET requests targeted endpoints like /services/data/v57.0/query and /services/data/v57.0/sobjects/Case/describe, where the former is used to retrieve records based on a specific criterion, while the latter provides metadata for the Case object, including field names and data types [5,6].

Subsequently, a POST request to /services/data/v57.0/jobs/query was observed, likely to initiate a Bulk API query job for extracting large volumes of data from the Ingest Job endpoint [7,8].

Finally, a DELETE request to remove an ingestion job batch, possibly an attempt to obscure traces of prior data access or manipulation.

A case on another US-based customer took place a day later, on August 18. This again began with an account logging in from the rare IP 208.68.36[.]90 involving the application Drift. This was followed by Salesforce GET requests targeting the same endpoints as seen in the previous case, and then a POST to the Ingest Job endpoint and finally a DELETE request, all occurring within one minute of the initial suspicious login.

The chain of anomalous behaviors, including a suspicious login and delete request, resulted in Darktrace’s Autonomous Response capability suggesting a ‘Disable user’ action. However, the customer’s deployment configuration required manual confirmation for the action to take effect.

Figure 3: An example model alert for the user, triggered due to an anomalous API DELETE request.

Figure 4: Model Alert Event Log showing various model alerts for the account that ultimately led to an Autonomous Response model being triggered.

Conclusion

In conclusion, this incident underscores the escalating risks of SaaS supply chain attacks, where third-party integrations can become avenues for attacks. It demonstrates how adversaries can exploit legitimate OAuth tokens and API traffic to circumvent traditional defenses. This emphasizes the necessity for constant monitoring of SaaS and cloud activity, beyond just endpoints and networks, while also reinforcing the significance of applying least privilege access and routinely reviewing OAuth permissions in cloud environments. Furthermore, it provides a wider perspective into the evolution of the threat landscape, shifting towards credential and token abuse as opposed to malware-driven compromise.

‍

Credit to Emma Foulger (Global Threat Research Operations Lead), Calum Hall (Technical Content Researcher), Signe Zaharka (Principal Cyber Analyst), Min Kim (Senior Cyber Analyst), Nahisha Nobregas (Senior Cyber Analyst), Priya Thapa (Cyber Analyst)

Appendices

Darktrace Model Detections

· SaaS / Access / Unusual External Source for SaaS Credential Use

· SaaS / Compromise / Login From Rare Endpoint While User Is Active

· SaaS / Compliance / Anomalous Salesforce API Event

· SaaS / Unusual Activity / Multiple Unusual SaaS Activities

· Antigena / SaaS / Antigena Unusual Activity Block

· Antigena / SaaS / Antigena Suspicious Source Activity Block

Customers should consider integrating Salesforce with Darktrace where possible. These integrations allow better visibility and correlation to spot unusual behavior and possible threats.