May 3, 2021

Understanding Modern-Day Cyber Attacks

Discover how Darktrace detects and mitigates threats in IoT ecosystems and globalized supply chains that are constantly evolving.

Written by

Brianna Leddy

Director of Analyst Operations

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

Brianna Leddy

Director of Analyst Operations

May 2021

It’s ten to five on a Friday afternoon. A technician has come in to perform a routine check on an electronic door. She enters the office with no issues – she works for a trusted third-party vendor, employees see her every week. She opens her laptop and connects to the Door Access Control Unit, a small Internet of Things (IoT) device used to operate the smart lock. Minutes later, trojans have been downloaded onto the company network, a crypto-mining operation has begun, and there is evidence of confidential data being exfiltrated. Where did things go wrong?

Threats in a business: A new dawn surfaces

As organizations keep pace with the demands of digital transformation, the attack surface has become broader than ever before. There are numerous points of entry for a cyber-criminal – from vulnerabilities in IoT ecosystems, to blind spots in supply chains, to insiders misusing their access to the business. Darktrace sees these threats every day. Sometimes, like in the real-world example above, which will be examined in this blog, they can occur in the very same attack.

Insider threats can use their familiarity and level of access to a system as a critical advantage when evading detection and launching an attack. But insiders don’t necessarily have to be malicious. Every employee or contractor is a potential threat: clicking on a phishing link or accidentally releasing data often leads to wide-scale breaches.

At the same time, connectivity in the workspace – with each IoT device communicating with the corporate network and the Internet on its own IP address – is an urgent security issue. Access control systems, for example, add a layer of physical security by tracking who enters the office and when. However, these same control systems imperil digital security by introducing a cluster of sensors, locks, alarm systems, and keypads, which hold sensitive user information and connect to company infrastructure.

Furthermore, a significant proportion of IoT devices are built without security in mind. Vendors prioritize time-to-market and often don’t have the resources to invest in baked-in security measures. Consider the number of start-ups which manufacture IoT – over 60% of home automation companies have fewer than ten employees.

Insider threat detected by Cyber AI

In January 2021, a medium-sized North American company suffered a supply chain attack when a third-party vendor connected to the control unit for a smart door.

Figure 1: The attack lasted 3.5 hours in total, commencing 16:50 local time.

The technician from the vendor’s company had come in to perform scheduled maintenance. They had been authorized to connect directly to the Door Access Control Unit, yet were unaware that the laptop they were using, brought in from outside of the organization, had been infected with malware.

As soon as the laptop connected with the control unit, the malware detected an open port, identified the vulnerability, and began moving laterally. Within minutes, the IoT device was seen making highly unusual connections to rare external IP addresses. The connections were made using HTTP and contained suspicious user agents and URIs.

Darktrace then detected that the control unit was attempting to download trojans and other payloads, including upsupx2.exe and 36BB9658.moe. Other connections were used to send base64 encoded strings containing the device name and the organization’s external IP address.

Cryptocurrency mining activity with a Monero (XMR) CPU miner was detected shortly afterwards. The device also utilized an SMB exploit to make external connections on port 445 while searching for vulnerable internal devices using the outdated SMBv1 protocol.

One hour later, the device connected to an endpoint related to the third-party remote access tool TeamViewer. After a few minutes, the device was seen uploading over 15 MB to a 100% rare external IP.

Figure 2: Timeline of the connections made by an example device on the days around an incident (blue). The connections associated with the compromise are a significant deviation from the device’s normal pattern of life, and result in multiple unusual activity events and repeated model breaches (orange).

Security threats in the supply chain

Cyber AI flagged the insider threat to the customer as soon as the control unit had been compromised. The attack had managed to bypass the rest of the organization’s security stack, for the simple reason that it was introduced directly from a trusted external laptop, and the IoT device itself was managed by the third-party vendor, so the customer had little visibility over it.

Traditional security tools are ineffective against supply chain attacks such as this. From the SolarWinds hack to Vendor Email Compromise, 2021 has put the nail in the coffin for signature-based security – proving that we cannot rely on yesterday’s attacks to predict tomorrow’s threats.

International supply chains and the sheer number of different partners and suppliers which modern organizations work with thus pose a serious security dilemma: how can we allow external vendors onto our network and keep an airtight system?

The first answer is zero-trust access. This involves treating every device as malicious, inside and outside the corporate network, and demanding verification at all stages. The second answer is visibility and response. Security products must shed a clear light into cloud and IoT infrastructure, and react autonomously as soon as subtle anomalies emerge across the enterprise.

IoT investigated

Darktrace’s Cyber AI Analyst reported on every stage of the attack, including the download of the first malicious executable file.

Figure 3: Example of Cyber AI Analyst detecting anomalous behavior on a device, including C2 connectivity and suspicious file downloads.

Cyber AI Analyst investigated the C2 connectivity, providing a high-level summary of the activity. The IoT device had accessed suspicious MOE files with randomly generated alphanumeric names.

Figure 4: A Cyber AI Analyst summary of C2 connectivity for a device.

Not only did the AI detect every stage of the activity, but the customer was also alerted via a Proactive Threat Notification following a high scoring model breach at 16:59, just minutes after the attack had commenced.

Stranger danger

Third parties coming in to tweak device settings and adjust the network can have unintended consequences. The hyper-connected world which we’re living in, with the advent of 5G and Industry 4.0, has become a digital playground for cyber-criminals.

In the real-world case study above, the IoT device was unsecured and misconfigured. With rushed creations of IoT ecosystems, intertwining supply chains, and a breadth of individuals and devices connecting to corporate infrastructure, modern-day organizations cannot expect simple security tools which rely on pre-defined rules to stop insider threats and other advanced cyber-attacks.

The organization did not have visibility over the management of the Door Access Control Unit. Despite this, and despite no prior knowledge of the attack type or the vulnerabilities present in the IoT device, Darktrace detected the behavioral anomalies immediately. Without Cyber AI, the infection could have remained on the customer’s environment for weeks or months, escalating privileges, silently crypto-mining, and exfiltrating sensitive company data.

Thanks to Darktrace analyst Grace Carballo for her insights on the above threat find.

Learn more about insider threats

Darktrace model detections:

Anomalous File/Anomalous Octet Stream
Anomalous Connection/New User Agent to IP Without Hostname
Unusual Activity/Unusual External Connectivity
Device/Increased External Connectivity
Anomalous Server Activity/Outgoing from Server
Device/New User Agent and New IP
Compliance/Cryptocurrency Mining Activity
Compliance/External Windows Connectivity
Anomalous File/Multiple EXE from Rare External Locations
Anomalous File/EXE from Rare External Location
Device/Large Number of Model Breaches
Anomalous File/Internet Facing System File Download
Device/Initial Breach Chain Compromise
Device/SMB Session Bruteforce
Device/Network Scan- Low Anomaly Score
Device/Large Number of Connections to New Endpoint
Anomalous Server Activity/Outgoing from Server
Compromise/Beacon to Young Endpoint
Anomalous Server Activity/Rare External from Server
Device/Multiple C2 Model Breaches
Compliance/Remote Management Tool on Server
Anomalous Connection/Data Sent to New External Device

‍

Written by

Brianna Leddy

Director of Analyst Operations

Inside the SOC

Written by

Brianna Leddy

Director of Analyst Operations

•

June 11, 2025

Nicole Wong

Cyber Security Analyst

Product Marketing Manager, OT Security & Compliance

Watch the NIS2 Webinar

Blog

Cloud

June 12, 2025

Breaking Silos: Why Unified Security is Critical in Hybrid World

Hybrid environments demand end-to-end visibility to stop modern attacks

Hybrid environments are a dominant trend in enterprise technology, but they continue to present unique issues to the defenders tasked with securing them. By 2026, Gartner predicts that 75% of organizations will adopt hybrid cloud strategies [1]. At the same time, only 23% of organizations report full visibility across cloud environments [2].

That means a strong majority of organizations do not have comprehensive visibility across both their on-premises and cloud networks. As a result, organizations are facing major challenges in achieving visibility and security in hybrid environments. These silos and fragmented security postures become a major problem when considering how attacks can move between different domains, exploiting the gaps.

For example, an attack may start with a phishing email, leading to the compromise of a cloud-based application identity and then moving between the cloud and network to exfiltrate data. Some attack types inherently involve multiple domains, like lateral movement and supply chain attacks, which target both on-premises and cloud networks.

Given this, unified visibility is essential for security teams to reduce blind spots and detect threats across the entire attack surface.

Risks of fragmented visibility

Silos arise due to separate teams and tools managing on-premises and cloud environments. Many teams have a hand in cloud security, with some common ones including security, infrastructure, DevOps, compliance, and end users, and these teams can all use different tools. This fragmentation increases the likelihood of inconsistent policies, duplicate alerts, and missed threats. And that’s just within the cloud, not even considering the additional defenses involved with network security.

Without a unified security strategy, gaps between these infrastructures and the teams which manage them can leave organizations vulnerable to cyber-attacks. The lack of visibility between on-premises and cloud environments contributes to missed threats and delayed incident response. In fact, breaches involving stolen or compromised credentials take an average of 292 to identify and contain [3]. That’s almost ten months.

The risk of fragmented visibility runs especially high as companies undergo cloud migrations. As organizations transition to cloud environments, they still have much of their data in on-premises networks, meaning that maintaining visibility across both on-premises and cloud environments is essential for securing critical assets and ensuring seamless operations.

Unified visibility is the solution

Unified visibility is achieved by having a single-pane-of-glass view to monitor both on-premises and cloud environments. This type of view brings many benefits, including streamlined detection, faster response times, and reduced complexity.

This can only be accomplished through integrations or interactions between the teams and tools involved with both on-premises security and cloud security.

AI-driven platforms, like Darktrace, are especially well equipped to enable the real-time monitoring and insights needed to sustain unified visibility. This is because they can handle the large amounts of data and data types.

Darktrace accomplishes this by plugging into an organization’s infrastructure so the AI can ingest and analyze data and its interactions within the environment to form an understanding of the organization’s normal behavior, right down to the granular details of specific users and devices. The system continually revises its understanding about what is normal based on evolving evidence.

This dynamic understanding of normal means that the AI engine can identify, with a high degree of precision, events or behaviors that are both anomalous and unlikely to be benign. This helps reduce noise while surfacing real threats, across cloud and on-prem environments without manual tuning.

In this way, given its versatile AI-based, platform approach, Darktrace empowers security teams with real-time monitoring and insights across both the network and cloud.

Unified visibility in the modern threat landscape

As part of the Darktrace ActiveAI Security Platform™, Darktrace / CLOUD works continuously across public, private, hybrid, and multi-cloud deployments. With real-time Cloud Asset Enumeration and Dynamic Architecture Modeling, Darktrace / CLOUD generates up-to-date architecture diagrams, giving SecOps and DevOps teams a unified view of cloud infrastructures.

It is always on the lookout for changes, driven by user and service activity. For example, unusual user activity can significantly raise the asset’s score, prompting Darktrace’s AI to update its architectural view and keep a living record of the cloud’s ever-changing landscape, providing near real-time insights into what’s happening.

This continuous architectural awareness ensures that security teams have a real-time understanding of cloud behavior and not just a static snapshot.

*Figure 1. Darktrace / CLOUD’s unified view of AWS and Azure cloud posture and compliance over time.*

With this dynamic cloud visibility and monitoring, Darktrace / CLOUD can help unify and secure environments.

Real world example: Remote access supply chain attacks

Sectop Remote Access Trojan (RAT) malware, also known as ‘ArchClient2,’ is a .NET RAT that contains information stealing capabilities and allows threat actors to monitor and control targeted computers. It is commonly distributed through drive-by downloads of illegitimate software via malvertizing.

Darktrace has been able to detect and respond to Sectop RAT attacks using unified visibility and platform-wide coverage. In one such example, Darktrace observed one device making various suspicious connections to unusual endpoints, likely in an attempt to receive C2 information, perform beaconing activity, and exfiltrate data to the cloud.

This type of supply chain attack can jump from the network to the cloud, so a unified view of both environments helps shorten detection and response times, therefore mitigating potential impact. Darktrace’s ability to detect these cross-domain behaviors stems from its AI-driven, platform-native visibility.

Conclusion

Organizations need unified visibility to secure complex, hybrid environments effectively against threats and attacks. To achieve this type of comprehensive visibility, the gaps between legacy security tools across on-premises and cloud networks can be bridged with platform tools that use AI to boost data analysis for highly accurate behavioral prediction and anomaly detection.

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

References:

1. Gartner, May 22, 2023, “10 Strategic Data and Analytics Predictions Through 2028”

2. Cloud Security Alliance, February 14, 2024, “Cloud Security Alliance Survey Finds 77% of Respondents Feel Unprepared to Deal with Security Threats”

3. IBM, “Cost of a Data Breach Report 2024”

About the author

Pallavi Singh

Product Marketing Manager, OT Security & Compliance

Blog

OT

June 11, 2025

Proactive OT security: Lessons on supply chain risk management from a rogue Raspberry Pi

Understanding supply chain risk in manufacturing

For industries running Industrial Control Systems (ICS) such as manufacturing and fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG), complex supply chains mean that disruption to one weak node can have serious impacts to the entire ecosystem. However, supply chain risk does not always originate from outside an organization’s ICS network.

The implicit trust placed on software or shared services for maintenance within an ICS can be considered a type of insider threat [1], where defenders also need to look ‘from within’ to protect against supply chain risk. Attackers have frequently mobilised this form of insider threat:

Many ICS and SCADA systems were compromised during the 2014 Havex Watering Hole attack, where via operators’ implicit trust in the trojanized versions of legitimate applications, on legitimate but compromised websites [2]. ‍
In 2018, the world’s largest manufacturer of semiconductors and processers shut down production for three days after a supplier installed tainted software that spread to over 10,000 machines in the manufacturer’s network [3].
During the 2020 SolarWinds supply chain attack, attackers compromised a version of Orion software that was deployed from SolarWinds’ own servers during a software update to thousands of customers, including tech manufacturing companies such as Intel and Nvidia [4].

Traditional approaches to ICS security have focused on defending against everything from outside the castle walls, or outside of the ICS network. As ICS attacks become more sophisticated, defenders must not solely rely on static perimeter defenses and prevention.

A critical part of active defense is understanding the ICS environment and how it operates, including all possible attack paths to the ICS including network connections, remote access points, the movement of data across zones and conduits and access from mobile devices. For instance, original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) and vendors often install remote access software or third-party equipment in ICS networks to facilitate legitimate maintenance and support activities, which can unintentionally expand the ICS’ attack surface.

This blog describes an example of the convergence between supply chain risk and insider risk, when a vendor left a Raspberry Pi device in a manufacturing customer’s ICS network without the customer’s knowledge.

Case study: Using unsupervised machine learning to detect pre-existing security issues

Raspberry Pi devices are commonly used in SCADA environments as low-cost, remotely accessible data collectors [5][6][7]. They are often paired with Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) for monitoring and tracking [8]. However, these devices also represent a security risk because their small physical size and time-consuming nature of physical inspection makes them easy to overlook. This poses a security risk, as these devices have previously been used to carry out USB-based attacks or to emulate Ethernet-over-USB connections to exfiltrate sensitive data [8][9].

In this incident, a Darktrace customer was unaware that their supplier had installed a Raspberry Pi device on their ICS network. Crucially, the installation occurred prior to Darktrace’s deployment on the customer’s network.

For other anomaly detection tools, this order of events meant that this third-party device would likely have been treated as part of the customer’s existing infrastructure. However, after Darktrace was deployed, it analyzed the metadata from the encrypted HTTPS and DNS connections that the Raspberry Pi made to ‘call home’ to the supplier and determined that these connections were unusual compared to the rest of the devices in the network, even in the absence of any malicious indicators of compromise (IoCs).

Darktrace triggered the following alerts for this unusual activity that consequently notified the customer to the pre-existing threat of an unmanaged device already present in their network:

Compromise / Sustained SSL or HTTP Increase
Compromise / Agent Beacon (Short Period)
Compromise / Agent Beacon (Medium Period)
Compromise / Agent Beacon (Long Period)
Tags / New Raspberry Pi Device
Device / DNS Requests to Unusual Server
Device / Anomaly Indicators / Spike in Connections to Rare Endpoint Indicator

‍*Figure 1: Darktrace’s External Sites Summary showing the rarity of the external endpoint that the Raspberry Pi device ‘called home’ to and the model alerts triggered.*

Darktrace’s Cyber AI Analyst launched an autonomous investigation into the activity, correlating related events into a broader incident and generating a report outlining the potential threat along with supporting technical details.

Darktrace’s anomaly-based detection meant that the Raspberry Pi device did not need to be observed performing clearly malicious behavior to alert the customer to the security risk, and neither can defenders afford to wait for such escalation.

Why is this significant?

In 2021 a similar attack took place. Aiming to poison a Florida water treatment facility, attackers leveraged a TeamViewer instance that had been dormant on the system for six months, effectively allowing the attacker to ‘live off the land’ [10].

The Raspberry Pi device in this incident also remained outside the purview of the customer’s security team at first. It could have been leveraged by a persistent attacker to pivot within the internal network and communicate externally.

A proactive approach to active defense that seeks to minimize and continuously monitor the attack surface and network is crucial.

The growing interest in manufacturing from attackers and policymakers

Significant motivations for targeting the manufacturing sector and increasing regulatory demands make the convergence of supply chain risk, insider risk, and the prevalence of stealthy living-off-the-land techniques particularly relevant to this sector.

Manufacturing is consistently targeted by cybercriminals [11], and the sector’s ‘just-in-time’ model grants attackers the opportunity for high levels of disruption. Furthermore, under NIS 2, manufacturing and some food and beverage processing entities are now designated as ‘important’ entities. This means stricter incident reporting requirements within 24 hours of detection, and enhanced security requirements such as the implementation of zero trust and network segmentation policies, as well as measures to improve supply chain resilience [12][13][14].

How can Darktrace help?

Ultimately, Darktrace successfully assisted a manufacturing organization in detecting a potentially disruptive 'near-miss' within their OT environment, even in the absence of traditional IoCs. Through passive asset identification techniques and continuous network monitoring, the customer improved their understanding of their network and supply chain risk.

While the swift detection of the rogue device allowed the threat to be identified before it could escalate, the customer could have reduced their time to respond by using Darktrace’s built-in response capabilities, had Darktrace’s Autonomous Response capability been enabled. Darktrace’s Autonomous Response can be configured to target specific connections on a rogue device either automatically upon detection or following manual approval from the security team, to stop it communicating with other devices in the network while allowing other approved devices to continue operating. Furthermore, the exportable report generated by Cyber AI Analyst helps security teams to meet NIS 2’s enhanced reporting requirements.

Sophisticated ICS attacks often leverage insider access to perform in-depth reconnaissance for the development of tailored malware capabilities. This case study and high-profile ICS attacks highlight the importance of mitigating supply chain risk in a similar way to insider risk. As ICS networks adapt to the introduction of IIoT, remote working and the increased convergence between IT and OT, it is important to ensure the approach to secure against these threats is compatible with the dynamic nature of the network.

Credit to Nicole Wong (Principal Cyber Analyst), Matthew Redrup (Senior Analyst and ANZ Team Lead)

[related-resource]

Appendices

MITRE ATT&CK Mapping

Infrastructure / New Raspberry Pi Device - INITIAL ACCESS - T1200 Hardware Additions
Device / DNS Requests to Unusual Server - CREDENTIAL ACCESS, COLLECTION - T1557 Man-in-the-Middle
Compromise / Agent Beacon - COMMAND AND CONTROL - T1071.001 Web Protocols