Darktrace cyber analysts are world-class experts in threat intelligence, threat hunting and incident response, and provide 24/7 SOC support to thousands of Darktrace customers around the globe. Inside the SOC is exclusively authored by these experts, providing analysis of cyber incidents and threat trends, based on real-world experience in the field.
Written by
Max Heinemeyer
Global Field CISO
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01
Feb 2018
The algorithms made famous by Conficker almost a decade ago are continuing to frustrate the security community.
A function of some advanced malware, Domain Generating Algorithms (DGA) rapidly generate new domains as a means of evading security personnel. This process is known as ‘domain fluxing’ and provides an alternative means of communication with the attacker’s command-and-control servers. They are very difficult to detect using a traditional security approach.
Darktrace’s AI and machine learning are designed to detect threats without any pre-existing knowledge of attacker targets, tools, or capabilities. While traditional security tools depend on specific Indicators of Compromise to identify malicious activity, Darktrace instead focuses on behavioral changes that may point to an active compromise. Detection of Domain Generating Algorithms is just one example of Darktrace’s ability to pinpoint attacker C2 communications through the identification of behavioral anomalies.
DGA identification in action
Darktrace recently saw an employee of a healthcare company connecting a personal laptop to the corporate network. The employee was asked by another member of the organization to troubleshoot the laptop as a favor. Unbeknown to the employee, and despite the fact that anti-virus was installed, the laptop was compromised by an unknown strain of malware.
On joining the network, the compromised laptop made DNS queries for domains that Darktrace classified as 100% rare for the environment. These domains appeared to be dynamically generated as they were all between 25 to 30 characters long and used multiple top-level domains. Darktrace immediately triggered a high-scoring domain fluxing alert due to the sudden increase in failed DNS requests for abnormal domains.
Additional domain fluxing alerts were triggered within 30 minutes of the device joining the network. The only reason that this highly suspicious activity was allowed to persist for that period of time was that the security administrator was at lunch.
A sample of Darktrace network logs showing failed DNS requests for DGA domains.
Event logs showing domain fluxing identification within 14 seconds of the device joining the network.
Rapid containment
The security administrator was informed of the situation on his return and immediately performed incident triage with Darktrace. The administrator was able to rapidly assess the device’s connection history using Darktrace’s native filters that are designed to detect scanning, lateral movement, C2 communications, and egress. He then identified the location of the compromised laptop, disabled its internet access, and physically removed the device from the network.
The total time from initial connection to identification, containment, and removal of the compromised, rogue device was approximately 67 minutes. The administrator left the following comment for the Darktrace analyst team:
Darktrace Threat Visualizer shows multiple domain fluxing model breaches as a result of a high volume of failed DNS requests for suspicious, dynamically-generated domains.
Closing thoughts
Darktrace’s AI approach focuses on identifying anomalies in evolving patterns of behavior. Although the laptop was new to the network, no other device was seen making a high volume of failed DNS requests for similar DGA domains. Darktrace immediately identified this activity as anomalous and generated an alert within 14 seconds of the device joining the network.
By employing Darktrace, a single analyst was able to discover and assess a compromised, rogue device operating within the network environment in just over an hour. What’s more, with Antigena (Darktrace’s autonomous response solution) in place, all suspicious behaviors would have been temporarily suspended, in real time. Alternatively, the administrator could have manually authorized Antigena’s proposed actions via the Darktrace Mobile App.
No extensive analysis of distributed log files, PCAPs, or other security tools. No prior knowledge of the attacker’s infrastructure or the malware. Darktrace AI identified DGA domains that were being produced on the fly, without help. That’s the level our security technology must perform at if we are to keep on top of all the new tech in the modern attacker’s toolkit.
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.
Darktrace Advances Incident Investigation and AI-Agent Security with OpenAI Daybreak Models
Earlier this year, Darktrace joined OpenAI’s Daybreak Defense Network to explore how their cyber capabilities can be integrated within Darktrace products and services to transform how security teams move from signal to action.
At the heart of this work is Darktrace's behavioral understanding of customer environments and identification of complex security incidents, combined with OpenAI models that can add context to help explain why an incident matters and its potential impact on the business. By bringing these capabilities into defensive workflows security teams already use, the goal is to give defenders not just greater visibility, but the context and guidance they need to act with confidence.
Since joining the program, we've been working with OpenAI to explore how these capabilities can address specific security challenges for defenders.
The problem we're solving
Attackers continue to change how they operate, including by using AI to increase the speed and scale of some techniques. Security teams are already managing a large volume of alerts, and the question isn't just what's happening, but how it could affect the organization. Even when an incident is fully investigated and correlated, technical severity alone doesn't tell a security team how much it actually matters to the business. That same challenge extends to internal AI adoption. As organizations adopt more AI systems and agents, security teams need visibility into their behavior, access and activity, along with the broader business context needed to identify and investigate potential risk.
Darktrace's Adaptive AI™ builds a detailed, organization-specific picture of what's normal for each environment, and uses that picture to investigate threats and identify complex security activity across domains. OpenAI's models can build on Darktrace's correlated, technically prioritized incidents by adding context that can help defenders understand what may be at stake.
What we're building
Our work is focused on two areas: supporting security investigation and response, and helping defenders identify risky behavior across enterprise AI systems and agents.
The first aligns Darktrace's behavioral understanding with OpenAI models to support security investigation and prioritization. Darktrace's Adaptive AI continuously learns the unique patterns of normal behavior within each customer it protects, creating a deep, organization-specific understanding of its digital estate. When unusual activity emerges, OpenAI's models can draw on that context to help analysts investigate the incident, understand its significance and assess potential business consequences — reducing the need to manually assemble context from fragmented signals.
Second, we are exploring how these capabilities can support AI-agent and runtime security through Darktrace / SECURE AI™. OpenAI’s Daybreak models can build on the detections and visibility Darktrace / SECURE AI provides, connecting signals across a customer's environment and help defenders identify potentially risky behavior involving AI systems and agents. Activity that might appear isolated can instead be connected with related signals, helping defenders investigate the broader context and determine appropriate remediation.
Darktrace brings deep cybersecurity expertise, an evolving understanding of each customer's environment, and AI-driven identification of threats across the digital estate. Through the Daybreak Defense Network, Darktrace is exploring how OpenAI models can augment those capabilities in defensive security workflows — supporting incident investigation and response and improving visibility into AI-agent and runtime risk.
These capabilities are still in development, and we're excited to continue building on this work.
To learn more about how Darktrace continues to innovate to meet today's most pressing security challenges, register for our upcoming launch broadcast here.
Botnet Behind the Camera: Mirai Katana Activity on a Video Recording Device
Key takeaways
Darktrace identified a camera device infected with the Mirai/Katana botnet in a sports-sector customer environment, showing how exposed IoT devices can become active participants in wider attack chains.
The compromise involved suspicious Wget behavior, file downloads from rare external IPs, unusual incoming HTTP connections to video recorder management interfaces, and large outbound data transfers to infrastructure associated with botnet activity.
The incident highlights the importance of extending visibility and response beyond traditional endpoints, as unmanaged or overlooked connected devices can be exploited for command-and-control, malware delivery, and data exfiltration.
Mirai and the Katana variant
Mirai is a botnet that first emerged in August 2016 and is well known for launching large-scale distributed-denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, typically targeting exposed Internet of Things (IoT) devices. It identifies vulnerable IoT devices ,often by abusing default credentials or exposed services, and recruiting them into a remotely controlled botnet that can be used in DDoS campaigns [1].
Katana, one of the many variants that arose after Mirai’s source code was released publicly, was first observed in late 2020 and has been seen using more advanced capabilities, including custom command-and-control (C2), persistence mechanisms, and DDoS functionality [2].
In March 2026, research from the Nokia Deepfield Emergency Response Team (ERT) identified Katana as a Mirai-derived DDoS botnet targeting Android-based TV set-top boxes through exposed Android Debug Bridge (ADB) access. Observed capabilities included custom C2, runtime domain rotation, multiple DDoS methods, and an on-device compiled kernel rootkit used for persistence and stealth [3].
Darktrace’s detection of Mirai Botnet activity on a camera device
In early 2026, Darktrace identified a Network/Digital Video Recorder (NVR/DVR) on the network of a sports-sector customer that had been infected with the Mirai Katana botnet and subsequently used to exfiltrate data from the customer’s environment. Seemingly related follow-up activity was observed on the same device several months later.
In both instances, the Darktrace Security Operations Centre (SOC) alerted the customer as part of the Managed Threat Detection (MTD) service. However, as Darktrace’s Autonomous Response capability was not fully enabled on the affected device, Darktrace was unable to proactively block the suspicious activity or prevent the compromise from continuing and recurring.
The initial compromise appears to have occurred when the affected device was seen using Wget to download Linux-based Executable and Linkable Format (ELF) files from a rare external IP, 195.177.94[.]105, which had not previously been observed in the customer’s network. Further analysis downloaded file hashes identified files related to the Mirai botnet.
Figure 1: Darktrace’s Real-Time AI Analyst investigation into the unusual outbound connection where the ELF files were downloaded.
Within a few hours, Darktrace detected the device uploading close to 3GB of data to another external IP, 50.7.49[.]4:3017 (ASN AS30058 FDCSERVERS), suggesting that the activity was likely routed via a virtual private server (VPS) hosted by FDC Servers [2]. Attackers often abuse VPS infrastructure from legitimate cloud providers to blend in with legitimate traffic and evade IP reputation and geolocation-based detections.
Figure 2: Darktrace’s detection of the unusual data upload activity by the affected camera device.
Darktrace continued to observe similar data transfers to multiple rare endpoints including 171.225.223[.]53, 95.161.128[.]62, 61.7.209[.]88, 95.161.128[.]62, which have been linked to Mirai by open-source intelligence (OSINT).
Figure 3: Darktrace’s detection of spikes in unusual external data transfer activity from the camera device.
Exploitation continued
Several months later, Darktrace identified the same exfiltration pattern on the device again, this time with stronger indications of associations with Mirai Katana botnet infection.
The device received incoming HTTP connections from 129.121.114[.]124, an external IP known to be associated with the Katana botnet IP [3]. The connections targeted the ‘/dvr/cmd’ path using the root username and user agent Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/42.0.2311.135 Safari/537.36 Edge/12.246.
The ‘/dvr/cmd’ path appears to be associated with the affected device’s web management functionality. This API endpoint has historically been targeted by Mirai and other IoT botnets through the exploitation of critical command injection vulnerabilities and automated botnet exploitation [4].
Figure 4: Darktrace’s detection of HTTP connectivity from the external IP associated with Mirai Katana Botnet.
A few days later, Darktrace observed the Wget utility being used to download ELF files, including “/lil”, from the IP 129.121.114[.]124. OSINT reporting has since associated this IP address with the Mirai Katana botnet. Notably, the IP observed earlier in the year, 195.177.94[.]105, had also hosted a file named “lil”, indicating a link between the observed activity.
Over the following days, the device received a sudden spike in connections from multiple rare external endpoints, suggesting a possible successful brute force attack. Darktrace also observed the device exfiltrating just under 4GB of data to another Mirai-associated IP address, 66.92.198[.]194, over ports 3344, 954922, and 80. Finally, the device was seen uploading data to the Mirai botnet IP 5.175.249[.]53 over port138 and exhibited an increase in UDP connections to 34.18.28[.]10 over port 9068.
Following both file download events, Darktrace identified spikes in external data transfers and connection attempts to rare destinations. While Darktrace’s Threat Research team could not confirm with high confidence that this to activity was directly associated with Mirai, it may indicate that Mirai Katana includes data exfiltration functionality.
Darktrace’s threat researchers also identified an internet-facing NTP server belonging to a separate customer receiving incoming connection attempts from the same initially observed IP, 195.177.94[.]105,over the port 123. This suggests that Mirai Katana may not exclusively target IoT devices.
Conclusion
This case demonstrates how threat actors can exploit overlooked IoT and OT devices to support broader malicious objectives. Here, a camera device infected with a botnet was used to exfiltrate data from the customer's environment, showing how peripheral assets can become active participants in an attack chain.
This case also reinforces a challenge many organizations face today: extending security visibility beyond traditional endpoints and servers. Cameras, sensors, and other connected devices often operate with limited monitoring and may fall outside established security processes, despite maintaining network connectivity and access to potentially sensitive environments. This is particularly relevant in the sports sector, where growing reliance on connected cameras, smart stadium technologies, and other IoT devices continues to expand the attack surface, as highlighted in Darktrace's Sports Sector Threat Report.
As botnets like Kata and Mirai continue to evolve, defenders need visibility across unmanaged IoT and edge devices, as well as security solutions that can recognize subtle deviations in device behavior that may indicate an emerging compromise.
Credit to Parvatha Ananthakannan (Cyber Analyst), Signe Zaharka (Principal Analyst)
Edited by Ryan Traill (Content Manager)
Appendices
Darktrace Model Detections
· Anomalous File / EXE from Rare External Location
· Anomalous File / Multiple EXE from Rare External Locations
· Device / Initial Attack Chain Activity
· Unusual Activity / Unusual External Data to New Endpoint
· Anomalous Connection / Data Sent to Rare Domain
· Unusual Activity / Enhanced Unusual External Data Transfer
· Anomalous Connection / Uncommon 1 GiB Outbound
· Device / Significant UDP Increase
· Anomalous Connection / Low and Slow Exfiltration to IP
· Compromise / Large Number of Suspicious Failed Connections
· Compromise / Large Number of Suspicious Successful Connections
