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
Narinder Bains
Infrastructure Manager, National Farmers' Union (Guest Contributor)
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Sep 2022
The National Farmers' Union (NFU) is the largest farmers’ organization in England and Wales, representing more than 46,000 farming businesses and over 80,000 members. We champion farmers across the country and represent them in Europe, negotiating with governments and other organizations from our Brussels office.
Despite the wide scope of our operations, our IT team consists of only 15 individuals. Because of this, we began looking for a security solution which could bolster our small team and its capacity to monitor our organization without complicating our security efforts.
Revealing NFU’s Environment with AI
We were satisfied that our firewalls and other older security tools were doing all that they could to protect our perimeter security. These tools could be working perfectly, but we would still lack the ability to know whether attacks were unfolding under the radar within our network. In other words, we needed visibility when there were already hackers inside.
Even with the best perimeter protection we could buy, this remained a blind spot, and the numerous high-profile stories in the news regarding successful ransomware attacks over last few years left the team increasingly on edge.
We also knew that attackers weren’t just probing in one area – we needed coverage over our entire digital estate, including our endpoint devices and Microsoft 365 activity. These were the areas that were the most difficult to get visibility over, but also the newest parts of our digital estate and the most vulnerable to attacks.
When we were introduced to Darktrace, we quickly saw its potential: the visibility it gave us across our digital estate was unparalleled, and its Autonomous Response technology was something we knew could be a huge benefit for NFU.
Previously, we’d lost hours sifting through data in an attempt to respond to attacks, and that’s only after dealing with numerous emails and false positives from our old security solutions. Once Darktrace was implemented, it covered everything, allowing us to view our entire organization from a single platform, and it dealt with threats 24/7 without requiring any input from us.
Taking action on a pre-infected endpoint
NFU’s adoption of hybrid working brought the importance of endpoint security to the forefront of our team’s minds. The dispersion of company devices across the country made it harder than ever for the team to monitor logs with their existing manpower, and we were constantly worried that an employee at home – whether or not they were connected to the company VPN – might inadvertently open us up to an attack like ransomware.
Because it bases its detection on an understanding of the digital estate’s ‘normal’ behaviors, we hadn’t expected that Darktrace would be able to spot threats in pre-infected environments. As soon as we deployed Darktrace/Endpoint, however, it spotted a user trying to make root level changes to one of our servers from a company laptop without permission, and immediately blocked the activity while allowing the user to continue legitimate business operations. Its ability to differentiate between benign and risky activity was impressive.
A straightforward threat summary delivered to our security team allowed us to understand the situation quickly and easily. Seeing this technology not only spotting dangerous activity, but quickly taking the necessary steps to stop it and strengthen our security posture in its wake, has really given us that extra peace of mind.
Enhancing existing tools with AI
Adding something to your security stack can often mean taking one step forward and two steps back, as the incorporation of a new solution can damage the ability of an old one. For example, creating two VPNs: while it seems like it might provide greater security, the two networks often disrupt one another and only make protection more difficult.
Darktrace, however, augments existing endpoint solutions, utilizing the data they gather in its investigations. By implementing the technology, we weren’t replacing our existing security tools but enhancing them. The way we see it, the greater the depth and breadth of information we feed into Darktrace’s AI, the greater its understanding and the better its decision-making; ultimately, the better it can protect our organization.
In addition to our endpoint devices, Darktrace now works across our Microsoft 365 environments and the network. It uses data from all three areas to draw conclusions about emerging threats and can take action against attacks wherever and whenever they emerge in the digital environment. Knowing this allows us to finally feel confident in our security posture, and to focus our efforts on the rest of our business operations.
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
Narinder Bains
Infrastructure Manager, National Farmers' Union (Guest Contributor)
ClearFake: From Fake CAPTCHAs to Blockchain-Driven Payload Retrieval
Darktrace detected a potential ClearFake‑related incident involving signs of EtherHiding activity and interactions with blockchain‑based infrastructure. A single device showed repeated suspicious command‑line behavior, primarily involving Microsoft HTML Application Host. The activity occurred over the course of a day and indicated early‑stage attempts to load malicious content associated with the ClearFake campaign.
When Trust Becomes the Attack Surface: Supply-Chain Attacks in an Era of Automation and Implicit Trust
Software supply-chain attacks in 2026
Software supply-chain attacks now represent the primary threat shaping the 2026 security landscape. Rather than relying on exploits at the perimeter, attackers are targeting the connective tissue of modern engineering environments: package managers, CI/CD automation, developer systems, and even the security tools organizations inherently trust.
These incidents are not isolated cases of poisoned code. They reflect a structural shift toward abusing trusted automation and identity at ecosystem scale, where compromise propagates through systems designed for speed, not scrutiny. Ephemeral build runners, regardless of provider, represent high‑trust, low‑visibility execution zones.
The Axios compromise and the cascading Trivy campaign illustrate how quickly this abuse can move once attacker activity enters build and delivery workflows. This blog provides an overview of the latest supply chain and security tool incidents with Darktrace telemetry and defensive actions to improve organizations defensive cyber posture.
1. Why the Axios Compromise Scaled
On 31 March 2026, attackers hijacked the npm account of Axios’s lead maintainer, publishing malicious versions 1.14.1 and 0.30.4 that silently pulled in a malicious dependency, plain‑crypto‑[email protected]. Axios is a popular HTTP client for node.js and processes 100 million weekly downloads and appears in around 80% of cloud and application environments, making this a high‑leverage breach [1].
The attack chain was simple yet effective:
A compromised maintainer account enabled legitimate‑looking malicious releases.
The poisoned dependency executed Remote Access Trojans (RATs) across Linux, macOS and Windows systems.
The malware beaconed to a remote command-and-control (C2) server every 60 seconds in a loop, awaiting further instructions.
The installer self‑cleaned by deleting malicious artifacts.
All of this matters because a single maintainer compromise was enough to project attacker access into thousands of trusted production environments without exploiting a single vulnerability.
A view from Darktrace
Multiple cases linked with the Axios compromise were identified across Darktrace’s customer base in March 2026, across both Darktrace / NETWORK and Darktrace / CLOUD deployments.
In one Darktrace / CLOUD deployment, an Azure Cloud Asset was observed establishing new external HTTP connectivity to the IP 142.11.206[.]73 on port 8000. Darktrace deemed this activity as highly anomalous for the device based on several factors, including the rarity of the endpoint across the network and the unusual combination of protocol and port for this asset. As a result, the triggering the "Anomalous Connection / Application Protocol on Uncommon Port" model was triggered in Darktrace / CLOUD. Detection was driven by environmental context rather than a known indicator at the time. Subsequent reporting later classified the destination as malicious in relation to the Axios supply‑chain compromise, reinforcing the gap that often exists between initial attacker activity and the availability of actionable intelligence. [5]
Additionally, shortly before this C2 connection, the device was observed communicating with various endpoints associated with the NPM package manager, further reinforcing the association with this attack.
Figure 1: Darktrace’s detection of the unusual external connection to 142.11[.]206[.]73 via port 8000.
Within Axios cases observed within Darktrace / NETWORK customer environments, activity generally focused on the use of newly observed cURL user agents in outbound connections to the C2 URL sfrclak[.]com/6202033, alongside the download of malicious files.
In other cases, Darktrace / NETWORK customers with Microsoft Defender for Endpoint integration received alerts flagging newly observed system executables and process launches associated with C2 communication.
Figure 2: A Security Integration Alert from Microsoft Defender for Endpoint associated with the Axios supply chain attack.
2. Why Trivy bypassed security tooling trust
Between late February and March 22, 2026, the threat group TeamPCP leveraged credentials from a previous incident to insert malicious artifacts across Trivy’s distribution ecosystem, including its CI automation, release binaries, Visual Studio Code extensions, and Docker container images [2].
While public reporting has emphasized GitHub Actions, Darktrace telemetry highlights attacker execution within CI/CD runner environments, including ephemeral build runners. These execution contexts are typically granted broad trust and limited visibility, allowing malicious activity within build automation to blend into expected operational workflows, regardless of provider.
This was a coordinated multi‑phase attack:
75 of 76 of trivy-action tags and all setup‑trivy tags were force‑pushed to deliver a malicious payload.
A malicious binary (v0.69.4) was distributed across all major distribution channels.
Developer machines were compromised, receiving a persistent backdoor and a self-propagating worm.
Secrets were exfiltrated at scale, including SSH keys, Kuberenetes tokens, database passwords, and cloud credentials across Amazon Web Service (AWS), Azure, and Google Cloud Platform (GCP).
Within Darktrace’s customer base, an AWS EC2 instance monitored by Darktrace / CLOUD appeared to have been impacted by the Trivy attack. On March 19, the device was seen connecting to the attacker-controlled C2 server scan[.]aquasecurtiy[.]org (45.148.10[.]212), triggering the model 'Anomalous Server Activity / Outgoing from Server’ in Darktrace / CLOUD.
Despite this limited historical context, Darktrace assessed this activity as suspicious due to the rarity of the destination endpoint across the wider deployment. This resulted in the triggering of a model alert and the generation of a Cyber AI Analyst incident to further analyze and correlate the attack activity.
TeamPCP’s continued abused of GitHub Actions against security and IT tooling has also been observed more recently in Darktrace’s customer base. On April 22, an AWS asset was seen connecting to the C2 endpoint audit.checkmarx[.]cx (94.154.172[.]43). The timing of this activity suggests a potential link to a malicious Bitwarden package distributed by the threat actor, which was only available for a short timeframe on April 22. [4][3]
Figure 3: A model alert flagging unusual external connectivity from the AWS asset, as seen in Darktrace / CLOUD .
While the Trivy activity originated within build automation, the underlying failure mode mirrors later intrusions observed via management tooling. In both cases, attackers leveraged platforms designed for scale and trust to execute actions that blended into normal operational noise until downstream effects became visible.
Quest KACE: Legacy Risk, Real Impact
The Quest KACE System Management Appliance (SMA) incident reinforces that software risk is not confined to development pipelines alone. High‑trust infrastructure and management platforms are increasingly leveraged by adversaries when left unpatched or exposed to the internet.
Throughout March 2026, attackers exploited CVE 2025-32975 to authentication on outdated, internet-facing KACE appliances, gaining administrative control and pushing remote payloads into enterprise environments. Organizations still running pre-patch versions effectively handed adversaries a turnkey foothold, reaffirming a simple strategic truth: legacy management systems are now part of the supply-chain threat surface, and treating them as “low-risk utilities” is no longer defensible [3].
Within the Darktrace customer base, a potential case was identified in mid-March involving an internet-facing server that exhibited the use of a new user agent alongside unusual file downloads and unexpected external connectivity. Darktrace identified the device downloading file downloads from "216.126.225[.]156/x", "216.126.225[.]156/ct.py" and "216.126.225[.]156/n", using the user agents, "curl/8.5.0" & "Python-urllib/3.9".
The timeframe and IoCs observed point towards likely exploitation of CVE‑2025‑32975. As with earlier incidents, the activity became visible through deviations in expected system behavior rather than through advance knowledge of exploitation or attacker infrastructure. The delay between observed exploitation and its addition to the Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) catalogue underscores a recurring failure: retrospective validation cannot keep pace with adversaries operating at automation speed.
The strategic pattern: Ecosystem‑scale adversaries
The Axios and Trivy compromises are not anomalies; they are signals of a structural shift in the threat landscape. In this post-trust era, the compromise of a single maintainer, repository token, or CI/CD tag can produce large-scale blast radiuses with downstream victims numbering in the thousands. Attackers are no longer just exploiting vulnerabilities; they are exploiting infrastructure privileges, developer trust relationships, and automated build systems that the industry has generally under secured.
Supply‑chain compromise should now be treated as an assumed breach scenario, not a specialized threat class, particularly across build, integration, and management infrastructure. Organizations must operate under the assumption that compromise will occur within trusted software and automation layers, not solely at the network edge or user endpoint. Defenders should therefore expect compromise to emerge from trusted automation layers before it is labelled, validated, or widely understood.
The future of supply‑chain defense lies in continuous behavioral visibility, autonomous detection across developer and build environments, and real‑time anomaly identification.
As AI increasingly shapes software development and security operations, defenders must assume adversaries will also operate with AI in the loop. The defensive edge will come not from predicting specific compromises, but from continuously interrogating behavior across environments humans can no longer feasibly monitor at scale.
Credit to Nathaniel Jones (VP, Security & AI Strategy, FCISCO), Emma Foulger (Global Threat Research Operations Lead), Justin Torres (Senior Cyber Analyst), Tara Gould (Malware Research Lead)
How email-delivered prompt injection attacks can target enterprise AI – and why it matters
What are email-delivered prompt injection attacks?
As organizations rapidly adopt AI assistants to improve productivity, a new class of cyber risk is emerging alongside them: email-delivered AI prompt injection. Unlike traditional attacks that target software vulnerabilities or rely on social engineering, this is the act of embedding malicious or manipulative instructions into content that an AI system will process as part of its normal workflow. Because modern AI tools are designed to ingest and reason over large volumes of data, including emails, documents, and chat histories, they can unintentionally treat hidden attacker-controlled text as legitimate input.
At Darktrace, our analysis has shown an increase of 90% in the number of customer deployments showing signals associated with potential prompt injection attempts since we began monitoring for this type of activity in late 2025. While it is not always possible to definitively attribute each instance, internal scoring systems designed to identify characteristics consistent with prompt injection have recorded a growing number of high-confidence matches. The upward trend suggests that attackers are actively experimenting with these techniques.
Recent examples of prompt injection attacks
Two early examples of this evolving threat are HashJack and ShadowLeak, which illustrate prompt injection in practice.
HashJack is a novel prompt injection technique discovered in November 2025 that exploits AI-powered web browsers and agentic AI browser assistants. By hiding malicious instructions within the URL fragment (after the # symbol) of a legitimate, trusted website, attackers can trick AI web assistants into performing malicious actions – potentially inserting phishing links, fake contact details, or misleading guidance directly into what appears to be a trusted AI-generated output.
ShadowLeak is a prompt injection method to exfiltrate PII identified in September 2025. This was a flaw in ChatGPT (now patched by OpenAI) which worked via an agent connected to email. If attackers sent the target an email containing a hidden prompt, the agent was tricked into leaking sensitive information to the attacker with no user action or visible UI.
What’s the risk of email-delivered prompt injection attacks?
Enterprise AI assistants often have complete visibility across emails, documents, and internal platforms. This means an attacker does not need to compromise credentials or move laterally through an environment. If successful, they can influence the AI to retrieve relevant information seamlessly, without the labor of compromise and privilege escalation.
The first risk is data exfiltration. In a prompt injection scenario, malicious instructions may be embedded within an ordinary email. As in the ShadowLeak attack, when AI processes that content as part of a legitimate task, it may interpret the hidden text as an instruction. This could result in the AI disclosing sensitive data, summarizing confidential communications, or exposing internal context that would otherwise require significant effort to obtain.
The second risk is agentic workflow poisoning. As AI systems take on more active roles, prompt injection can influence how they behave over time. An attacker could embed instructions that persist across interactions, such as causing the AI to include malicious links in responses or redirect users to untrusted resources. In this way, the attacker inserts themselves into the workflow, effectively acting as a man-in-the-middle within the AI system.
Why can’t other solutions catch email-delivered prompt injection attacks?
AI prompt injection challenges many of the assumptions that traditional email security is built on. It does not fit the usual patterns of phishing, where the goal is to trick a user into clicking a link or opening an attachment.
Most security solutions are designed to detect signals associated with user engagement: suspicious links, unusual attachments, or social engineering cues. Prompt injection avoids these indicators entirely, meaning there are fewer obvious red flags.
In this case, the intention is actually the opposite of user solicitation. The objective is simply for the email to be delivered and remain in the inbox, appearing benign and unremarkable. The malicious element is not something the recipient is expected to engage with, or even notice.
Detection is further complicated by the nature of the prompts themselves. Unlike known malware signatures or consistent phishing patterns, injected prompts can vary widely in structure and wording. This makes simple pattern-matching approaches, such as regex, unreliable. A broad rule set risks generating large numbers of false positives, while a narrow one is unlikely to capture the diversity of possible injections.
How does Darktrace catch these types of attacks?
The Darktrace approach to email security more generally is to look beyond individual indicators and assess context, which also applies here.
For example, our prompt density score identifies clusters of prompt-like language within an email rather than just single occurrences. Instead of treating the presence of a phrase as a blocking signal, the focus is on whether there is an unusual concentration of these patterns in a way that suggests injection. Additional weighting can be applied where there are signs of obfuscation. For example, text that is hidden from the user – such as white font or font size zero – but still readable by AI systems can indicate an attempt to conceal malicious prompts.
This is combined with broader behavioral signals. The same communication context used to detect other threats remains relevant, such as whether the content is unusual for the recipient or deviates from normal patterns.
Ask your email provider about email-delivered AI prompt injection
Prompt injection targets not just employees, but the AI systems they rely on, so security approaches need to account for both.
Though there are clear indications of emerging activity, it remains to be seen how popular prompt injection will be with attackers going forward. Still, considering the potential impact of this attack type, it’s worth checking if this risk has been considered by your email security provider.
Questions to ask your email security provider
What safeguards are in place to prevent emails from influencing AI‑driven workflows over time?
How do you assess email content that’s benign for a human reader, but may carry hidden instructions intended for AI systems?
If an email contains no links, no attachments, and no social engineering cues, what signals would your platform use to identify malicious intent?
![Darktrace’s detection of the unusual external connection to 142.11[.]206[.]73 via port 8000.](https://cdn.prod.website-files.com/626ff4d25aca2edf4325ff97/69fa6d343ee828935a4a00f5_Screenshot%202026-05-05%20at%203.20.33%E2%80%AFPM.png)
