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April 16, 2025

AI Uncovered: Introducing Darktrace Incident Graph Evaluation for Security Threats (DIGEST)

Discover how Darktrace’s new DIGEST model enhances Cyber AI Analyst by using GNNs and RNNs to score and prioritize threats with expert-level precision before damage is done.
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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.
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16
Apr 2025

DIGEST advances how Cyber AI Analyst scores and prioritizes incidents. Trained on over a million anonymized incident graphs, our model brings deeper context to severity scoring by analyzing how threats are structured and how they evolve. DIGEST assesses threats as an expert, before damage is done. For more details beyond this overview, please read our Technical Research Paper.

Darktrace combines machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) approaches using a multi-layered, multi-method approach. The result is an AI system that continuously ingests data from across an organization’s environment, learns from it, and adapts in real time. DIGEST adds a new layer to this system, specifically to our Cyber AI Analyst, the first and most experienced AI Analyst in cybersecurity, dedicated to refining how incidents are scored and prioritized. DIGEST improves what your team uses to focus on what matters the most first.

To build DIGEST, we combined Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) to interpret incident structure with Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) to analyze how incidents evolve over time. This pairing allows DIGEST to reliably determine the potential severity of an incident even at an early stage to give the Cyber AI Analyst a critical edge in identifying high-risk threats early and recognizing when activity is unlikely to escalate.

DIGEST works locally in real-time regardless of whether your Darktrace deployment is on prem or in the cloud, without requiring data to be sent externally for decisions to be made. It was built to support teams in all environments, including those with strict data controls and limited connectivity.

Our approach to AI is unique, drawing inspiration from multiple disciplines to tackle the toughest cybersecurity challenges. DIGEST demonstrates how a novel application of GNNs and RNNs improves the prioritization and triage of security incidents. By blending interdisciplinary expertise with innovative AI techniques, we are able to push the boundaries of what’s possible and deliver it where it is needed most. We are eager to share our findings to accelerate progress throughout the broader field of AI development.

DIGEST: Pattern, progression, and prioritization

Most security incidents start quietly. A device contacting an unusual domain. Credentials are used at unexpected hours. File access patterns shift. The fundamental challenge is not always detecting these anomalies but knowing what to address first. DIGEST gives us this capability.

To understand DIGEST, it helps to start with Cyber AI Analyst, a critical component of our Self-Learning AI system and a front-line triage partner in security investigations. It combines supervised and unsupervised machine learning (ML) techniques, natural language processing (NLP), and graph-based reasoning to investigate and summarize security incidents.

DIGEST was built as an additional layer of analysis within Cyber AI Analyst. It enhances its capabilities by refining how incidents are scored and prioritized, helping teams focus on what matters most more quickly. For a general view of the ML and AI methods that power Darktrace products, read our AI Arsenal whitepaper. This paper provides insights regarding the various approaches we use to detect, investigate, and prioritize threats.

Cyber AI Analyst is constantly investigating alerts and produces millions of critical incidents every year. The dynamic graphs produced by Cyber AI Analyst investigations represent an abstract understanding of security incidents that is fully anonymized and privacy preserving. This allowed us to use the Call Home and aianalyst.darktrace.com services to produce a dataset comprising the broad structure of millions of incidents that Cyber AI analyst detected on customer deployments, without containing any sensitive data. (Read our technical research paper for more details about our dataset).

The dynamic graphs from Cyber AI Analyst capture the structure of security incidents where nodes represent entities like users, devices or resources, and edges represent the multitude of relationships between them. As new activity is observed, the graph expands, capturing the progression of incidents over time. Our dataset contained everything from benign administrative behavior to full-scale ransomware attacks.

Unique data, unmatched insights

Key terms

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs): A type of neural network designed to analyze and interpret data structured as graphs, capturing relationships between nodes.

Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs): A type of neural network designed to model sequences where the order of events matters, like how activity unfolds in a security incident.

The Cyber AI Analyst dataset used to train DIGEST reflects over a decade of work in AI paired with unmatched expertise in cybersecurity. Prior to training DIGEST on our incident graph data set, we performed rigorous data preprocessing to ensure to remove issues such as duplicate or ill-formed incidents. Additionally, to validate DIGEST’s outputs, expert security analysts assessed and verified the model’s scoring.

Transforming data into insights requires using the right strategies and techniques. Given the graphical nature of Cyber AI Analyst incident data, we used GNNs and RNNs to train DIGEST to understand incidents and how they are likely to change over time. Change does not always mean escalation. DIGEST’s enhanced scoring also keeps potentially legitimate or low-severity activity from being prioritized over threats that are more likely to get worse. At the beginning, all incidents might look the same to a person. To DIGEST, it looks like the beginning of a pattern.

As a result, DIGEST enhances our understanding of security incidents by evaluating the structure of the incident, probable next steps in an incident’s trajectory, and how likely it is to grow into a larger event.

To illustrate these capabilities in action, we are sharing two examples of DIGEST’s scoring adjustments from use cases within our customers’ environments.

First, Figure 1 shows the graphical representation of a ransomware attack, and Figure 2 shows how DIGEST scored incident progression of that ransomware attack. At hour two, DIGEST’s score escalated to 95% well before observation of data encryption. This means that prior to seeing malicious encryption behaviors, DIGEST understood the structure of the incident and flagged these early activities as high-likelihood precursors to a severe event. Early detection, especially when flagged prior to malicious encryption behaviors, gives security teams a valuable head start and can minimize the overall impact of the threat, Darktrace Autonomous Response can also be enabled by Cyber AI Analyst to initiate an immediate action to stop the progression, allowing the human security team time to investigate and implement next steps.

Graph representation of a ransomware attack
Figure 1: Graph representation of a ransomware attack
Timeline of DIGEST incident score escalation. Note that timestep does not equate to hours, the spike in score to 95% occurred approximately 2 hours into the attack, prior to data encryption.
Figure 2:  Timeline of DIGEST incident score escalation. Note that timestep does not equate to hours, the spike in score to 95% occurred approximately 2 hours into the attack, prior to data encryption.

In contrast, our second example shown in Figure 3 and Figure 4 illustrates how DIGEST’s analysis of an incident can help teams avoid wasting time on lower risk scenarios. In this instance, Figure 3 illustrates a graph of unusual administrative activity, where we observed connection to a large group of devices. However, the incident score remained low because DIGEST determined that high risk malicious activity was unlikely. This determination was based on what DIGEST observed in the incident's structure, what it assessed as the probable next steps in the incident lifecycle and how likely it was to grow into a larger adverse event.

Graph representation of unusual admin activity connecting to a large group of devices.
Figure 3: Graph representation of unusual admin activity connecting to a large group of devices.
Timeline of DIGEST incident scoring, where the score remained low as the unusual event was determined to be low risk.
Figure 4: Timeline of DIGEST incident scoring, where the score remained low as the unusual event was determined to be low risk.

These examples show the value of enhanced scoring. DIGEST helps teams act sooner on the threats that count and spend less time chasing the ones that do not.

The next phase of advanced detection is here

Darktrace understands what incidents look like. We have seen, investigated, and learned from them at scale, including over 90 million investigations in 2024. With DIGEST, we can share our deep understanding of incidents and their behaviors with you and triage these incidents using Cyber AI Analyst.

Our ability to innovate in this space is grounded in the maturity of our team and the experiences we have built upon in over a decade of building AI solutions for cybersecurity. This experience, along with our depth of understanding of our data, techniques, and strategic layering of AI/ML components has shaped every one of our steps forward.

With DIGEST, we are entering a new phase, with another line of defense that helps teams prioritize and reason over incidents and threats far earlier in an incident’s lifecycle. DIGEST understands your incidents when they start, making it easier for your team to act quickly and confidently.

DIGEST is available in Darktrace 6.3, along with a new embedding model – DEMIST-2 – designed to provide reliable, high-accuracy detections for critical security use cases.

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Want to learn more?

If you are curious about the details of DIGEST’s dataset, model design, training, experiments, and model deployment, read our technical brief.

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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.
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July 3, 2025

Top Eight Threats to SaaS Security and How to Combat Them

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The latest on the identity security landscape

Following the mass adoption of remote and hybrid working patterns, more critical data than ever resides in cloud applications – from Salesforce and Google Workspace, to Box, Dropbox, and Microsoft 365.

On average, a single organization uses 130 different Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) applications, and 45% of organizations reported experiencing a cybersecurity incident through a SaaS application in the last year.

As SaaS applications look set to remain an integral part of the digital estate, organizations are being forced to rethink how they protect their users and data in this area.

What is SaaS security?

SaaS security is the protection of cloud applications. It includes securing the apps themselves as well as the user identities that engage with them.

Below are the top eight threats that target SaaS security and user identities.

1.  Account Takeover (ATO)

Attackers gain unauthorized access to a user’s SaaS or cloud account by stealing credentials through phishing, brute-force attacks, or credential stuffing. Once inside, they can exfiltrate data, send malicious emails, or escalate privileges to maintain persistent access.

2. Privilege escalation

Cybercriminals exploit misconfigurations, weak access controls, or vulnerabilities to increase their access privileges within a SaaS or cloud environment. Gaining admin or superuser rights allows attackers to disable security settings, create new accounts, or move laterally across the organization.

3. Lateral movement

Once inside a network or SaaS platform, attackers move between accounts, applications, and cloud workloads to expand their foot- hold. Compromised OAuth tokens, session hijacking, or exploited API connections can enable adversaries to escalate access and exfiltrate sensitive data.

4. Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) bypass and session hijacking

Threat actors bypass MFA through SIM swapping, push bombing, or exploiting session cookies. By stealing an active authentication session, they can access SaaS environments without needing the original credentials or MFA approval.

5. OAuth token abuse

Attackers exploit OAuth authentication mechanisms by stealing or abusing tokens that grant persistent access to SaaS applications. This allows them to maintain access even if the original user resets their password, making detection and mitigation difficult.

6. Insider threats

Malicious or negligent insiders misuse their legitimate access to SaaS applications or cloud platforms to leak data, alter configurations, or assist external attackers. Over-provisioned accounts and poor access control policies make it easier for insiders to exploit SaaS environments.

7. Application Programming Interface (API)-based attacks

SaaS applications rely on APIs for integration and automation, but attackers exploit insecure endpoints, excessive permissions, and unmonitored API calls to gain unauthorized access. API abuse can lead to data exfiltration, privilege escalation, and service disruption.

8. Business Email Compromise (BEC) via SaaS

Adversaries compromise SaaS-based email platforms (e.g., Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace) to send phishing emails, conduct invoice fraud, or steal sensitive communications. BEC attacks often involve financial fraud or data theft by impersonating executives or suppliers.

BEC heavily uses social engineering techniques, tailoring messages for a specific audience and context. And with the growing use of generative AI by threat actors, BEC is becoming even harder to detect. By adding ingenuity and machine speed, generative AI tools give threat actors the ability to create more personalized, targeted, and convincing attacks at scale.

Protecting against these SaaS threats

Traditionally, security leaders relied on tools that were focused on the attack, reliant on threat intelligence, and confined to a single area of the digital estate.

However, these tools have limitations, and often prove inadequate for contemporary situations, environments, and threats. For example, they may lack advanced threat detection, have limited visibility and scope, and struggle to integrate with other tools and infrastructure, especially cloud platforms.

AI-powered SaaS security stays ahead of the threat landscape

New, more effective approaches involve AI-powered defense solutions that understand the digital business, reveal subtle deviations that indicate cyber-threats, and action autonomous, targeted responses.

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About the author
Carlos Gray
Senior Product Marketing Manager, Email

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July 2, 2025

Pre-CVE Threat Detection: 10 Examples Identifying Malicious Activity Prior to Public Disclosure of a Vulnerability

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Vulnerabilities are weaknesses in a system that can be exploited by malicious actors to gain unauthorized access or to disrupt normal operations. Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (or CVEs) are a list of publicly disclosed cybersecurity vulnerabilities that can be tracked and mitigated by the security community.

When a vulnerability is discovered, the standard practice is to report it to the vendor or the responsible organization, allowing them to develop and distribute a patch or fix before the details are made public. This is known as responsible disclosure.

With a record-breaking 40,000 CVEs reported for 2024 and a predicted higher number for 2025 by the Forum for Incident Response and Security Teams (FIRST) [1], anomaly-detection is essential for identifying these potential risks. The gap between exploitation of a zero-day and disclosure of the vulnerability can sometimes be considerable, and retroactively attempting to identify successful exploitation on your network can be challenging, particularly if taking a signature-based approach.

Detecting threats without relying on CVE disclosure

Abnormal behaviors in networks or systems, such as unusual login patterns or data transfers, can indicate attempted cyber-attacks, insider threats, or compromised systems. Since Darktrace does not rely on rules or signatures, it can detect malicious activity that is anomalous even without full context of the specific device or asset in question.

For example, during the Fortinet exploitation late last year, the Darktrace Threat Research team were investigating a different Fortinet vulnerability, namely CVE 2024-23113, for exploitation when Mandiant released a security advisory around CVE 2024-47575, which aligned closely with Darktrace’s findings.

Retrospective analysis like this is used by Darktrace’s threat researchers to better understand detections across the threat landscape and to add additional context.

Below are ten examples from the past year where Darktrace detected malicious activity days or even weeks before a vulnerability was publicly disclosed.

ten examples from the past year where Darktrace detected malicious activity days or even weeks before a vulnerability was publicly disclosed.

Trends in pre-cve exploitation

Often, the disclosure of an exploited vulnerability can be off the back of an incident response investigation related to a compromise by an advanced threat actor using a zero-day. Once the vulnerability is registered and publicly disclosed as having been exploited, it can kick off a race between the attacker and defender: attack vs patch.

Nation-state actors, highly skilled with significant resources, are known to use a range of capabilities to achieve their target, including zero-day use. Often, pre-CVE activity is “low and slow”, last for months with high operational security. After CVE disclosure, the barriers to entry lower, allowing less skilled and less resourced attackers, like some ransomware gangs, to exploit the vulnerability and cause harm. This is why two distinct types of activity are often seen: pre and post disclosure of an exploited vulnerability.

Darktrace saw this consistent story line play out during several of the Fortinet and PAN OS threat actor campaigns highlighted above last year, where nation-state actors were seen exploiting vulnerabilities first, followed by ransomware gangs impacting organizations [2].

The same applies with the recent SAP Netweaver exploitations being tied to a China based threat actor earlier this spring with subsequent ransomware incidents being observed [3].

Autonomous Response

Anomaly-based detection offers the benefit of identifying malicious activity even before a CVE is disclosed; however, security teams still need to quickly contain and isolate the activity.

For example, during the Ivanti chaining exploitation in the early part of 2025, a customer had Darktrace’s Autonomous Response capability enabled on their network. As a result, Darktrace was able to contain the compromise and shut down any ongoing suspicious connectivity by blocking internal connections and enforcing a “pattern of life” on the affected device.

This pre-CVE detection and response by Darktrace occurred 11 days before any public disclosure, demonstrating the value of an anomaly-based approach.

In some cases, customers have even reported that Darktrace stopped malicious exploitation of devices several days before a public disclosure of a vulnerability.

For example, During the ConnectWise exploitation, a customer informed the team that Darktrace had detected malicious software being installed via remote access. Upon further investigation, four servers were found to be impacted, while Autonomous Response had blocked outbound connections and enforced patterns of life on impacted devices.

Conclusion

By continuously analyzing behavioral patterns, systems can spot unusual activities and patterns from users, systems, and networks to detect anomalies that could signify a security breach.

Through ongoing monitoring and learning from these behaviors, anomaly-based security systems can detect threats that traditional signature-based solutions might miss, while also providing detailed insights into threat tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs). This type of behavioral intelligence supports pre-CVE detection, allows for a more adaptive security posture, and enables systems to evolve with the ever-changing threat landscape.

Credit to Nathaniel Jones (VP, Security & AI Strategy, Field CISO), Emma Fougler (Global Threat Research Operations Lead), Ryan Traill (Analyst Content Lead)

References and further reading:

  1. https://www.first.org/blog/20250607-Vulnerability-Forecast-for-2025
  2. https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/threat-intelligence/fortimanager-zero-day-exploitation-cve-2024-47575
  3. https://thehackernews.com/2025/05/china-linked-hackers-exploit-sap-and.html

Related Darktrace blogs:

*Self-reported by customer, confirmed afterwards.

**Updated January 2024 blog now reflects current findings

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