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February 22, 2024

Attack Trends: VIP Impersonation in the Business Hierarchy

VIP Impersonation occurs when a cyber-threat actor impersonates a prominent employee to obtain sensitive data. Learn all about VIP impersonation here.
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
Kendra Gonzalez Duran
Principal Analyst
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22
Feb 2024

What is VIP impersonation?

VIP impersonation involves a threat actor impersonating a trusted, prominent figure at an organization in an attempt to solicit sensitive information from an employee.

VIP impersonation is a high-priority issue for security teams, but it can be difficult to assess the exact risks, and whether those are more critical than other types of compromise. Looking across a range of Darktrace/Email™ customer deployments, this blog explores the patterns of individuals targeted for impersonation and evaluates if these target priorities correspond with security teams' focus on protecting attack pathways to critical assets.

How do security teams stop VIP Impersonation?

Protecting VIP entities within an organization has long been a traditional focus for security teams. The assumption is that VIPs, due to their prominence, possess the greatest access to critical assets, making them prime targets for cyber threats.  

Email remains the predominant vector for attacks, with over 90% of breaches originating from malicious emails. However, the dynamics of email-based attacks are shifting, as the widespread use of generative AI is lowering the barrier to entry by allowing adversaries to create hyper-realistic emails with minimal errors.

Given these developments, it's worth asking the question – which entities (VIP/non-VIP) are most targeted by threat actors via email? And, more importantly – which entities (VIP/non-VIP) are more valuable if they are successfully compromised?

There are two types of VIPs:  

1. When referring to emails and phishing, VIPs are the users in an organization who are well known publicly.  

2. When referring to attack paths, VIPs are users in an organization that are known publicly and have access to highly privileged assets.  

Not every prominent user has access to critical assets, and not every user that has access to critical assets is prominent.  

Darktrace analysis of VIP impersonation

We analyzed patterns of attack pathways and phishing attempts across 20 customer deployments from a large, randomized pool encompassing a diverse range of organizations.  

Understanding Attack Pathways

Our observations revealed that 57% of low-difficulty attack paths originated from VIP entities, while 43% of observed low-difficulty attack paths towards critical assets or entities began through non-VIP users. This means that targeting VIPs is not the only way attackers can reach critical assets, and that non-VIP users must be considered as well.  

While the sample size prevents us from establishing statistical significance across all customers, the randomized selection lends credence to the generalizability of these findings to other environments.

Phishing Attempts  

On average, 1.35% of total emails sent to these customers exhibited significantly malicious properties associated with phishing or some form of impersonation. Strikingly, nearly half of these malicious emails (49.6%) were directed towards VIPs, while the rest were sent to non-VIPs. This near-equal split is worth noting, as attack paths show that non-VIPs also serve as potential entry points for targeting critical assets.  

Darktrace/Email UI
Figure 1: A phishing email actioned by Darktrace, sent to multiple VIP and non-VIP entities

For example, a recent phishing campaign targeted multiple customers across deployments, with five out of 13 emails specifically aimed at VIP users. Darktrace/Email actioned the malicious emails by double locking the links, holding the messages, and stripping the attachments.

Given that non-VIP users receive nearly half of the phishing or impersonation emails, it underscores the critical importance for security teams to recognize their blind spots in protecting critical assets. Overlooking the potential threat originating from non-VIP entities could lead to severe consequences. For instance, if a non-VIP user falls victim to a phishing attack or gets compromised, their credentials could be exploited to move laterally within the organization, potentially reaching critical assets.

This highlights the necessity for a sophisticated security tool that can identify targeted users, without the need for extensive customization and regardless of VIP status. By deploying a solution capable of promptly responding to email threats – including solicitation, phishing attempts, and impersonation – regardless of the status of the targeted user, security teams can significantly enhance their defense postures.

Darktrace vs Traditional Email Detection Methods

Traditional rules and signatures-based detection mechanisms fall short in identifying the evolving threats we’ve observed, due to their reliance on knowledge of past attacks to categorize emails.

Secure Email Gateway (SEG) or Integrated Cloud Email Security (ICES) tools categorize emails based on previous or known attacks, operating on a known-good or known-bad model. Even if tools use AI to automate this process, the approach is still fundamentally looking to the past and therefore vulnerable to unknown and zero-day threats.  

Darktrace uses AI to understand each unique organization and how its email environment interoperates with each user and device on the network. Consequently, it is able to identify the subtle deviations from normal behavior that qualify as suspicious. This approach goes beyond simplistic categorizations, considering factors such as the sender’s history and recipient’s exposure score.  

This nuanced analysis enables Darktrace to differentiate between genuine communications and malicious impersonation attempts. It automatically understands who is a VIP, without the need for manual input, and will action more strongly on incoming malicious emails  based on a user’s status.

Email does determine who is a VIP, without a need of manual input, and will action more strongly on incoming malicious emails.

Darktrace/Email also feeds into Darktrace’s preventative security tools, giving the interconnected AI engines further context for assessing the high-value targets and pathways to vital internal systems and assets that start via the inbox.

Leveraging AI for Enhanced Protection Across the Enterprise  

The efficacy of AI-driven security solutions lies in their ability to make informed decisions and recommendations based on real-time business data. By leveraging this data, AI driven solutions can identify exploitable attack pathways and an organizations most critical assets. Darktrace uniquely uses several forms of AI to equip security teams with the insights needed to make informed decisions about which pathways to secure, reducing human bias around the importance of protecting VIPs.

With the emergence of tools like AutoGPT, identifying potential targets for phishing attacks has become increasingly simplified. However, the real challenge lies in gaining a comprehensive understanding of all possible and low-difficulty attack paths leading to critical assets and identities within the organization.

At the same time, organizations need email tools that can leverage the understanding of users to prevent email threats from succeeding in the first instance. For every email and user, Darktrace/Email takes into consideration changes in behavior from the sender, recipient, content, and language, and many other factors.

Integrating Darktrace/Email with Darktrace’s attack path modeling capabilities enables comprehensive threat contextualization and facilitates a deeper understanding of attack pathways. This holistic approach ensures that all potential vulnerabilities, irrespective of the user's status, are addressed, strengthening the overall security posture.  

Conclusion

Contrary to conventional wisdom, our analysis suggests that the distinction between VIPs and non-VIPs in terms of susceptibility to impersonation and low-difficulty attack paths is not as pronounced as presumed. Therefore, security teams must adopt a proactive stance in safeguarding all pathways, rather than solely focusing on VIPs.  

Attack path modeling enhances Darktrace/Email's capabilities by providing crucial metrics on potential impact, damage, exposure, and weakness, enabling more targeted and effective threat mitigation strategies. For example, stronger email actions can be enforced for users who are known to have a high potential impact in case of compromise. 

In an era where cyber threats continue to evolve in complexity, an adaptive and non-siloed approach to securing inboxes, high-priority individuals, and critical assets is indispensable.  

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
Kendra Gonzalez Duran
Principal Analyst

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July 17, 2025

Introducing the AI Maturity Model for Cybersecurity

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AI adoption in cybersecurity: Beyond the hype

Security operations today face a paradox. On one hand, artificial intelligence (AI) promises sweeping transformation from automating routine tasks to augmenting threat detection and response. On the other hand, security leaders are under immense pressure to separate meaningful innovation from vendor hype.

To help CISOs and security teams navigate this landscape, we’ve developed the most in-depth and actionable AI Maturity Model in the industry. Built in collaboration with AI and cybersecurity experts, this framework provides a structured path to understanding, measuring, and advancing AI adoption across the security lifecycle.

Overview of AI maturity levels in cybersecurity

Why a maturity model? And why now?

In our conversations and research with security leaders, a recurring theme has emerged:

There’s no shortage of AI solutions, but there is a shortage of clarity and understanding of AI uses cases.

In fact, Gartner estimates that “by 2027, over 40% of Agentic AI projects will be canceled due to escalating costs, unclear business value, or inadequate risk controls. Teams are experimenting, but many aren’t seeing meaningful outcomes. The need for a standardized way to evaluate progress and make informed investments has never been greater.

That’s why we created the AI Security Maturity Model, a strategic framework that:

  • Defines five clear levels of AI maturity, from manual processes (L0) to full AI Delegation (L4)
  • Delineating the outcomes derived between Agentic GenAI and Specialized AI Agent Systems
  • Applies across core functions such as risk management, threat detection, alert triage, and incident response
  • Links AI maturity to real-world outcomes like reduced risk, improved efficiency, and scalable operations

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How is maturity assessed in this model?

The AI Maturity Model for Cybersecurity is grounded in operational insights from nearly 10,000 global deployments of Darktrace's Self-Learning AI and Cyber AI Analyst. Rather than relying on abstract theory or vendor benchmarks, the model reflects what security teams are actually doing, where AI is being adopted, how it's being used, and what outcomes it’s delivering.

This real-world foundation allows the model to offer a practical, experience-based view of AI maturity. It helps teams assess their current state and identify realistic next steps based on how organizations like theirs are evolving.

Why Darktrace?

AI has been central to Darktrace’s mission since its inception in 2013, not just as a feature, but the foundation. With over a decade of experience building and deploying AI in real-world security environments, we’ve learned where it works, where it doesn’t, and how to get the most value from it. This model reflects that insight, helping security leaders find the right path forward for their people, processes, and tools

Security teams today are asking big, important questions:

  • What should we actually use AI for?
  • How are other teams using it — and what’s working?
  • What are vendors offering, and what’s just hype?
  • Will AI ever replace people in the SOC?

These questions are valid, and they’re not always easy to answer. That’s why we created this model: to help security leaders move past buzzwords and build a clear, realistic plan for applying AI across the SOC.

The structure: From experimentation to autonomy

The model outlines five levels of maturity :

L0 – Manual Operations: Processes are mostly manual with limited automation of some tasks.

L1 – Automation Rules: Manually maintained or externally-sourced automation rules and logic are used wherever possible.

L2 – AI Assistance: AI assists research but is not trusted to make good decisions. This includes GenAI agents requiring manual oversight for errors.

L3 – AI Collaboration: Specialized cybersecurity AI agent systems  with business technology context are trusted with specific tasks and decisions. GenAI has limited uses where errors are acceptable.

L4 – AI Delegation: Specialized AI agent systems with far wider business operations and impact context perform most cybersecurity tasks and decisions independently, with only high-level oversight needed.

Each level reflects a shift, not only in technology, but in people and processes. As AI matures, analysts evolve from executors to strategic overseers.

Strategic benefits for security leaders

The maturity model isn’t just about technology adoption it’s about aligning AI investments with measurable operational outcomes. Here’s what it enables:

SOC fatigue is real, and AI can help

Most teams still struggle with alert volume, investigation delays, and reactive processes. AI adoption is inconsistent and often siloed. When integrated well, AI can make a meaningful difference in making security teams more effective

GenAI is error prone, requiring strong human oversight

While there is a lot of hype around GenAI agentic systems, teams will need to account for inaccuracy and hallucination in Agentic GenAI systems.

AI’s real value lies in progression

The biggest gains don’t come from isolated use cases, but from integrating AI across the lifecycle, from preparation through detection to containment and recovery.

Trust and oversight are key initially but evolves in later levels

Early-stage adoption keeps humans fully in control. By L3 and L4, AI systems act independently within defined bounds, freeing humans for strategic oversight.

People’s roles shift meaningfully

As AI matures, analyst roles consolidate and elevate from labor intensive task execution to high-value decision-making, focusing on critical, high business impact activities, improving processes and AI governance.

Outcome, not hype, defines maturity

AI maturity isn’t about tech presence, it’s about measurable impact on risk reduction, response time, and operational resilience.

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Outcomes across the AI Security Maturity Model

The Security Organization experiences an evolution of cybersecurity outcomes as teams progress from manual operations to AI delegation. Each level represents a step-change in efficiency, accuracy, and strategic value.

L0 – Manual Operations

At this stage, analysts manually handle triage, investigation, patching, and reporting manually using basic, non-automated tools. The result is reactive, labor-intensive operations where most alerts go uninvestigated and risk management remains inconsistent.

L1 – Automation Rules

At this stage, analysts manage rule-based automation tools like SOAR and XDR, which offer some efficiency gains but still require constant tuning. Operations remain constrained by human bandwidth and predefined workflows.

L2 – AI Assistance

At this stage, AI assists with research, summarization, and triage, reducing analyst workload but requiring close oversight due to potential errors. Detection improves, but trust in autonomous decision-making remains limited.

L3 – AI Collaboration

At this stage, AI performs full investigations and recommends actions, while analysts focus on high-risk decisions and refining detection strategies. Purpose-built agentic AI systems with business context are trusted with specific tasks, improving precision and prioritization.

L4 – AI Delegation

At this stage, Specialized AI Agent Systems performs most security tasks independently at machine speed, while human teams provide high-level strategic oversight. This means the highest time and effort commitment activities by the human security team is focused on proactive activities while AI handles routine cybersecurity tasks

Specialized AI Agent Systems operate with deep business context including impact context to drive fast, effective decisions.

Join the webinar

Get a look at the minds shaping this model by joining our upcoming webinar using this link. We’ll walk through real use cases, share lessons learned from the field, and show how security teams are navigating the path to operational AI safely, strategically, and successfully.

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July 17, 2025

Forensics or Fauxrensics: Five Core Capabilities for Cloud Forensics and Incident Response

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The speed and scale at which new cloud resources can be spun up has resulted in uncontrolled deployments, misconfigurations, and security risks. It has had security teams racing to secure their business’ rapid migration from traditional on-premises environments to the cloud.

While many organizations have successfully extended their prevention and detection capabilities to the cloud, they are now experiencing another major gap: forensics and incident response.

Once something bad has been identified, understanding its true scope and impact is nearly impossible at times. The proliferation of cloud resources across a multitude of cloud providers, and the addition of container and serverless capabilities all add to the complexities. It’s clear that organizations need a better way to manage cloud incident response.

Security teams are looking to move past their homegrown solutions and open-source tools to incorporate real cloud forensics capabilities. However, with the increased buzz around cloud forensics, it can be challenging to decipher what is real cloud forensics, and what is “fauxrensics.”

This blog covers the five core capabilities that security teams should consider when evaluating a cloud forensics and incident response solution.

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1. Depth of data

There have been many conversations among the security community about whether cloud forensics is just log analysis. The reality, however, is that cloud forensics necessitates access to a robust dataset that extends far beyond traditional log data sources.

While logs provide valuable insights, a forensics investigation demands a deeper understanding derived from multiple data sources, including disk, network, and memory, within the cloud infrastructure. Full disk analysis complements log analysis, offering crucial context for identifying the root cause and scope of an incident.

For instance, when investigating an incident involving a Kubernetes cluster running on an EC2 instance, access to bash history can provide insights into the commands executed by attackers on the affected instance, which would not be available through cloud logs alone.

Having all of the evidence in one place is also a capability that can significantly streamline investigations, unifying your evidence be it disk images, memory captures or cloud logs, into a single timeline allowing security teams to reconstruct an attacks origin, path and impact far more easily. Multi–cloud environments also require platforms that can support aggregating data from many providers and services into one place. Doing this enables more holistic investigations and reduces security blind spots.

There is also the importance of collecting data from ephemeral resources in modern cloud and containerized environments. Critical evidence can be lost in seconds as resources are constantly spinning up and down, so having the ability to capture this data before its gone can be a huge advantage to security teams, rather than having to figure out what happened after the affected service is long gone.

darktrace / cloud, cado, cloud logs, ost, and memory information. value of cloud combined analysis

2. Chain of custody

Chain of custody is extremely critical in the context of legal proceedings and is an essential component of forensics and incident response. However, chain of custody in the cloud can be extremely complex with the number of people who have access and the rise of multi-cloud environments.

In the cloud, maintaining a reliable chain of custody becomes even more complex than it already is, due to having to account for multiple access points, service providers and third parties. Having automated evidence tracking is a must. It means that all actions are logged, from collection to storage to access. Automation also minimizes the chance of human error, reducing the risk of mistakes or gaps in evidence handling, especially in high pressure fast moving investigations.

The ability to preserve unaltered copies of forensic evidence in a secure manner is required to ensure integrity throughout an investigation. It is not just a technical concern, its a legal one, ensuring that your evidence handling is documented and time stamped allows it to stand up to court or regulatory review.

Real cloud forensics platforms should autonomously handle chain of custody in the background, recording and safeguarding evidence without human intervention.

3. Automated collection and isolation

When malicious activity is detected, the speed at which security teams can determine root cause and scope is essential to reducing Mean Time to Response (MTTR).

Automated forensic data collection and system isolation ensures that evidence is collected and compromised resources are isolated at the first sign of malicious activity. This can often be before an attacker has had the change to move latterly or cover their tracks. This enables security teams to prevent potential damage and spread while a deeper-dive forensics investigation takes place. This method also ensures critical incident evidence residing in ephemeral environments is preserved in the event it is needed for an investigation. This evidence may only exist for minutes, leaving no time for a human analyst to capture it.

Cloud forensics and incident response platforms should offer the ability to natively integrate with incident detection and alerting systems and/or built-in product automation rules to trigger evidence capture and resource isolation.

4. Ease of use

Security teams shouldn’t require deep cloud or incident response knowledge to perform forensic investigations of cloud resources. They already have enough on their plates.

While traditional forensics tools and approaches have made investigation and response extremely tedious and complex, modern forensics platforms prioritize usability at their core, and leverage automation to drastically simplify the end-to-end incident response process, even when an incident spans multiple Cloud Service Providers (CSPs).

Useability is a core requirement for any modern forensics platform. Security teams should not need to have indepth knowledge of every system and resource in a given estate. Workflows, automation and guidance should make it possible for an analyst to investigate whatever resource they need to.

Unifying the workflow across multiple clouds can also save security teams a huge amount of time and resources. Investigations can often span multiple CSP’s. A good security platform should provide a single place to search, correlate and analyze evidence across all environments.

Offering features such as cross cloud support, data enrichment, a single timeline view, saved search, and faceted search can help advanced analysts achieve greater efficiency, and novice analysts are able to participate in more complex investigations.

5. Incident preparedness

Incident response shouldn't just be reactive. Modern security teams need to regularly test their ability to acquire new evidence, triage assets and respond to threats across both new and existing resources, ensuring readiness even in the rapidly changing environments of the cloud.  Having the ability to continuously assess your incident response and forensics workflows enables you to rapidly improve your processes and identify and mitigate any gaps identified that could prevent the organization from being able to effectively respond to potential threats.

Real forensics platforms deliver features that enable security teams to prepare extensively and understand their shortcomings before they are in the heat of an incident. For example, cloud forensics platforms can provide the ability to:

  • Run readiness checks and see readiness trends over time
  • Identify and mitigate issues that could prevent rapid investigation and response
  • Ensure the correct logging, management agents, and other cloud-native tools are appropriately configured and operational
  • Ensure that data gathered during an investigation can be decrypted
  • Verify that permissions are aligned with best practices and are capable of supporting incident response efforts

Cloud forensics with Darktrace

Darktrace delivers a proactive approach to cyber resilience in a single cybersecurity platform, including cloud coverage. Darktrace / CLOUD is a real time Cloud Detection and Response (CDR) solution built with advanced AI to make cloud security accessible to all security teams and SOCs. By using multiple machine learning techniques, Darktrace brings unprecedented visibility, threat detection, investigation, and incident response to hybrid and multi-cloud environments.

Darktrace’s cloud offerings have been bolstered with the acquisition of Cado Security Ltd., which enables security teams to gain immediate access to forensic-level data in multi-cloud, container, serverless, SaaS, and on-premises environments.

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