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
Maria Geronikolou
Cyber Analyst
Share
26
Sep 2024
What is thread hijacking?
Cyberattacks are becoming increasingly stealthy and targeted, with malicious actors focusing on high-value individuals to gain privileged access to their organizations’ digital environments. One technique that has gained prominence in recent years is thread hijacking. This method allows attackers to infiltrate ongoing conversations, exploiting the trust within these threads to access sensitive systems.
Thread hijacking typically involves attackers gaining access to a user’s email account, monitoring ongoing conversations, and then inserting themselves into these threads. By replying to existing emails, they can send malicious links, request sensitive information, or manipulate the conversation to achieve their goals, such as redirecting payments or stealing credentials. Because such emails appear to come from a trusted source, they often bypass human security teams and traditional security filters.
How does thread hijacking work?
Initial Compromise: Attackers first gain access to a user’s email account, often through phishing, malware, or exploiting weak passwords.
Monitoring: Once inside, they monitor the user’s email threads, looking for ongoing conversations that can be exploited.
Infiltration: The attacker then inserts themselves into these conversations, often replying to existing emails. Because the email appears to come from a trusted source within an ongoing thread, it bypasses many traditional security filters and raises less suspicion.
Exploitation: Using the trust established in the conversation, attackers can send malicious links, request sensitive information, or manipulate the conversation to achieve their goals, such as redirecting payments or stealing credentials.
A recent incident involving a Darktrace customer saw a malicious actor attempt to manipulate trusted email communications, potentially exposing critical data. The attacker created a new mailbox rule to forward specific emails to an archive folder, making it harder for the customer to notice the malicious activity. This highlights the need for advanced detection and robust preventive tools.
Darktrace’s Self-Learning AI is able to recognize subtle deviations in normal behavior, whether in a device or a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) user. This capability enables it to detect emerging attacks in their early stages. In this post, we’ll delve into the attacker’s tactics and illustrate how Darktrace / IDENTITY™ successfully identified and mitigated a thread hijacking attempt, preventing escalation and potential disruption to the customer’s network.
On August 8, 2024, Darktrace detected an unusual email received by a SaaS account on a customer’s network. The email appeared to be a reply to a previous chain discussing tax and payment details, likely related to a transaction between the customer and one of their business partners.
Figure 1: Headers of the suspicious email received.
A few hours later, Darktrace detected the same SaaS account creating a new mailbox rule named “.”, a tactic commonly used by malicious actors to evade detection when setting up new email rules [2]. This rule was designed to forward all emails containing a specific word to the user’s “Archives” folder. This evasion technique is typically used to move any malicious emails or responses to a rarely opened folder, ensuring that the genuine account holder does not see replies to phishing emails or other malicious messages sent by attackers [3].
Darktrace recognized the newly created email rule as suspicious after identifying the following parameters:
AlwaysDeleteOutlookRulesBlob: False
Force: False
MoveToFolder: Archive
Name: “.”
FromAddressContainsWords: [Redacted]
MarkAsRead: True
StopProcessingRules: True
Darktrace also noted that the user attempting to create this new email rule had logged into the SaaS environment from an unusual IP address. Although the IP was located in the same country as the customer and the ASN used by the malicious actor was typical for the customer’s network, the rare IP, coupled with the anomalous behavior, raised suspicions.
Figure 2: Hijacked SaaS account creating the new mailbox rule.
Given the suspicious nature of this activity, Darktrace’s Security Operations Centre (SOC) investigated the incident and alerted the customer’s security team of this incident.
Due to a public holiday in the customer's location (likely an intentional choice by the threat actor), their security team did not immediately notice or respond to the notification. Fortunately, the customer had Darktrace's Autonomous Response capability enabled, which allowed it to take action against the suspicious SaaS activity without human intervention.
In this instance, Darktrace swiftly disabled the seemingly compromised SaaS user for 24 hours. This action halted the spread of the compromise to other accounts on the customer’s SaaS platform and prevented any sensitive data exfiltration. Additionally, it provided the security team with ample time to investigate the threat and remove the user from their environment. The customer also received detailed incident reports and support through Darktrace’s Security Operations Support service, enabling direct communication with Darktrace’s expert Analyst team.
Conclusion
Ultimately, Darktrace’s anomaly-based detection allowed it to identify the subtle deviations from the user’s expected behavior, indicating a potential compromise on the customer’s SaaS platform. In this case, Darktrace detected a login to a SaaS platform from an unusual IP address, despite the attacker’s efforts to conceal their activity by using a known ASN and logging in from the expected country.
Despite the attempted SaaS hijack occurring on a public holiday when the customer’s security team was likely off-duty, Darktrace autonomously detected the suspicious login and the creation of a new email rule. It swiftly blocked the compromised SaaS account, preventing further malicious activity and safeguarding the organization from data exfiltration or escalation of the compromise.
This highlights the growing need for AI-driven security capable of responding to malicious activity in the absence of human security teams and detect subtle behavioral changes that traditional security tools.
Credit to: Ryan Traill, Threat Content Lead for his contribution to this blog
Appendices
Darktrace Model Detections
SaaS / Compliance / Anomalous New Email Rule
Experimental / Antigena Enhanced Monitoring from SaaS Client Block
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.
From VPS to Phishing: How Darktrace Uncovered SaaS Hijacks through Virtual Infrastructure Abuse
Darktrace identified coordinated SaaS account compromises across multiple customer environments. The incidents involved suspicious logins from VPS-linked infrastructure followed by unauthorized inbox rule creation and deletion of phishing-related emails. These consistent behaviors across devices point to a targeted phishing campaign leveraging virtual infrastructure for access and concealment. Discover how Darktrace uncovered this activity and what it means for the future of SaaS security.
Defending the Cloud: Stopping Cyber Threats in Azure and AWS with Darktrace
This blog examines three real-world cloud-based attacks in Azure and AWS environments, including credential compromise, data exfiltration, and ransomware detonation. Learn how Darktrace’s AI-driven threat detection and Autonomous Response capabilities help organizations defend against evolving threats in complex cloud environments.
Top Eight Threats to SaaS Security and How to Combat Them
SaaS security requires new methods to keep up with evolving threats and business infrastructure. In this blog, learn the top eight threats to identity security and how AI-based solutions can help.
Advancing the Use of Frontier AI in Cybersecurity: Darktrace Joins the OpenAI Daybreak Cyber Partner Program to Explore Defensive AI Integrations
Darktrace joins the OpenAI Daybreak Cyber Partner Program
Today, we announced that Darktrace is joining the OpenAI Daybreak Cyber Partner Program. We’ll be partnering with OpenAI to explore how their cyber capabilities can be integrated within Darktrace products and services to bring new capabilities to our customers.
This partnership is an exciting opportunity to bring together Darktrace’s behavioral AI modelling of the organization with OpenAI’s advanced contextual capabilities to create a new level of understanding for security teams. To understand the impact, it’s helpful to start with how we think about the problem.
At Darktrace, we built our AI in support of the core belief that cybersecurity needs to understand the business it is defending. That's why our Self-Learning AI is designed to help organizations understand normal and abnormal behavior for each organization across their digital environment, including users and identities, networks and cloud, email and collaboration tools, and now AI systems and agents with the rollout of Darktrace / SECURE AI™.
Our goal was never simply to spot known attacks faster. It was to help defenders understand how their organization behaves, potential risks and impact, and where disruption could take hold so they could prepare for the unknown threats that they may not have seen or even imagined before.
That’s exactly what is happening across the threat landscape today. Attacks keep changing; techniques shift, infrastructure evolves, and attackers move with more speed, precision, and context. And now they have even more AI and automation on their side. Attackers are exploiting identities, trusted services, SaaS applications, and business workflows. They are not always breaking in; often, the threat may come from within the organization in the form of insider threat or even rogue agents.
In this reality, defenders need a combination of deep AI modelling of the organization and AI that can connect identified threats to concrete business context, translating this information into real world value, and allow action before risk becomes disruption.
That is the opportunity we see in partnering with OpenAI.
What is the OpenAI Daybreak Cyber Partner Program and why is Darktrace joining
The OpenAI Daybreak Cyber Partner Program is focused on advancing the safe use of AI for cybersecurity. As part of the program’s next phase, OpenAI is working with a select group of trusted partners including Darktrace on scoped product integrations, managed services, and partner-delivered defensive capabilities. We’ll be exploring how OpenAI’s advanced frontier AI capabilities can support defenders in the tools and workflows they already use each day.
For Darktrace, this is a natural extension of our expertise and the work we have been doing for a decade: safely and securely applying the most effective AI techniques in combination to understand organizations, detecting malicious activity at the earliest indicators, and helping cyber defenders act faster.
By using the advanced models and more precise safeguards available in the OpenAI Daybreak Cyber Partner Program, Darktrace and OpenAI will combine Darktrace’s real-time behavioral understanding of an organization's digital estate with OpenAI's ability to interpret wider business context.
This is a unique and powerful combination of insights that could give organizations deeper context on technical risk and help them prioritize workloads and investigations based on potential impact to revenue, operations, and resilience. It can also provide security teams and executives with intelligence into which events matter most to the business, why they matter, and what action to take. Not just finding, for instance, that an agent is compromised, but highlighting that the compromised agent could shut down order fulfilment within the next three hours.
Why the Darktrace and OpenAI partnership matters for defenders
Security teams today have more attack surface, more complex environments to protect, and an increasing volume of threats. The ability to act quickly is critical, but they also need to be able to focus on the risks that could have the greatest business impact.
That is especially important as attackers use AI to scale phishing, automate reconnaissance, find weaknesses, and blend into normal business activity. At the same time, organizations and their employees are using AI to innovate, which introduces an even broader attack surface and new set of risks. Defenders need AI that can operate across the same complexity, but safely, transparently, and in service of building more resilience. And they need a way to safely adopt, govern, and defend AI across their organizations.
Joining the OpenAI Daybreak Cyber Partner Program is another step in that direction. We are still early in this work, and we will take a careful, disciplined approach. But the direction is clear: protecting organizations requires AI that understands the business, not just the attack.
At Darktrace, that is exactly where we remain focused and why we are so excited about this partnership with OpenAI.
Hola VPN Abuse: From Proxy Traffic to Malware and Cryptomining
Introduction
In enterprise environments, non-compliant software traffic can introduce unexpected exposure by creating unmanaged paths for outbound connectivity. Hola VPN is a notable example because of its peer-to-peer design, which can effectively turn user devices into routing or exit nodes for other parties’ traffic, shifting the risk profile from that of a traditional virtual private network (VPN) to something closer to a distributed proxy.
As a result, the appearance of Hola-related activity, whether from prior installation or unintended background connections, should be treated with caution. Such activity may provide a foothold for malicious behavior, including lateral movement or command-and-control communication.
This blog explores how Hola-associated activity appeared as part of broader patterns of suspicious behavior observed across the Darktrace customer base.
The campaign
In February and March 2026, Darktrace observed similar anomalous activity across multiple customer environments, with affected devices showing consistent behavioral patterns. These included connections to multiple *.hola[.]org endpoints using Hola-related user agents, suggesting interaction with Hola infrastructure rather than isolated or incidental traffic.
Following these connections, affected customer environments showed downloads of suspicious executable files from rare external endpoints 188.241.219[.]55 and 184.241.218[.]111. Both endpoints have been flagged as potentially malicious by open-source intelligence (OSINT) [1][2].
These downloads were conducted using consistent user agents across impacted customers, specifically ‘Hola svc_js_win32/1.249.408’ and ‘Hola svc_js_win32/1.251.389’, suggesting a possible association with Hola-related activity.
Notably, this pattern aligns with recent reporting that, in some cases, Hola distributed an undeclared executable component, me[.]exe, which was later assessed to be a likely Monero-mining binary introduced via a compromised delivery pipeline [3].
Case Study 1
Darktrace first observed a new device on January 19, 2026, within a customer environment based in the Europe, Middle East, and Africa (EMEA) region. On the same day it appeared on the network, the device communicated with multiple pieces of Hola VPN-linked infrastructure before downloading a binary from a hola[.]org subdomain.
Figure 1: Cyber AI Analyst investigation highlighting Hola VPN service activity potentially associated with subsequent HTTP command-and-control (C2) connections.
Subsequent Darktrace telemetry revealed a recurring pattern of activity from the day the device was first observed through to March 4, 2026. During this period, the device repeatedly issued HTTP GET requests to the URI /bwfile?size=1048576, each returning a 200 OK response, indicating successful file retrieval.
This behavior was accompanied by a POST request to /bwfile, followed by an additional GET request for a significantly larger file at /bwfile?size=26214400, suggesting a deliberate and structured file transfer pattern.
Notably, the binary download activity was not tied to a single static host. Instead, it was observed across multiple URLs that changed over time while remaining within the same hola[.]org domain. This pattern suggests the use of rotating or distributed delivery infrastructure rather than a fixed endpoint.
Figure 2: Variation in URLs over time within the same hola[.]org domain, indicating the use of dynamically changing endpoints.
Across these events, the activity was consistently associated with the user agent Hola svc_js_win32/1.249.408, further linking the traffic to Hola-related service components. Amid these persistent and unusual connections, on February 22, Darktrace observed the device connecting to 188.241.219[.]55/proxy-peer-windows-amd64[.]exe, resulting in the download of an executable file.
Figure 3: File transfer event showing the download of an executable from the rare external endpoint 188.241.219[.]55.
Based on its file hash, the downloaded file was assessed as a likely Trojan downloader [4], with import hash (imphash) values showing similarities to samples linked to Vidar, Rhadamanthys, and Stealc according to OSINT [5]. Overall, this sequence of activity suggests that Hola-related connectivity may have been leveraged as part of a broader malware delivery chain.
Darktrace’s Autonomous Response
Due to the highly unusual activity observed, Darktrace Autonomous Response was triggered by the device’s behavior. However, as the customer deployment was configured in “Human Confirmation” mode, manual approval was required before any action could be taken.
Had the deployment been set to “Fully Autonomous” mode, Darktrace would have automatically:
Blocked connections to the associated ports and external endpoints
Prevented all outgoing network connections from the device
Enforced the device’s established ‘pattern of life’, allowing normal activity to continue while restricting any anomalous behavior
Figure 4: Example of a Darktrace Autonomous Response model highlighting the action that would have been taken, demonstrating how the system identifies anomalous behavior and applies targeted containment measures to restrict suspicious network activity.
Case Study 2
While the first case focused on anomalous activity from a newly observed device, Darktrace also identified cases in which devices had already been communicating with Hola-related endpoints prior to the suspected campaign. This may suggest pre-existing Hola usage within the environment, potentially increasing exposure and creating an avenue for subsequent suspicious activity.
One case involved three devices within a customer network based in the Americas (AMS). In this instance, a different payload was identified: me[.]exe, a potentially malicious cryptocurrency miner also referred to as HolaMonitorService[.]exe [6][7]. The downloads were observed from infrastructure similar to that seen in Case 1, including an IP address within the same 188.241.0.0/16 subnet.
Connections to *.hola[.]org, alongside the use of potential Hola-related user agents consistent with those in Case 1, were also identified, further suggesting a link between the observed activity and Hola-associated infrastructure.
Darktrace observed activity indicative of unusual VPN usage on the first affected device on February 2, followed by telemetry suggesting potential Tor usage. This was later followed by the download of me[.]exe on March 10 from 188.241.218[.]111. Notably, this device was the earliest among the three within the deployment to exhibit the presence of the suspicious executable.
Figure 5: Cyber AI Analyst detection highlighting the download of a suspicious executable from a similar external endpoint in a separate deployment.
On March 5, 2026, the second affected device exhibited a slightly different progression, initiating connections to http-test1[.]hola[.]org using the user agent ‘hola_get’. This activity was followed by the download of me[.]exe from the same endpoint on March 13, consistent with the broader pattern of Hola-related downloads observed across the environment.
Figure 6: Example of Hola VPN-related connectivity observed on the network prior to the suspected campaign, indicating pre-existing usage that may have contributed to subsequent activity.
The final affected device within this customer’s network demonstrated a more limited but related pattern, also downloading me[.]exe on March 17 using the same ‘hola_get’ user agent.
While the earlier Hola VPN usage observed across the deployment may not have been directly related to the suspected malware campaign, it may nonetheless have contributed to reduced visibility. The presence of pre-existing Hola-related traffic could have obscured malicious activity, making it more difficult to distinguish legitimate usage from attacker-driven behavior and, in turn, hindering the timely identification of the emerging compromise.
Darktrace’s Autonomous Response
For this deployment, the customer had their Autonomous Response capability configured in “Fully Autonomous” mode, allowing Darktrace to take action without human intervention. As a result, the system was able to autonomously disrupt the activity as soon as relevant events were identified through model detections.
Figure 7: Darktrace Autonomous Response actions taken against suspicious activity linked to Hola VPN.
Suspected cryptomining activity
As previously noted, some of the observed executable payloads appear to be linked to cryptomining malware. Across a subset of affected customer environments, this assessment was further supported by subsequent device activity consistent with Monero mining. Affected devices established follow-on connections to multiple external endpoints aligned with known mining infrastructure, indicating post-download execution.
Considering the broader sequence of activity, this pattern may point to a wider form of abuse in which legitimate VPN-related traffic is used to mask or facilitate malicious behavior following compromise.
On several devices, the download of executable files, including a newly observed peer[.]exe, was followed by alerts indicative of cryptocurrency mining activity. Mining-related credentials such as ‘x’ were observed using the Minergate protocol to communicate with endpoints within the 89.125.255.0/24 subnet and 188.241.218[.]111, the same endpoint involved in earlier download activity. Additional credentials appeared to reflect device-specific CPU identifiers, for example ‘12th Gen Intel(R) Core (TM) i5-1235U’.
Observed mining methods included login, submit, and job, consistent with active participation in a pool-based mining workflow rather than passive or incidental contact. The login method indicates that the host authenticated to the mining service as a worker, job reflects the assignment of computational tasks, and submit shows completed work being returned to the pool [8]. This sequence suggests that affected devices were actively contributing processing resources as part of an unauthorized distributed mining operation.
The presence of unauthorized cryptominers can lead to degraded system performance and reduced device stability. Beyond the immediate resource impact, such activity often serves as an indicator of a broader compromise rather than an isolated issue. This may increase the risk of further malware deployment, persistence mechanisms, and lateral movement, particularly in environments where the initial intrusion has not been fully contained.
Conclusion
Across affected environments, detections such as unusual VPN usage, connections to Hola infrastructure, anomalous HTTP activity, suspicious file downloads, and subsequent cryptomining behavior were linked into a single, evolving incident narrative. This aggregation provided a clearer view of attack progression, enabling security teams to understand not just isolated alerts, but the full sequence of compromise from initial contact through to post-exploitation.
Ultimately, these activities show that the risk posed by non-compliant software such as Hola VPN can extend far beyond simple policy violations. What began as traffic to Hola-related infrastructure was, in multiple cases, followed by behavior suggesting deliberate misuse, including suspicious executable downloads using Hola-related user agents and, in some instances, evidence of active cryptomining. These were not isolated anomalies, but elements of a broader pattern in which seemingly benign proxy or VPN-related communications may have created a pathway for malicious delivery and unauthorized resource exploitation.
The significance of this activity lies not only in the downloads or mining, but in what it reveals about an attacker’s ability to blend malicious operations into traffic associated with software that may already have a foothold in the environment. When unapproved software operates within an enterprise, it can reduce visibility, blur the distinction between legitimate and malicious traffic, and create opportunities to extend compromise in ways that are persistent and difficult to detect. Darktrace’s anomaly-based approach enables these behavioral distinctions to be identified, regardless of whether the device is new or long established within the network.
Credit to Min Kim (Associate Principal Analyst), Priya Thapa (Senior Cyber Analyst) Edited by Ryan Traill (Content Manager)
![Variation in URLs over time within the same hola[.]org domain, indicating the use of dynamically changing endpoints.](https://cdn.prod.website-files.com/626ff4d25aca2edf4325ff97/6a304bdeff111215c0436931_Screenshot%202026-06-15%20at%2012.00.43%E2%80%AFPM.avif)
![File transfer event showing the download of an executable from the rare external endpoint 188.241.219[.]55.](https://cdn.prod.website-files.com/626ff4d25aca2edf4325ff97/6a304c2468d20aeff16a2721_Screenshot%202026-06-15%20at%2012.01.53%E2%80%AFPM.avif)
