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May 10, 2024

Exploitation of ConnectWise ScreenConnect Vulnerabilities

Uncover the tactics used to exploit ConnectWise vulnerabilities and strategies to protect your systems.
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
Justin Torres
Cyber Analyst
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10
May 2024

Introduction

Across an ever changing cyber landscape, it is common place for threat actors to actively identify and exploit newly discovered vulnerabilities within commonly utilized services and applications. While attackers are likely to prioritize developing exploits for the more severe and global Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVEs), they typically have the most success exploiting known vulnerabilities within the first couple years of disclosure to the public.

Addressing these vulnerabilities in a timely manner reduces the effectiveness of known vulnerabilities, decreasing the pace of malicious actor operations and forcing pursuit of more costly and time-consuming methods, such as zero-day related exploits or attacking software supply chain operations. While actors also develop tools to exploit other vulnerabilities, developing exploits for critical and publicly known vulnerabilities gives actors impactful tools at a low cost they are able to use for quite some time.

Between January and March 2024, the Darktrace Threat Research team investigated one such example that involved indicators of compromise (IoCs) suggesting the exploitation of vulnerabilities in ConnectWise’s remote monitoring and management (RMM) software ScreenConnect.

What are the ConnectWise ScreenConnect vulnerabilities?

CVE-2024-1708 is an authentication bypass vulnerability in ScreenConnect 23.9.7 (and all earlier versions) that, if exploited, would enable an attacker to execute remote code or directly impact confidential information or critical systems. This exploit would pave the way for a second ScreenConnect vunerability, CVE-2024-1709, which allows attackers to directly access confidential information or critical systems [1].

ConnectWise released a patch and automatically updated cloud versions of ScreenConnect 23.9.9, while urging security temas to update on-premise versions immediately [3].

If exploited in conjunction, these vulnerabilities could allow a malicious actor to create new administrative accounts on publicly exposed instances by evading existing security measures. This, in turn, could enable attackers to assume an administrative role and disable security tools, create backdoors, and disrupt RMM processes. Access to an organization’s environment in this manner poses serious risk, potentially leading to significant consequences such as deploying ransomware, as seen in various incidents involving the exploitation of ScreenConnect [2]

Darktrace Coverage of ConnectWise Exploitation

Darktrace’s anomaly-based detection was able to identify evidence of exploitation related to CVE-2024-1708 and CVE-2024-1709 across two distinct timelines; these detections included connectivity with endpoints that were later confirmed to be malicious by multiple open-source intelligence (OSINT) vendors. The activity observed by Darktrace suggests that threat actors were actively exploiting these vulnerabilities across multiple customer environments.

In the cases observed across the Darktrace fleet, Darktrace DETECT™ and Darktrace RESPOND™ were able to work in tandem to pre-emptively identify and contain network compromises from the onset. While Darktrace RESPOND was enabled in most customer environments affected by the ScreenConnect vulnerabilities, in the majority of cases it was configured in Human Confirmation mode. Whilst in Human Confirmation mode, RESPOND will provide recommended actions to mitigate ongoing attacks, but these actions require manual approval from human security teams.

When enabled in autonomous response mode, Darktrace RESPOND will take action automatically, shutting down suspicious activity as soon as it is detected without the need for human intervention. This is the ideal end state for RESPOND as actions can be taken at machine speed, without any delays waiting for user approval.

Looking within the patterns of activity observed by Darktrace , the typical  attack timeline included:

Darktrace observed devices on affected customer networks performing activity indicative of ConnectWise ScreenConnect usage, for example connections over 80 and 8041, connections to screenconnect[.]com, and the use of the user agent “LabTech Agent”. OSINT research suggests that this user agent is an older name for ConnectWise Automate [5] which also includes ScreenConnect as standard [6].

Darktrace DETECT model alert highlighting the use of a remote management tool, namely “screenconnect[.]com”.
Figure 1: Darktrace DETECT model alert highlighting the use of a remote management tool, namely “screenconnect[.]com”.

This activity was typically followed by anomalous connections to the external IP address 108.61.210[.]72 using URIs of the form “/MyUserName_DEVICEHOSTNAME”, as well as additional connections to another external, IP 185.62.58[.]132. Both of these external locations have since been reported as potentially malicious [14], with 185.62.58[.]132 in particular linked to ScreenConnect post-exploitation activity [2].

Figure 2: Darktrace DETECT model alert highlighting the unusual connection to 185.62.58[.]132 via port 8041.
Figure 2: Darktrace DETECT model alert highlighting the unusual connection to 185.62.58[.]132 via port 8041.
Figure 3: Darktrace DETECT model alert highlighting connections to 108.61.210[.]72 using a new user agent and the “/MyUserName_DEVICEHOSTNAME” URI.
Figure 3: Darktrace DETECT model alert highlighting connections to 108.61.210[.]72 using a new user agent and the “/MyUserName_DEVICEHOSTNAME” URI.

Same Exploit, Different Tactics?  

While the majority of instances of ConnectWise ScreenConnect exploitation observed by Darktrace followed the above pattern of activity, Darktrace was able to identify some deviations from this.

In one customer environment, Darktrace’s detection of post-exploitation activity began with the same indicators of ScreenConnect usage, including connections to screenconnect[.]com via port 8041, followed by connections to unusual domains flagged as malicious by OSINT, in this case 116.0.56[.]101 [16] [17]. However, on this deployment Darktrace also observed threat actors downloading a suspicious AnyDesk installer from the endpoint with the URI “hxxp[:]//116.0.56[.]101[:]9191/images/Distribution.exe”.

Figure 4: Darktrace DETECT model alert highlighting the download of an unusual executable file from 116.0.56[.]101.
Figure 4: Darktrace DETECT model alert highlighting the download of an unusual executable file from 116.0.56[.]101.

Further investigation by Darktrace’s Threat Research team revealed that this endpoint was associated with threat actors exploiting CVE-2024-1708 and CVE-2024-1709 [1]. Darktrace was additionally able to identify that, despite the customer being based in the United Kingdom, the file downloaded came from Pakistan. Darktrace recognized that this represented a deviation from the device’s expected pattern of activity and promptly alerted for it, bringing it to the attention of the customer.

Figure 5: External Sites Summary within the Darktrace UI pinpointing the geographic locations of external endpoints, in this case highlighting a file download from Pakistan.
Figure 5: External Sites Summary within the Darktrace UI pinpointing the geographic locations of external endpoints, in this case highlighting a file download from Pakistan.

Darktrace’s Autonomous Response

In this instance, the customer had Darktrace enabled in autonomous response mode and the post-exploitation activity was swiftly contained, preventing the attack from escalating.

As soon as the suspicious AnyDesk download was detected, Darktrace RESPOND applied targeted measures to prevent additional malicious activity. This included blocking connections to 116.0.56[.]101 and “*.56.101”, along with blocking all outgoing traffic from the device. Furthermore, RESPOND enforced a “pattern of life” on the device, restricting its activity to its learned behavior, allowing connections that are considered normal, but blocking any unusual deviations.

Figure 6: Darktrace RESPOND enforcing a “pattern of life” on the offending device after detecting the suspicious AnyDesk download.
Figure 6: Darktrace RESPOND enforcing a “pattern of life” on the offending device after detecting the suspicious AnyDesk download.
Figure 7: Darktrace RESPOND blocking connections to the suspicious endpoint 116.0.56[.]101 and “*.56.101” following the download of the suspicious AnyDesk installer.
Figure 7: Darktrace RESPOND blocking connections to the suspicious endpoint 116.0.56[.]101 and “*.56.101” following the download of the suspicious AnyDesk installer.

The customer was later able to use RESPOND to manually quarantine the offending device, ensuring that all incoming and outgoing traffic to or from the device was prohibited, thus preventing ay further malicious communication or lateral movement attempts.

Figure 8: The actions applied by Darktrace RESPOND in response to the post-exploitation activity related to the ScreenConnect vulnerabilities, including the manually applied “Quarantine device” action.

Conclusion

In the observed cases of the ConnectWise ScreenConnect vulnerabilities being exploited across the Darktrace fleet, Darktrace was able to pre-emptively identify and contain network compromises from the onset, offering vital protection against disruptive cyber-attacks.

While much of the post-exploitation activity observed by Darktrace remained the same across different customer environments, important deviations were also identified suggesting that threat actors may be adapting their tactics, techniques and procedures (TTPs) from campaign to campaign.

While new vulnerabilities will inevitably surface and threat actors will continually look for novel ways to evolve their methods, Darktrace’s Self-Learning AI and behavioral analysis offers organizations full visibility over new or unknown threats. Rather than relying on existing threat intelligence or static lists of “known bads”, Darktrace is able to detect emerging activity based on anomaly and respond to it without latency, safeguarding customer environments whilst causing minimal disruption to business operations.

Credit: Emma Foulger, Principal Cyber Analyst for their contribution to this blog.

Appendices

Darktrace Model Coverage

DETECT Models

Compromise / Agent Beacon (Medium Period)

Compromise / Agent Beacon (Long Period)

Anomalous File / EXE from Rare External Location

Device / New PowerShell User Agent

Anomalous Connection / Powershell to Rare External

Anomalous Connection / New User Agent to IP Without Hostname

User / New Admin Credentials on Client

Device / New User Agent

Anomalous Connection / Multiple HTTP POSTs to Rare Hostname

Anomalous Server Activity / Anomalous External Activity from Critical Network Device

Compromise / Suspicious Request Data

Compliance / Remote Management Tool On Server

Anomalous File / Anomalous Octet Stream (No User Agent)

RESPOND Models

Antigena / Network::External Threat::Antigena Suspicious File Block

Antigena / Network::External Threat::Antigena File then New Outbound Block

Antigena / Network::Significant Anomaly::Antigena Enhanced Monitoring from Client Block

Antigena / Network::Significant Anomaly::Antigena Significant Anomaly from Client Block

Antigena / Network::Significant Anomaly::Antigena Controlled and Model Breach

Antigena / Network::Insider Threat::Antigena Unusual Privileged User Activities Block

Antigena / Network / External Threat / Antigena Suspicious File Pattern of Life Block

Antigena / Network / Insider Threat / Antigena Unusual Privileged User Activities Pattern of Life Block

List of IoCs

IoC - Type - Description + Confidence

185.62.58[.]132 – IP- IP linked with threat actors exploiting CVE-2024-1708 and CVE-2024-17091

108.61.210[.]72- IP - IP linked with threat actors exploiting CVE-2024-1708 and CVE-2024-17091

116.0.56[.]101    - IP - IP linked with threat actors exploiting CVE-2024-1708 and CVE-2024-17091

/MyUserName_ DEVICEHOSTNAME – URI - URI linked with threat actors exploiting CVE-2024-1708 and CVE-2024-17091

/images/Distribution.exe – URI - URI linked with threat actors exploiting CVE-2024-1708 and CVE-2024-17091

24780657328783ef50ae0964b23288e68841a421 - SHA1 Filehash - Filehash linked with threat actors exploiting CVE-2024-1708 and CVE-2024-17091

a21768190f3b9feae33aaef660cb7a83 - MD5 Filehash - Filehash linked with threat actors exploiting CVE-2024-1708 and CVE-2024-17091

MITRE ATT&CK Mapping

Technique – Tactic – ID - Sub-technique of

Web Protocols - COMMAND AND CONTROL - T1071.001 - T1071

Web Services      - RESOURCE DEVELOPMENT - T1583.006 - T1583

Drive-by Compromise - INITIAL ACCESS - T1189 – NA

Ingress Tool Transfer   - COMMAND AND CONTROL - T1105 - NA

Malware - RESOURCE DEVELOPMENT - T1588.001- T1588

Exploitation of Remote Services - LATERAL MOVEMENT - T1210 – NA

PowerShell – EXECUTION - T1059.001 - T1059

Pass the Hash      - DEFENSE EVASION, LATERAL MOVEMENT     - T1550.002 - T1550

Valid Accounts - DEFENSE EVASION, PERSISTENCE, PRIVILEGE ESCALATION, INITIAL ACCESS - T1078 – NA

Man in the Browser – COLLECTION - T1185     - NA

Exploit Public-Facing Application - INITIAL ACCESS - T1190         - NA

Exfiltration Over C2 Channel – EXFILTRATION - T1041 – NA

IP Addresses – RECONNAISSANCE - T1590.005 - T1590

Remote Access Software - COMMAND AND CONTROL - T1219 – NA

Lateral Tool Transfer - LATERAL MOVEMENT - T1570 – NA

Application Layer Protocol - COMMAND AND CONTROL - T1071 – NA

References:

[1] https://unit42.paloaltonetworks.com/connectwise-threat-brief-cve-2024-1708-cve-2024-1709/  

[2] https://www.huntress.com/blog/slashandgrab-screen-connect-post-exploitation-in-the-wild-cve-2024-1709-cve-2024-1708    

[3] https://www.huntress.com/blog/a-catastrophe-for-control-understanding-the-screenconnect-authentication-bypass

[4] https://www.speedguide.net/port.php?port=8041  

[5] https://www.connectwise.com/company/announcements/labtech-now-connectwise-automate

[6] https://www.connectwise.com/solutions/software-for-internal-it/automate

[7] https://www.securityweek.com/slashandgrab-screenconnect-vulnerability-widely-exploited-for-malware-delivery/

[8] https://arcticwolf.com/resources/blog/cve-2024-1709-cve-2024-1708-follow-up-active-exploitation-and-pocs-observed-for-critical-screenconnect-vulnerabilities/https://success.trendmicro.com/dcx/s/solution/000296805?language=en_US&sfdcIFrameOrigin=null

[9] https://www.connectwise.com/company/trust/security-bulletins/connectwise-screenconnect-23.9.8

[10] https://socradar.io/critical-vulnerabilities-in-connectwise-screenconnect-postgresql-jdbc-and-vmware-eap-cve-2024-1597-cve-2024-22245/

[11] https://www.trendmicro.com/en_us/research/24/b/threat-actor-groups-including-black-basta-are-exploiting-recent-.html

[12] https://otx.alienvault.com/indicator/ip/185.62.58.132

[13] https://www.virustotal.com/gui/ip-address/185.62.58.132/community

[14] https://www.virustotal.com/gui/ip-address/108.61.210.72/community

[15] https://otx.alienvault.com/indicator/ip/108.61.210.72

[16] https://www.virustotal.com/gui/ip-address/116.0.56[.]101/community

[17] https://otx.alienvault.com/indicator/ip/116.0.56[.]101

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
Justin Torres
Cyber Analyst

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September 25, 2025

Announcing Unified Real-Time CDR and Automated Investigations to Transform Cloud Security Operations

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Fragmented Tools are Failing SOC Teams in the Cloud Era

The cloud has transformed how businesses operate, reshaping everything from infrastructure to application delivery. But cloud security has not kept pace. Most tools still rely on traditional models of logging, policy enforcement, and posture management; approaches that provide surface-level visibility but lack the depth to detect or investigate active attacks.

Meanwhile, attackers are exploiting vulnerabilities, delivering cloud-native exploits, and moving laterally in ways that posture management alone cannot catch fast enough. Critical evidence is often missed, and alerts lack the forensic depth SOC analysts need to separate noise from true risk. As a result, organizations remain exposed: research shows that nearly nine in ten organizations have suffered a critical cloud breach despite investing in existing security tools [1].

SOC teams are left buried in alerts without actionable context, while ephemeral workloads like containers and serverless functions vanish before evidence can be preserved. Point tools for logging or forensics only add complexity, with 82% of organizations using multiple platforms to investigate cloud incidents [2].

The result is a broken security model: posture tools surface risks but don’t connect them to active attacker behaviors, while investigation tools are too slow and fragmented to provide timely clarity. Security teams are left reactive, juggling multiple point solutions and still missing critical signals. What’s needed is a unified approach that combines real-time detection and response for active threats with automated investigation and cloud posture management in a single workflow.

Just as security teams once had to evolve beyond basic firewalls and antivirus into network and endpoint detection, response, and forensics, cloud security now requires its own next era: one that unifies detection, response, and investigation at the speed and scale of the cloud.

A Powerful Combination: Real-Time CDR + Automated Cloud Forensics

Darktrace / CLOUD now uniquely unites detection, investigation, and response into one workflow, powered by Self-Learning AI. This means every alert, from any tool in your stack, can instantly become actionable evidence and a complete investigation in minutes.

With this release, Darktrace / CLOUD delivers a more holistic approach to cloud defense, uniting real-time detection, response, and investigation with proactive risk reduction. The result is a single solution that helps security teams stay ahead of attackers while reducing complexity and blind spots.

  • Automated Cloud Forensic Investigations: Instantly capture and analyze volatile evidence from cloud assets, reducing investigation times from days to minutes and eliminating blind spots
  • Enhanced Cloud-Native Threat Detection: Detect advanced attacker behaviors such as lateral movement, privilege escalation, and command-and-control in real time
  • Enhanced Live Cloud Topology Mapping: Gain continuous insight into cloud environments, including ephemeral workloads, with live topology views that simplify investigations and expose anomalous activity
  • Agentless Scanning for Proactive Risk Reduction: Continuously monitor for misconfigurations, vulnerabilities, and risky exposures to reduce attack surface and stop threats before they escalate.

Automated Cloud Forensic Investigations

Darktrace / CLOUD now includes capabilities introduced with Darktrace / Forensic Acquisition & Investigation, triggering automated forensic acquisition the moment a threat is detected. This ensures ephemeral evidence, from disks and memory to containers and serverless workloads can be preserved instantly and analyzed in minutes, not days. The integration unites detection, response, and forensic investigation in a way that eliminates blind spots and reduces manual effort.

Figure 1: Easily view Forensic Investigation of a cloud resource within the Darktrace / CLOUD architecture map

Enhanced Cloud-Native Threat Detection

Darktrace / CLOUD strengthens its real-time behavioral detection to expose early attacker behaviors that logs alone cannot reveal. Enhanced cloud-native detection capabilities include:

• Reconnaissance & Discovery – Detects enumeration and probing activity post-compromise.

• Privilege Escalation via Role Assumption – Identifies suspicious attempts to gain elevated access.

• Malicious Compute Resource Usage – Flags threats such as crypto mining or spam operations.

These enhancements ensure active attacks are detected earlier, before adversaries can escalate or move laterally through cloud environments.

Figure 2: Cyber AI Analyst summary of anomalous behavior for privilege escalation and establishing persistence.

Enhanced Live Cloud Topology Mapping

New enhancements to live topology provide real-time mapping of cloud environments, attacker movement, and anomalous behavior. This dynamic visibility helps SOC teams quickly understand complex environments, trace attack paths, and prioritize response. By integrating with Darktrace / Proactive Exposure Management (PEM), these insights extend beyond the cloud, offering a unified view of risks across networks, endpoints, SaaS, and identity — giving teams the context needed to act with confidence.

Figure 3: Enhanced live topology maps unify visibility across architectures, identities, network connections and more.

Agentless Scanning for Proactive Risk Reduction

Darktrace / CLOUD now introduces agentless scanning to uncover malware and vulnerabilities in cloud assets without impacting performance. This lightweight, non-disruptive approach provides deep visibility into cloud workloads and surfaces risks before attackers can exploit them. By continuously monitoring for misconfigurations and exposures, the solution strengthens posture management and reduces attack surface across hybrid and multi-cloud environments.

Figure 4: Agentless scanning of cloud assets reveals vulnerabilities, which are prioritized by severity.

Together, these capabilities move cloud security operations from reactive to proactive, empowering security teams to detect novel threats in real time, reduce exposures before they are exploited, and accelerate investigations with forensic depth. The result is faster triage, shorter MTTR, and reduced business risk — all delivered in a single, AI-native solution built for hybrid and multi-cloud environments.

Accelerating the Evolution of Cloud Security

Cloud security has long been fragmented, forcing teams to stitch together posture tools, log-based monitoring, and external forensics to get even partial coverage. With this release, Darktrace / CLOUD delivers a holistic, unified approach that covers every stage of the cloud lifecycle, from proactive posture management and risk identification to real-time detection, to automated investigation and response.

By bringing these capabilities together in a single AI-native solution, Darktrace is advancing cloud security beyond incremental change and setting a new standard for how organizations protect their hybrid and multi-cloud environments.

With Darktrace / CLOUD, security teams finally gain end-to-end visibility, response, and investigation at the speed of the cloud, transforming cloud defense from fragmented and reactive to unified and proactive.

[related-resource]

Sources: [1], [2] Darktrace Report: Organizations Require a New Approach to Handle Investigations in the Cloud

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About the author
Adam Stevens
Senior Director of Product, Cloud | Darktrace

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September 25, 2025

Introducing the Industry’s First Truly Automated Cloud Forensics Solution

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Why Cloud Investigations Fail Today

Cloud investigations have become one of the hardest problems in modern cybersecurity. Traditional DFIR tools were built for static, on-prem environments, rather than dynamic and highly scalable cloud environments, containing ephemeral workloads that disappear in minutes. SOC analysts are flooded with cloud security alerts with one-third lacking actionable data to confirm or dismiss a threat[1], while DFIR teams waste 3-5 days requesting access and performing manual collection, or relying on external responders.

These delays leave organizations vulnerable. Research shows that nearly 90% of organizations suffer some level of damage before they can fully investigate and contain a cloud incident [2]. The result is a broken model: alerts are closed without a complete understanding of the threat due to a lack of visibility and control, investigations drag on, and attackers retain the upper hand.

For SOC teams, the challenge is scale and clarity. Analysts are inundated with alerts but lack the forensic depth to quickly distinguish real threats from noise. Manual triage wastes valuable time, creates alert fatigue, and often forces teams to escalate or dismiss incidents without confidence — leaving adversaries with room to maneuver.

For DFIR teams, the challenge is depth and speed. Traditional forensics tools were built for static, on-premises environments and cannot keep pace with ephemeral workloads that vanish in minutes. Investigators are left chasing snapshots, requesting access from cloud teams, or depending on external responders, leading to blind spots and delayed response.

That’s why we built Darktrace / Forensic Acquisition & Investigation, the first automated forensic solution designed specifically for the speed, scale, and complexities of the cloud. It addresses both sets of challenges by combining automated forensic evidence capture, attacker timeline reconstruction, and cross-cloud scale. The solution empowers SOC analysts with instant clarity and DFIR teams with forensic depth, all in minutes, not days. By leveraging the very nature of the cloud, Darktrace makes these advanced capabilities accessible to security teams of all sizes, regardless of expertise or resources.

Introducing Automated Forensics at the Speed and Scale of Cloud

Darktrace / Forensic Acquisition & Investigation transforms cloud investigations by capturing, processing, and analyzing forensic evidence of cloud workloads, instantly, even from time-restricted ephemeral resources. Triggered by a detection from any cloud security tool, the entire process is automated, providing accurate root cause analysis and deep insights into attacker behavior in minutes rather than days or weeks. SOC and DFIR teams no longer have to rely on manual processes, snapshots, or external responders, they can now leverage the scale and elasticity of the cloud to accelerate triage and investigations.

Seamless Integration with Existing Detection Tools

Darktrace / Forensic Acquisition & Investigation does not require customers to replace their detection stack. Instead, it integrates with cloud-native providers, XDR platforms, and SIEM/SOAR tools, automatically initiating forensic capture whenever an alert is raised. This means teams can continue leveraging their existing investments while gaining the forensic depth required to validate alerts, confirm root cause, and accelerate response.

Most importantly, the solution is natively integrated with Darktrace / CLOUD, turning real-time detections of novel attacker behaviors into full forensic investigations instantly. When Darktrace / CLOUD identifies suspicious activity such as lateral movement, privilege escalation, or abnormal usage of compute resources, Darktrace / Forensic Acquisition & Investigation automatically preserves the underlying forensic evidence before it disappears. This seamless workflow unites detection, response, and investigation in a way that eliminates gaps, accelerates triage, and gives teams confidence that every critical cloud alert can be investigated to completion.

Figure 1: Integration with Darktrace / CLOUD – this example is showing the ability to pivot into the forensic investigation associated with a compromised cloud asset

Automated Evidence Collection Across Hybrid and Multi-Cloud

The solution provides automated forensic acquisition across AWS, Microsoft Azure, GCP, and on-prem environments. It supports both full volume capture, creating a bit-by-bit copy of an entire storage device for the most comprehensive preservation of evidence, and triage collection, which prioritizes speed by gathering only the most essential forensic artifacts such as process data, logs, network connections, and open file contents. This flexibility allows teams to strike the right balance between speed and depth depending on the investigation at hand.

Figure 2: Ability to acquire forensic data from Cloud, SaaS and on-prem environments

Automated Investigations, Root Cause Analysis and Attacker Timelines

Once evidence is collected, Darktrace applies automation to reconstruct attacker activity into a unified timeline. This includes correlating commands, files, lateral movement, and network activity into a single investigative view enriched with custom threat intelligence such as IOCs. Detailed investigation reporting including an investigation summary, an overview of the attacker timeline, and key events. Analysts can pivot into detailed views such as the filesystem view, traversing directories or inspecting file content, or filter and search using faceted options to quickly narrow the scope of an investigation.

Figure 3: Automated Investigation view surfacing the most significant attacker activity, which is contextualized with Alarm information

Forensics for Containers and Ephemeral Assets

Investigating containers and serverless workloads has historically been one of the hardest challenges for DFIR teams, as these assets often disappear before evidence can be preserved. Darktrace / Forensic Acquisition & Investigation captures forensic evidence across managed Kubernetes cloud services, even from distroless or no-shell containers, AWS ECS and other environments, ensuring that ephemeral activity is no longer a blind spot. For hybrid organizations, this extends to on-premises Kubernetes and OpenShift deployments, bringing consistency across environments.

Figure 4: Container investigations – this example is showing the ability to capture containers from managed Kubernetes cloud services

SaaS Log Collection for Modern Investigations

Beyond infrastructure-level data, the solution collects logs from SaaS providers such as Microsoft 365, Entra ID, and Google Workspace. This enables investigations into common attack types like business email compromise (BEC), account takeover (ATO), and insider threats — giving teams visibility into both infrastructure-level and SaaS-driven compromise from a single platform.

Figure 5: Ability to import logs from SaaS providers including Microsoft 365, Entra ID, and Google Workspace

Proactive Vulnerability and Malware Discovery

Finally, the solution surfaces risk proactively with vulnerability and malware discovery for Linux-based cloud resources. Vulnerabilities are presented in a searchable table and correlated with the attacker timeline, enabling teams to quickly understand not just which packages are exposed, but whether they have been targeted or exploited in the context of an incident.

Figure 6: Vulnerability data with pivot points into the attacker timeline

Cloud-Native Scale and Performance

Darktrace / Forensic Acquisition & Investigation uses a cloud-native parallel processing architecture that spins up compute resources on demand, ensuring that investigations run at scale without bottlenecks. Detailed reporting and summaries are automatically generated, giving teams a clear record of the investigation process and supporting compliance, litigation readiness, and executive reporting needs.

Scalable and Flexible Deployment Options

Every organization has different requirements for speed, control, and integration. Darktrace / Forensic Acquisition & Investigation is designed to meet those needs with two flexible deployment models.

  • Self-Hosted Virtual Appliance delivers deep integration and control across hybrid environments, preserving forensic data for compliance and litigation while scaling to the largest enterprise investigations.
  • SaaS-Delivered Deployment provides fast time-to-value out of the box, enabling automated forensic response without requiring deep cloud expertise or heavy setup.

Both models are built to scale across regions and accounts, ensuring organizations of any size can achieve rapid value and adapt the solution to their unique operational and compliance needs. This flexibility makes advanced cloud forensics accessible to every security team — whether they are optimizing for speed, integration depth, or regulatory alignment

Delivering Advanced Cloud Forensics for Every Team

Until now, forensic investigations were slow, manual, and reserved for only the largest organizations with specialized DFIR expertise. Darktrace / Forensic Acquisition & Investigation changes that by leveraging the scale and elasticity of the cloud itself to automate the entire investigation process. From capturing full disk and memory at detection to reconstructing attacker timelines in minutes, the solution turns fragmented workflows into streamlined investigations available to every team.

Whether deployed as a SaaS-delivered service for fast time-to-value or as a self-hosted appliance for deep integration, Darktrace / Forensic Acquisition & Investigation provides the features that matter most: automated evidence capture, cross-cloud investigations, forensic depth for ephemeral assets, and root cause clarity without manual effort.

With Darktrace / Forensic Acquisition & Investigation, what once took days now takes minutes. Now, forensic investigations in the cloud are faster, more scalable, and finally accessible to every security team, no matter their size or expertise.

[related-resource]

Sources: [1], [2] Darktrace Report: Organizations Require a New Approach to Handle Investigations in the Cloud

Additional Resources

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About the author
Paul Bottomley
Director of Product Management | Darktrace
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