December 9, 2024

Darktrace’s view on Operation Lunar Peek: Exploitation of Palo Alto firewall devices (CVE 2024-0012 and 2024-9474)

Darktrace’s Threat Research team investigated a major campaign exploiting vulnerabilities in Palo Alto firewall devices (CVE 2024-0012 and 2024-9474). Learn about the spike in post-exploitation activities and understand the need for anomaly-based detection to stay ahead of evolving threats.

Written by

Adam Potter

Senior Cyber Analyst

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

Adam Potter

Senior Cyber Analyst

Dec 2024

Introduction: Spike in exploitation and post-exploitation activity affecting Palo Alto firewall devices

As the first line of defense for many organizations, perimeter devices such as firewalls are frequently targeted by threat actors. If compromised, these devices can serve as the initial point of entry to the network, providing access to vulnerable internal resources. This pattern of malicious behavior has become readily apparent within the Darktrace customer base. In 2024, Darktrace Threat Research analysts identified and investigated at least two major campaigns targeting internet-exposed perimeter devices. These included the exploitation of PAN-OS firewall exploitation via CVE 2024-3400 and FortiManager appliances via CVE 2024-47575.

More recently, at the end of November, Darktrace analysts observed a spike in exploitation and post-exploitation activity affecting, once again, Palo Alto firewall devices in the days following the disclosure of the CVE 2024-0012 and CVE-2024-9474 vulnerabilities.

Threat Research analysts had already been investigating potential exploitation of the firewalls’ management interface after Palo Alto published a security advisory (PAN-SA-2024-0015) on November 8. Subsequent analysis of data from Darktrace’s Security Operations Center (SOC) and external research uncovered multiple cases of Palo Alto firewalls being targeted via the likely exploitation of these vulnerabilities since November 13, through the end of the month. Although this spike in anomalous behavior may not be attributable to a single malicious actor, Darktrace Threat Research identified a clear increase in PAN-OS exploitation across the customer base by threat actors likely utilizing the recently disclosed vulnerabilities, resulting in broad patterns of post-exploitation activity.

How did exploitation occur?

CVE 2024-0012 is an authentication bypass vulnerability affecting unpatched versions of Palo Alto Networks Next-Generation Firewalls. The vulnerability resides in the management interface application on the firewalls specifically, which is written in PHP. When attempting to access highly privileged scripts, users are typically redirected to a login page. However, this can be bypassed by supplying an HTTP request where a Palo Alto related authentication header can be set to “off”. Users can supply this header value to the Nginx reverse proxy server fronting the application which will then send it without any prior processing [1].

CVE-2024-9474 is a privilege escalation vulnerability that allows a PAN-OS administrator with access to the management web interface to execute root-level commands, granting full control over the affected device [2]. When combined, these vulnerabilities enable unauthenticated adversaries to execute arbitrary commands on the firewall with root privileges.

Post-Exploitation Patterns of Activity

Darktrace Threat Research analysts examined potential indicators of PAN-OS software exploitation via CVE 2024-0012 and CVE-2024-9474 during November 2024. The investigation identified three main groupings of post-exploitation activity:

Exploit validation and initial payload retrieval
Command and control (C2) connectivity, potentially featuring further binary downloads
Potential reconnaissance and cryptomining activity

Exploit Validation

Across multiple investigated customers, Darktrace analysts identified likely vulnerable PAN-OS devices conducting external network connectivity to bin services. Specifically, several hosts performed DNS queries for, and HTTP requests to Out-of-Band Application Security Testing (OAST) domains, such as csv2im6eq58ujueonqs0iyq7dqpak311i.oast[.]pro. These endpoints are commonly used by network administrators to harden defenses, but they are increasingly used by threat actors to verify successful exploitation of targeted devices and assess their potential for further compromise. Although connectivity involving OAST domains were prevalent across investigated incidents, this activity was not necessarily the first indicator observed. In some cases, device behavior involving OAST domains also occurred shortly after an initial payload was downloaded.

Figure 1: Darktrace model alert logs detailing the HTTP request to an OAST domain immediately following PAN-OS device compromise.

Initial Payload Retrieval

Following successful exploitation, affected devices commonly performed behaviors indicative of initial payload download, likely in response to incoming remote command execution. Typically, the affected PAN-OS host would utilize the command line utilities curl and Wget, seen via use of user agents curl/7.61.1 and Wget/1.19.5 (linux-gnu), respectively.

In some cases, the use of these command line utilities by the infected devices was considered new behavior. Given the nature of the user agents, interaction with the host shell suggests remote command execution to achieve the outgoing payload requests.

While additional binaries and scripts were retrieved in later stages of the post-exploitation activity in some cases, this set of behaviors and payloads likely represent initial persistence and execution mechanisms that will enable additional functionality later in the kill chain. During the investigation, Darktrace analysts noted the prevalence of shell script payload requests. Devices analyzed would frequently make HTTP requests over the usual destination port 80 using the command line URL utility (curl), as seen in the user-agent field.

The observed URIs often featured requests for text files, such as “1.txt”, or shell scripts such as “y.sh”. Although packet capture (PCAP) samples were unavailable for review, external researchers have noted that the IP address hosting such “1.txt” files (46.8.226[.]75) serves malicious PHP payloads. When examining the contents of the “y.sh” shell script, Darktrace analysts noticed the execution of bash commands to upload a PHP-written web shell on the affected server.

Figure 2: PCAP showing the client request and server response associated with the download of the y.sh script from 45.76.141[.]166. The body content of the HTTP response highlights a shebang command to run subsequent code as bash script. The content is base64 encoded and details PHP script for what appears to be a webshell that will likely be written to the firewall device.

While not all investigated cases saw initial shell script retrieval, affected systems would commonly make an external HTTP connection, almost always via Wget, for the Executable and Linkable Format (ELF) file “/palofd” from the rare external IP 38.180.147[.]18.

Such requests were frequently made without prior hostname lookups, suggesting that the process or script initiating the requests already contained the external IP address. Analysts noticed a consistent SHA1 hash present for all identified instances of “/palofd” downloads (90f6890fa94b25fbf4d5c49f1ea354a023e06510). Multiple open-source intelligence (OSINT) vendors have associated this hash sample with Spectre RAT, a remote access trojan with capabilities including remote command execution, payload delivery, process manipulation, file transfers, and data theft [3][4].

Figure 3: Advanced Search log metrics highlighting details of the “/palofd” file download over HTTP.

Several targeted customer devices were observed initiating TLS/SSL connections to rare external IPs with self-signed TLS certificates following exploitation. Model data from across the Darktrace fleet indicated some overlap in JA3 fingerprints utilized by affected PAN-OS devices engaging in the suspicious TLS activity. Although JA3 hashes alone cannot be used for process attribution, this evidence suggests some correlation of source process across instances of PAN-OS exploitation.

These TLS/SSL sessions were typically established without the specification of a Server Name Indication (SNI) within the TLS extensions. The SNI extension prevents servers from supplying an incorrect certificate to the requesting client when multiple sites are hosted on the same IP. SSL connectivity without SNI specification suggests a potentially malicious running process as most software establishing TLS sessions typically supply this information during the handshake. Although the encrypted nature of the connection prevented further analysis of the payload packets, external sources note that JavaScript content is transmitted during these sessions, serving as initial payloads for the Sliver C2 platform using Wget [5].

C2 Communication and Additional Payloads

Following validation and preliminary post-compromise actions, examined hosts would commonly initiate varying forms of C2 connectivity. During this time, devices were frequently detected making further payload downloads, likely in response to directives set within C2 communications.

Palo Alto firewalls likely exploited via the newly disclosed CVEs would commonly utilize the Sliver C2 platform for external communication. Sliver’s functionality allows for different styles and formatting for communication. An open-source alternative to Cobalt Strike, this framework has been increasingly popular among threat actors, enabling the generation of dynamic payloads (“slivers”) for multiple platforms, including Windows, MacOS, Linux.

These payloads allow operators to establish persistence, spawn new shells, and exfiltrate data. URI patterns and PCAPs analysis yielded evidence of both English word type encoding within Sliverand Gzip formatting.

For example, multiple devices contacted the Sliver-linked IP address 77.221.158[.]154 using HTTP to retrieve Gzip files. The URIs present for these requests follow known Sliver Gzip formatted communication patterns [6]. Investigations yielded evidence of both English word encoding within Sliver, identified through PCAP analysis, and Gzip formatting.

Figure 4: Sample of URIs observed in Advanced Searchhighlighting HTTP requests to 77.221.158[.]154 for Gzip content suggest of Sliver communication.

Figure 5: PCAP showing English word encoding for Sliver communication observed during post-exploitation C2 activity.

External connectivity during this phase also featured TCP connection attempts over uncommon ports for common application protocols. For both Sliver and non-Sliver related IP addresses, devices utilized destination ports such as 8089, 3939, 8880, 8084, and 9999 for the HTTP protocol. The use of uncommon destination ports may represent attempts to avoid detection of connectivity to rare external endpoints. Moreover, some external beaconing within included URIs referencing the likely IP of the affected device. Such behavior can suggest the registration of compromised devices with command servers.

Targeted devices also proceeded to download additional payloads from rare external endpoints as beaconing/C2 activity was ongoing. For example, the newly registered domain repositorylinux[.]org (IP: 103.217.145[.]112) received numerous HTTP GET requests from investigated devices throughout the investigation period for script files including “linux.sh” and “cron.sh”. Young domains, especially those that present as similar to known code repositories, tend to host harmful content. Packet captures of the cron.sh file reveal commands within the HTTP body content involving crontab operations, likely to schedule future downloads. Some hosts that engaged in connectivity to the fake repository domain were later seen conducting crypto-mining connections, potentially highlighting the download of miner applications from the domain.

Additional payloads observed during this time largely featured variations of shell scripts, PHP content, and/or executables. Typically, shell scripts direct the device to retrieve additional content from external servers or repositories or contain potential configuration details for subsequent binaries to run on the device. For example, the “service.sh” retrieves a tar-compressed archive, a configuration JSON file as well as a file with the name “solr” from GitHub, potentially associated with the Apache Solr tool used for enterprise search. These could be used for further enumeration of the host and/or the network environment. PHP scripts observed may involve similar web shell functionality and were retrieved from both rare external IPs identified as well by external researchers [7]. Darktrace also detected the download of octet-stream data occurring mid-compromise from an Amazon Web Services (AWS) S3 bucket. Although no outside research confirmed the functionality, additional executable downloads for files such as “/initd”(IP: 178.215.224[.]246) and “/x6” (IP: 223.165.4[.]175) may relate to tool ingress, further Trojan/backdoor functionality, or cryptocurrency mining.

Figure 7: PCAP specifying the HTTP response headers and body content for the service.sh file request. The body content shown includes variable declarations for URLs that will eventually be called by the device shell via bash command.

Reconnaissance and Cryptomining

Darktrace analysts also noticed additional elements of kill chain operations from affected devices after periods of initial exploit activity. Several devices initiated TCP connections to endpoints affiliated with cryptomining pools such as us[.]zephyr[.]herominers[.]com and xmrig[.]com. Connectivity to these domains indicates likely successful installation of mining software during earlier stages of post-compromise activity. In a small number of instances, Darktrace observed reconnaissance and lateral movement within the time range of PAN-OS exploitation. Firewalls conducted large numbers of internal connectivity attempts across several critical ports related to privileged protocols, including SMB and SSH. Darktrace detected anonymous NTLM login attempts and new usage of potential PAN-related credentials. These behaviors likely constitute attempts at lateral movement to adjacent devices to further extend network compromise impact.

Figure 8: Model alert connection logs detailing the uncommon failed NTLM logins using an anonymous user account following PAN-OS exploitation.

Conclusion

Darktrace Threat Research and SOC analysts increasingly detect spikes in malicious activity on internet-facing devices in the days following the publication of new vulnerabilities. The latest iteration of this trend highlighted how threat actors quickly exploited Palo Alto firewall using authentication bypass and remote command execution vulnerabilities to enable device compromise. A review of the post-exploitation activity during these events reveals consistent patterns of perimeter device exploitation, but also some distinct variations.

Prior campaigns targeting perimeter devices featured activity largely confined to the exfiltration of configuration data and some initial payload retrieval. Within the current campaign, analysts identified a broader scope post-compromise activity consisting not only of payloads downloads but also extensive C2 activity, reconnaissance, and coin mining operations. While the use of command line tools like curl featured prominently in prior investigations, devices were seen retrieving a generally wider array of payloads during the latest round of activity. The use of the Sliver C2 platform further differentiates the latest round of PAN-OS compromises, with evidence of Sliver activity in about half of the investigated cases.

Several of the endpoints contacted by the infected firewall devices did not have any OSINT associated with them at the time of the attack. However, these indicators were noted as unusual for the devices according to Darktrace based on normal network traffic patterns. This reality further highlights the need for anomaly-based detection that does not rely necessarily on known indicators of compromise (IoCs) associated with CVE exploitation for detection. Darktrace’s experience in 2024 of multiple rounds of perimeter device exploitation may foreshadow future increases in these types of comprise operations.

Credit to Adam Potter (Senior Cyber Analyst), Alexandra Sentenac (Senior Cyber Analyst), Emma Foulger (Principal Cyber Analyst) and the Darktrace Threat Research team.

Get the latest insights on emerging cyber threats

Attackers are adapting, are you ready? This report explores the latest trends shaping the cybersecurity landscape and what defenders need to know in 2025.

Identity-based attacks: How attackers are bypassing traditional defenses
Zero-day exploitation: The rise of previously unknown vulnerabilities
AI-driven threats: How adversaries are leveraging AI to outmaneuver security controls

Stay ahead of evolving threats with expert analysis from Darktrace. Download the report here.

References

[1]: https://labs.watchtowr.com/pots-and-pans-aka-an-sslvpn-palo-alto-pan-os-cve-2024-0012-and-cve-2024-9474/

[2]: https://security.paloaltonetworks.com/CVE-2024-9474

[3]: https://threatfox.abuse[.]ch/ioc/1346254/

[4]:https://www.virustotal.com/gui/file/4911396d80baff80826b96d6ea7e54758847c93fdbcd3b86b00946cfd7d1145b/detection

[5]: https://arcticwolf.com/resources/blog/arctic-wolf-observes-threat-campaign-targeting-palo-alto-networks-firewall-devices/

[6] https://www.immersivelabs.com/blog/detecting-and-decrypting-sliver-c2-a-threat-hunters-guide

[7] https://arcticwolf.com/resources/blog/arctic-wolf-observes-threat-campaign-targeting-palo-alto-networks-firewall-devices/

Appendices

Darktrace Model Alerts

Anomalous Connection / Anomalous SSL without SNI to New External

Anomalous Connection / Application Protocol on Uncommon Port

Anomalous Connection / Multiple Failed Connections to Rare Endpoint

Anomalous Connection / Multiple HTTP POSTs to Rare Hostname

Anomalous Connection / New User Agent to IP Without Hostname

Anomalous Connection / Posting HTTP to IP Without Hostname

Anomalous Connection / Rare External SSL Self-Signed

Anomalous File / EXE from Rare External Location

Anomalous File / Incoming ELF File

Anomalous File / Mismatched MIME Type From Rare Endpoint

Anomalous File / Multiple EXE from Rare External Locations

Anomalous File / New User Agent Followed By Numeric File Download

Anomalous File / Script from Rare External Location

Anomalous File / Zip or Gzip from Rare External Location

Anomalous Server Activity / Rare External from Server

Compromise / Agent Beacon (Long Period)

Compromise / Agent Beacon (Medium Period)

Compromise / Agent Beacon to New Endpoint

Compromise / Beacon for 4 Days

Compromise / Beacon to Young Endpoint

Compromise / Beaconing Activity To External Rare

Compromise / High Priority Tunnelling to Bin Services

Compromise / High Volume of Connections with Beacon Score

Compromise / HTTP Beaconing to New IP

Compromise / HTTP Beaconing to Rare Destination

Compromise / Large Number of Suspicious Failed Connections

Compromise / Large Number of Suspicious Successful Connections

Compromise / Slow Beaconing Activity To External Rare

Compromise / SSL Beaconing to Rare Destination

Compromise / Suspicious Beaconing Behavior

Compromise / Suspicious File and C2

Compromise / Suspicious HTTP and Anomalous Activity

Compromise / Suspicious TLS Beaconing To Rare External

Compromise / Sustained SSL or HTTP Increase

Compromise / Sustained TCP Beaconing Activity To Rare Endpoint

Device / Initial Attack Chain Activity

Device / New User Agent

MITRE ATT&CK Mapping

Tactic – Technique

INITIAL ACCESS – Exploit Public-Facing Application

RESOURCE DEVELOPMENT – Malware

EXECUTION – Scheduled Task/Job (Cron)

EXECUTION – Unix Shell

PERSISTENCE – Web Shell

DEFENSE EVASION – Masquerading (Masquerade File Type)

DEFENSE EVASION - Deobfuscate/Decode Files or Information

CREDENTIAL ACCESS – Brute Force

DISCOVERY – Remote System Discovery

COMMAND AND CONTROL – Ingress Tool Transfer

COMMAND AND CONTROL – Application Layer Protocol (Web Protocols)

COMMAND AND CONTROL – Encrypted Channel

COMMAND AND CONTROL – Non-Standard Port

COMMAND AND CONTROL – Data Obfuscation

IMPACT – Resource Hijacking (Compute)

List of IoCs

IoC – Type – Description

sys.traceroute[.]vip – Hostname - C2 Endpoint
77.221.158[.]154 – IP - C2 Endpoint
185.174.137[.]26 – IP - C2 Endpoint
93.113.25[.]46 – IP - C2 Endpoint
104.131.69[.]106 – IP - C2 Endpoint
95.164.5[.]41 – IP - C2 Endpoint
bristol-beacon-assets.s3.amazonaws[.]com – Hostname - Payload Server
img.dxyjg[.]com – Hostname - Payload Server
38.180.147[.]18 – IP - Payload Server
143.198.1[.]178 – IP - Payload Server
185.208.156[.]46 – IP - Payload Server
185.196.9[.]154 – IP - Payload Server
46.8.226[.]75 – IP - Payload Server
223.165.4[.]175 – IP - Payload Server
188.166.244[.]81 – IP - Payload Server
bristol-beaconassets.s3[.]amazonaws[.]com/Y5bHaYxvd84sw – URL - Payload
img[.]dxyjg[.]com/KjQfcPNzMrgV – URL - Payload
38.180.147[.]18/palofd – URL - Payload
90f6890fa94b25fbf4d5c49f1ea354a023e06510 – SHA1 - Associated to file /palofd
143.198.1[.]178/7Z0THCJ – URL - Payload
8d82ccdb21425cf27b5feb47d9b7fb0c0454a9ca – SHA1 - Associated to file /7Z0THCJ
fefd0f93dcd6215d9b8c80606327f5d3a8c89712 – SHA1 - Associated to file /7Z0THCJ
e5464f14556f6e1dd88b11d6b212999dd9aee1b1 – SHA1 - Associated to file /7Z0THCJ
143.198.1[.]178/o4VWvQ5pxICPm – URL - Payload
185.208.156[.]46/lUuL095knXd62DdR6umDig – URL - Payload
185.196.9[.]154/ykKDzZ5o0AUSfkrzU5BY4w – URL - Payload
46.8.226[.]75/1.txt – URL - Payload
223.165.4[.]175/x6 – URL - Payload
45.76.141[.]166/y.sh – URL - Payload
repositorylinux[.]org/linux.sh – URL - Payload
repositorylinux[.]org/cron.sh – URL - Payload

‍

Written by

Adam Potter

Senior Cyber Analyst

Inside the SOC

Written by

Adam Potter

Senior Cyber Analyst

•

July 13, 2026

Nathaniel Jones

VP, Security & AI Strategy, Field CISO

•

July 24, 2026

Carlos Gray

Senior Product Marketing Manager, Email

Watch the NIS2 Webinar

Blog

Email

July 24, 2026

Darktrace / EMAIL Expands Behavioral Defense Across Email and Collaboration Workflows

Email and collaboration tools do more than carry messages. They are where organizations approve payments, share sensitive data, reset credentials, and make thousands of everyday decisions. Increasingly, they are interfaces through which humans direct AI agents in their daily activity. Email, Slack and Teams are high volume, rich with sensitive data, and an easy place to hide malicious activity.

The opportunity isn’t lost on bad actors. Darktrace / EMAIL detected more than 32 million high-confidence phishing emails globally in 2025, and 70% of those messages passed DMARC authentication. Phishing is increasingly difficult to detect and familiar trust signals alone are not enough. People and security teams need to understand how a message fits the normal behavior of the sender, recipient, and organization. They also need to correlate activity across platforms to spot threats that span multiple channels.

To effectively secure against today’s evolved threats, security teams need to act at two levels: they need to help each employee make a safer decision ‘in the moment’, and they need to understand the wider patterns that may expose the business to risk.

Darktrace is introducing four new capabilities in Darktrace / EMAIL to address both challenges. The new features explain suspicious content more clearly to end users, strengthen the capabilities of Darktrace / Adaptive Human Defense with richer guidance, let organizations define their own patterns for detecting sensitive data in messages, and give security teams a process-level view of risk across email and collaboration workflows.

Darktrace / EMAIL Inbox Analysis highlights risky content within your emails

A warning is more useful when it explains what the user should look at. To help do that, we’ve expanded Darktrace / EMAIL’s Inbox Analysis Add-In to highlight potentially dangerous content within the body of emails that Darktrace / EMAIL flags as potentially suspicious or high risk.

The add-in can highlight language designed to create urgency, financial references, requests for payment, suspicious links, and content that is unusual for the sender. Each highlighted element includes a pop up that explains why it may be suspicious. Instead of asking an employee to accept a verdict without context, the analysis helps them examine the message and make a more informed decision.

Enhanced Just-In-Time Training Banners in Darktrace / Adaptive Human Defense

Enhanced Just-In-Time Training Banners build on the same principle. The banners now include a contextual header, actionable advice, and specific detection context. This gives employees more useful guidance at the point of risk without adding unnecessary information or cognitive load.

Together, the capabilities help turn a warning into a short learning moment. Employees can see what looks unusual, understand what action to take, and build their judgment.

Custom Sensitive Data Detection in Darktrace / EMAIL - Data Loss Prevention

Sensitive data is different for every business. Standard categories such as payment card details or government identifiers matter, but organizations also have their own customer codes, project names, research formats, account structures, and internal identifiers.

Custom Sensitive Data Detection in Darktrace / EMAIL - Data Loss Prevention allows administrators to write custom expressions for the data their organization needs to protect. Matched content can trigger existing model actions and data loss prevention (DLP) workflows, extending Darktrace's DLP capabilities.

This extends data loss detection beyond a fixed library of common data types. Security teams can apply controls to information that is sensitive in the context of their own organization and adapt those controls as the business changes.

Introducing Email and Collaboration Workflow Risk Posture Dashboards

Some of the most important risks are not isolated events. They are repeated ways of working that create an opening for error, misuse, or attack. For example, a payment request may be one suspicious message, but a recurring approval workflow that relies on weak verification is a business process risk.

The new Email and Collaboration Workflow Risk Posture Dashboard analyzes email and collaboration data across Email, Microsoft Teams, Slack and Zoom to provide a process-level view of risk in the organization. These may include financial authorization workflows, sensitive data sharing patterns, and activity that could expose credentials.

The dashboard brings these patterns into a view and provides actionable recommendations. This helps security teams determine where to investigate or strengthen controls, where ownership needs to be clarified, and where the business may need to change a risky process. It gives CISOs a clearer view of how human and communication risk is embedded in everyday operations, not only where individual alerts occur.

Behavior connects the individual decision to the wider risk

These capabilities build on Darktrace’s unique behavioral approach to security. We use Adaptive AI to learn how people and AI normally behave within an organization, creating the context needed to recognize when activity changes.

Within the Darktrace Behavioral Defense Platform, Darktrace / EMAIL helps protect people against phishing, account takeover, data exfiltration, and human risk across email and collaboration tools. The new capabilities extend that protection in both directions. They give employees clearer context for the decision in front of them, while giving security leaders a broader view of the workflows and behavior that create risk across the organization.

The result is not simply more alerts. It is a better understanding of why something is risky, what action to take, and where the organization can reduce risk before a familiar process becomes an easy route for an attacker.

‍

[related-resource]

About the author

Carlos Gray

Senior Product Marketing Manager, Email

Blog

July 24, 2026

When Guardrails Break: Why Securing AI Requires Behavioral Detection and Autonomous Containment

Bottom line up front: Governance, guardrails, identity controls, and secure development are necessary to secure AI, but they are not sufficient. AI systems are probabilistic, adaptive, and non-deterministic. Therefore, organizations need two critical layers of security:

Behavioral-based detection that can identify when AI begins to act outside its intended purpose; and
Surgical, explainable autonomous containment that can stop risky activity before it causes material damage.

That capability depends on multiple specialized AI models working together, not one LLM making every decision.

Organizations are embedding AI into development, business operations, and security workflows faster than most security programs can adapt. The risk is no longer limited to the model. It extends across prompts, data, identities, agents, memory, APIs, tools, permissions, and the trust relationships connecting them.

In my recent blog, Securing AI: Analysis of the Complete Security Stack with Governance and Controls, I outlined a defense-in-depth strategy spanning governance, identity, data security, secure development, runtime detection, autonomous containment, and recovery. The most urgent requirement across that architecture is the ability to understand how AI behaves in practice and contain it when that behavior becomes risky.

Why non-deterministic systems require behavioral-based detection

Traditional controls remain foundational. Organizations need least privilege, strong identity controls, secure-by-design architecture, data governance, AI inventories, guardrails, testing, and clear boundaries on autonomy.

But deterministic controls, which assume predictable and repeatable behavior, cannot fully secure non-deterministic systems, where the same input may not always produce the same outcome.

AI agents can interpret the same instruction differently, chain individually authorized actions into an unsafe outcome, or pursue a legitimate goal through a method the organization did not anticipate. One of the most recent examples of this is the incident that OpenAI and Hugging Face jointly disclosed, where an autonomous agent escaped its intended testing boundaries and compromised Hugging Face infrastructure.

An agent may have permission to access data and invoke a tool, but that does not mean every use of that access is appropriate. It is not enough to know whether an action is allowed. Organizations need to know whether it makes sense.

Is this normal for this agent?
Is it acting within its intended purpose?
Is it accessing unusual data, invoking an unexpected tool, or beginning to drift?
Do a series of ordinary-looking actions become risky when viewed together?

Behavioral-based detection specific to an environment or organization with an understanding of context and risk enables provides the needed detection engineering for AI systems. It learns normal activity across people, systems, data, devices, and AI agents, then identifies deviations and evaluates their risk, intent, and context. This enables detection of misuse, abuse, compromise, manipulation, and unintended behavior even when no known attack signature or explicit policy violation exists.

Why accuracy is the foundation for SOC optimization

AI will only improve the SOC if it produces accurate, explainable, and actionable outcomes.

If analysts must manually validate every AI-generated finding because they cannot understand the evidence or confidence behind it, automation has not reduced workload. It has moved the workload. False positives increase fatigue. False negatives cause the most risk and damage to organizations. Inaccurate autonomous actions can disrupt critical operations.

Accuracy is therefore more than a model-performance metric. It is the prerequisite for analyst trust, SOC optimization, and safe autonomous response.

That accuracy is unlikely to come from one model.

Generative AI is valuable for natural-language analysis, summarization, and human interaction. But an LLM should not be the sole analytical engine for behavioral-based detection, investigation, risk assessment, and containment. Interpretability and consistency are required for high-consequence security decisions.

A stronger architecture uses multiple specialized AI systems collaboratively:

Behavioral models can establish normal activity.
Unsupervised learning can identify novel anomalies.
Graph analysis can evaluate relationships among agents, identities, systems, and tools.
Other models can correlate events, investigate competing hypotheses, and assess risk.
Semantic models can analyze language where behavior-based language analysis is needed but this can be used in tandem with vector embeddings, graph neural networks, and a variety of other AI systems.

Each model contributes a different analytical perspective. Their outputs can corroborate one another, improving accuracy and creating a more reliable basis for response. The objective is not one model operating as an oracle. It is layered, adaptive intelligence designed to produce decisions the SOC can understand and trust.

Autonomous containment is required to secure autonomous systems

Many SOCs remain hesitant to trust LLM-based agents with autonomous containment. That concern is reasonable. A poorly selected response can isolate the wrong asset, stop a critical workflow, block a legitimate identity, or create more operational damage than the original incident.

But relying exclusively on human response is also not viable.

AI systems can operate at machine speed. They can expose sensitive data, execute workflows, modify records, call tools, or propagate actions across connected systems before an analyst can investigate and intervene. The behavior may be unintentional, the result of an agent optimizing toward a goal, or caused by misuse, compromise, prompt injection, or offensive AI.

Intent affects the investigation. It does not change the need to stop the damage.

Organizations need autonomous response, but it must be surgical and explainable. The objective is not to shut down an entire agent, user, application, or business process whenever an anomaly occurs. It is to interrupt the specific risky behavior: block an unusual connection, constrain a tool call, stop an abnormal data transfer, or temporarily limit an agent when it is performing anomalous, risky activity.

That buys humans time. It stops the spread, limits damage, and allows the SOC to investigate without unnecessarily disrupting the business.

Layered, Adaptive AI provides a path forward

Darktrace has spent more than a decade researching and operationalizing layered, behavioral, Adaptive AI that learns a specific organization rather than relying only on historic attacks or predefined signatures.

The approach is designed to understand normal behavior, identify anomalous activity, assess its risk, correlate related events, autonomously investigate, and, when necessary, apply targeted containment while normal operations continue.

That sequence matters. Autonomous response cannot simply be added to the end of an LLM workflow. Trusted containment depends on broad visibility, continuous behavioral understanding, multiple analytical techniques, risk and context evaluation, autonomous investigation, explainability, and precise response actions.

This represents a more responsible model for security autonomy: not automation for its own sake, but controlled autonomy built to improve security outcomes and protect business operations.

Security must enable AI adoption

The answer for security teams is not to block AI. Organizations are adopting it to improve productivity, accelerate development, and create new business value.

But innovation without behavioral detection and autonomous containment is not sustainable.

Organizations should continue investing in governance, identity, least privilege, data security, secure MLOps, guardrails, testing, evaluation, validation, verification, kill switches, rollback, and forensic readiness. At the same time, they cannot wait for every governance program to mature before addressing runtime risk.

Behavioral-based detection and autonomous containment provide an immediate layer of resilience. They allow organizations to detect exploitation and risky AI behavior they did not anticipate, contain it at machine speed, and preserve human control over broader remediation.

The future of AI security will not be defined by a single model making every decision. It will be defined by multiple specialized AI systems working collaboratively, with sufficient accuracy, transparency, and context to support trusted autonomous action.

Surgical, explainable autonomous containment is no longer a future capability. It is a requirement for scaling AI securely today.

Learn how to build a defense-in-depth strategy for securing AI at scale in our talk at Black Hat on August 5 at 3:15 PM.

[related-resource]

About the author

Your data. Our AI.

Elevate your network security with Darktrace AI

Get a demo

Check out this article by Darktrace: Darktrace’s view on Operation Lunar Peek: Exploitation of Palo Alto firewall devices (CVE 2024-0012 and 2024-9474)

Darktrace’s view on Operation Lunar Peek: Exploitation of Palo Alto firewall devices (CVE 2024-0012 and 2024-9474)

Introduction: Spike in exploitation and post-exploitation activity affecting Palo Alto firewall devices

How did exploitation occur?

Post-Exploitation Patterns of Activity

Exploit Validation

Initial Payload Retrieval

C2 Communication and Additional Payloads

Reconnaissance and Cryptomining

Conclusion

Get the latest insights on emerging cyber threats

References

Appendices

MITRE ATT&CK Mapping

List of IoCs

Security After Signatures: Operating in a World of Pre‑CVE Disclosure Exploitation, Collapsed Trust Boundaries, and Autonomous Systems

Darktrace / EMAIL Expands Behavioral Defense Across Email and Collaboration Workflows

Enjoying the blog?

More in this series

From Click to Command: Behavioral Detection of AppleScript-Led MacOS Intrusions

Hola VPN Abuse: From Proxy Traffic to Malware and Cryptomining

How Attackers Abuse the Chinese Nezha Monitoring Tool

Blog

Email

July 24, 2026

Darktrace / EMAIL Expands Behavioral Defense Across Email and Collaboration Workflows

Darktrace / EMAIL Inbox Analysis highlights risky content within your emails

Enhanced Just-In-Time Training Banners in Darktrace / Adaptive Human Defense

Custom Sensitive Data Detection in Darktrace / EMAIL - Data Loss Prevention

Introducing Email and Collaboration Workflow Risk Posture Dashboards

Behavior connects the individual decision to the wider risk

Blog

July 24, 2026

When Guardrails Break: Why Securing AI Requires Behavioral Detection and Autonomous Containment

Why non-deterministic systems require behavioral-based detection

Why accuracy is the foundation for SOC optimization

Autonomous containment is required to secure autonomous systems

Layered, Adaptive AI provides a path forward

Security must enable AI adoption