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July 18, 2023

Understanding Email Security & the Psychology of Trust

We explore how psychological research into the nature of trust relates to our relationship with technology - and what that means for AI solutions.
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
Hanah Darley
Director of Threat Research
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18
Jul 2023

When security teams discuss the possibility of phishing attacks targeting their organization, often the first reaction is to assume it is inevitable because of the users. Users are typically referenced in cyber security conversations as organizations’ greatest weaknesses, cited as the causes of many grave cyber-attacks because they click links, open attachments, or allow multi-factor authentication bypass without verifying the purpose.

While for many, the weakness of the user may feel like a fact rather than a theory, there is significant evidence to suggest that users are psychologically incapable of protecting themselves from exploitation by phishing attacks, with or without regular cyber awareness trainings. The psychology of trust and the nature of human reliance on technology make the preparation of users for the exploitation of that trust in technology very difficult – if not impossible.

This Darktrace long read will highlight principles of psychological and sociological research regarding the nature of trust, elements of the trust that relate to technology, and how the human brain is wired to rely on implicit trust. These principles all point to the outcome that humans cannot be relied upon to identify phishing. Email security driven by machine augmentation, such as AI anomaly detection, is the clearest solution to tackle that challenge.

What is the psychology of trust?

Psychological and sociological theories on trust largely centre around the importance of dependence and a two-party system: the trustor and the trustee. Most research has studied the impacts of trust decisions on interpersonal relationships, and the characteristics which make those relationships more or less likely to succeed. In behavioural terms, the elements most frequently referenced in trust decisions are emotional characteristics such as benevolence, integrity, competence, and predictability.1

Most of the behavioural evaluations of trust decisions survey why someone chooses to trust another person, how they made that decision, and how quickly they arrived at their choice. However, these micro-choices about trust require the context that trust is essential to human survival. Trust decisions are rooted in many of the same survival instincts which require the brain to categorize information and determine possible dangers. More broadly, successful trust relationships are essential in maintaining the fabric of human society, critical to every element of human life.

Trust can be compared to dark matter (Rotenberg, 2018), which is the extensive but often difficult to observe material that binds planets and earthly matter. In the same way, trust is an integral but often a silent component of human life, connecting people and enabling social functioning.2

Defining implicit and routine trust

As briefly mentioned earlier, dependence is an essential element of the trusting relationship. Being able to build a routine of trust, based on the maintenance rather than establishment of trust, becomes implicit within everyday life. For example, speaking to a friend about personal issues and life developments is often a subconscious reaction to the events occurring, rather than an explicit choice to trust said friend each time one has new experiences.

Active and passive levels of cognition are important to recognize in decision-making, such as trust choices. Decision-making is often an active cognitive process requiring a lot of resource from the brain. However, many decisions occur passively, especially if they are not new choices e.g. habits or routines. The brain’s focus turns to immediate tasks while relegating habitual choices to subconscious thought processes, passive cognition. Passive cognition leaves the brain open to impacts from inattentional blindness, wherein the individual may be abstractly aware of the choice but it is not the focus of their thought processes or actively acknowledged as a decision. These levels of cognition are mostly referenced as “attention” within the brain’s cognition and processing.3

This idea is essentially a concept of implicit trust, meaning trust which is occurring as background thought processes rather than active decision-making. This implicit trust extends to multiple areas of human life, including interpersonal relationships, but also habitual choice and lifestyle. When combined with the dependence on people and services, this implicit trust creates a haze of cognition where trust is implied and assumed, rather than actively chosen across a myriad of scenarios.

Trust and technology

As researchers at the University of Cambridge highlight in their research into trust and technology, ‘In a fundamental sense, all technology depends on trust.’  The same implicit trust systems which allow us to navigate social interactions by subconsciously choosing to trust, are also true of interactions with technology. The implied trust in technology and services is perhaps most easily explained by a metaphor.

Most people have a favourite brand of soda. People will routinely purchase that soda and drink it without testing it for chemicals or bacteria and without reading reviews to ensure the companies that produce it have not changed their quality standards. This is a helpful, representative example of routine trust, wherein the trust choice is implicit through habitual action and does not mean the person is actively thinking about the ramifications of continuing to use a product and trust it.

The principle of dependence is especially important in trust and technology discussions, because the modern human is entirely reliant on technology and so has no way to avoid trusting it.5   Specifically important in workplace scenarios, employees are given a mandatory set of technologies, from programs to devices and services, which they must interact with on a daily basis. Over time, the same implicit trust that would form between two people forms between the user and the technology. The key difference between interpersonal trust and technological trust is that deception is often much more difficult to identify.

The implicit trust in workplace technology

To provide a bit of workplace-specific context, organizations rely on technology providers for the operation (and often the security) of their devices. The organizations also rely on the employees (users) to use those technologies within the accepted policies and operational guidelines. The employees rely on the organization to determine which products and services are safe or unsafe.

Within this context, implicit trust is occurring at every layer of the organization and its technological holdings, but often the trust choice is only made annually by a small security team rather than continually evaluated. Systems and programs remain in place for years and are used because “that’s the way it’s always been done. Within that context, the exploitation of that trust by threat actors impersonating or compromising those technologies or services is extremely difficult to identify as a human.

For example, many organizations utilize email communications to promote software updates for employees. Typically, it would consist of email prompting employees to update versions from the vendors directly or from public marketplaces, such as App Store on Mac or Microsoft Store for Windows. If that kind of email were to be impersonated, spoofing an update and including a malicious link or attachment, there would be no reason for the employee to question that email, given the explicit trust enforced through habitual use of that service and program.

Inattentional blindness: How the brain ignores change

Users are psychologically predisposed to trust routinely used technologies and services, with most of those trust choices continuing subconsciously. Changes to these technologies would often be subject to inattentional blindness, a psychological phenomenon wherein the brain either overwrites sensory information with what the brain expects to see rather than what is actually perceived.

A great example of inattentional blindness6 is the following experiment, which asks individuals to count the number of times a ball is passed between multiple people. While that is occurring, something else is going on in the background, which, statistically, those tested will not see. The shocking part of this experiment comes after, when the researcher reveals that the event occurring in the background not seen by participants was a person in a gorilla suit moving back and forth between the group. This highlights how significant details can be overlooked by the brain and “overwritten” with other sensory information. When applied to technology, inattentional blindness and implicit trust makes spotting changes in behaviour, or indicators that a trusted technology or service has been compromised, nearly impossible for most humans to detect.

With all this in mind, how can you prepare users to correctly anticipate or identify a violation of that trust when their brains subconsciously make trust decisions and unintentionally ignore cues to suggest a change in behaviour? The short answer is, it’s difficult, if not impossible.

How threats exploit our implicit trust in technology

Most cyber threats are built around the idea of exploiting the implicit trust humans place in technology. Whether it’s techniques like “living off the land”, wherein programs normally associated with expected activities are leveraged to execute an attack, or through more overt psychological manipulation like phishing campaigns or scams, many cyber threats are predicated on the exploitation of human trust, rather than simply avoiding technological safeguards and building backdoors into programs.

In the case of phishing, it is easy to identify the attempts to leverage the trust of users in technology and services. The most common example of this would be spoofing, which is one of the most common tactics observed by Darktrace/Email. Spoofing is mimicking a trusted user or service, and can be accomplished through a variety of mechanisms, be it the creation of a fake domain meant to mirror a trusted link type, or the creation of an email account which appears to be a Human Resources, Internal Technology or Security service.

In the case of a falsified internal service, often dubbed a “Fake Support Spoof”, the user is exploited by following instructions from an accepted organizational authority figure and service provider, whose actions should normally be adhered to. These cases are often difficult to spot when studying the sender’s address or text of the email alone, but are made even more difficult to detect if an account from one of those services is compromised and the sender’s address is legitimate and expected for correspondence. Especially given the context of implicit trust, detecting deception in these cases would be extremely difficult.

How email security solutions can solve the problem of implicit trust

How can an organization prepare for this exploitation? How can it mitigate threats which are designed to exploit implicit trust? The answer is by using email security solutions that leverage behavioural analysis via anomaly detection, rather than traditional email gateways.

Expecting humans to identify the exploitation of their own trust is a high-risk low-reward endeavour, especially when it takes different forms, affects different users or portions of the organization differently, and doesn’t always have obvious red flags to identify it as suspicious. Cue email security using anomaly detection as the key answer to this evolving problem.

Anomaly detection enabled by machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) removes the inattentional blindness that plagues human users and security teams and enables the identification of departures from the norm, even those designed to mimic expected activity. Using anomaly detection mitigates multiple human cognitive biases which might prevent teams from identifying evolving threats, and also guarantees that all malicious behaviour will be detected. Of course, anomaly detection means that security teams may be alerted to benign anomalous activity, but still guarantees that no threat, no matter how novel or cleverly packaged, won’t be identified and raised to the human security team.

Utilizing machine learning, especially unsupervised machine learning, mimics the benefits of human decision making and enables the identification of patterns and categorization of information without the framing and biases which allow trust to be leveraged and exploited.

For example, say a cleverly written email is sent from an address which appears to be a Microsoft affiliate, suggesting to the user that they need to patch their software due to the discovery of a new vulnerability. The sender’s address appears legitimate and there are news stories circulating on major media providers that a new Microsoft vulnerability is causing organizations a lot of problems. The link, if clicked, forwards the user to a login page to verify their Microsoft credentials before downloading the new version of the software. After logging in, the program is available for download, and only requires a few minutes to install. Whether this email was created by a service like ChatGPT (generative AI) or written by a person, if acted upon it would give the threat actor(s) access to the user’s credential and password as well as activate malware on the device and possibly broader network if the software is downloaded.

If we are relying on users to identify this as unusual, there are a lot of evidence points that enforce their implicit trust in Microsoft services that make them want to comply with the email rather than question it. Comparatively, anomaly detection-driven email security would flag the unusualness of the source, as it would likely not be coming from a Microsoft-owned IP address and the sender would be unusual for the organization, which does not normally receive mail from the sender. The language might indicate solicitation, an attempt to entice the user to act, and the link could be flagged as it contains a hidden redirect or tailored information which the user cannot see, whether it is hidden beneath text like “Click Here” or due to link shortening. All of this information is present and discoverable in the phishing email, but often invisible to human users due to the trust decisions made months or even years ago for known products and services.

AI-driven Email Security: The Way Forward

Email security solutions employing anomaly detection are critical weapons for security teams in the fight to stay ahead of evolving threats and varied kill chains, which are growing more complex year on year. The intertwining nature of technology, coupled with massive social reliance on technology, guarantees that implicit trust will be exploited more and more, giving threat actors a variety of avenues to penetrate an organization. The changing nature of phishing and social engineering made possible by generative AI is just a drop in the ocean of the possible threats organizations face, and most will involve a trusted product or service being leveraged as an access point or attack vector. Anomaly detection and AI-driven email security are the most practical solution for security teams aiming to prevent, detect, and mitigate user and technology targeting using the exploitation of trust.

References

1https://www.kellogg.northwestern.edu/trust-project/videos/waytz-ep-1.aspx

2Rotenberg, K.J. (2018). The Psychology of Trust. Routledge.

3https://www.cognifit.com/gb/attention

4https://www.trusttech.cam.ac.uk/perspectives/technology-humanity-society-democracy/what-trust-technology-conceptual-bases-common

5Tyler, T.R. and Kramer, R.M. (2001). Trust in organizations : frontiers of theory and research. Thousand Oaks U.A.: Sage Publ, pp.39–49.

6https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00426-006-0072-4

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
Hanah Darley
Director of Threat Research

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September 30, 2025

Out of Character: Detecting Vendor Compromise and Trusted Relationship Abuse with Darktrace

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What is Vendor Email Compromise?

Vendor Email Compromise (VEC) refers to an attack where actors breach a third-party provider to exploit their access, relationships, or systems for malicious purposes. The initially compromised entities are often the target’s existing partners, though this can extend to any organization or individual the target is likely to trust.

It sits at the intersection of supply chain attacks and business email compromise (BEC), blending technical exploitation with trust-based deception. Attackers often infiltrate existing conversations, leveraging AI to mimic tone and avoid common spelling and grammar pitfalls. Malicious content is typically hosted on otherwise reputable file sharing platforms, meaning any shared links initially seem harmless.

While techniques to achieve initial access may have evolved, the goals remain familiar. Threat actors harvest credentials, launch subsequent phishing campaigns, attempt to redirect invoice payments for financial gain, and exfiltrate sensitive corporate data.

Why traditional defenses fall short

These subtle and sophisticated email attacks pose unique challenges for defenders. Few busy people would treat an ongoing conversation with a trusted contact with the same level of suspicion as an email from the CEO requesting ‘URGENT ASSISTANCE!’ Unfortunately, many traditional secure email gateways (SEGs) struggle with this too. Detecting an out-of-character email, when it does not obviously appear out of character, is a complex challenge. It’s hardly surprising, then, that 83% of organizations have experienced a security incident involving third-party vendors [1].  

This article explores how Darktrace detected four different vendor compromise campaigns for a single customer, within a two-week period in 2025.  Darktrace / EMAIL successfully identified the subtle indicators that these seemingly benign emails from trusted senders were, in fact, malicious. Due to the configuration of Darktrace / EMAIL in this customer’s environment, it was unable to take action against the malicious emails. However, if fully enabled to take Autonomous Response, it would have held all offending emails identified.

How does Darktrace detect vendor compromise?

The answer lies at the core of how Darktrace operates: anomaly detection. Rather than relying on known malicious rules or signatures, Darktrace learns what ‘normal’ looks like for an environment, then looks for anomalies across a wide range of metrics. Despite the resourcefulness of the threat actors involved in this case, Darktrace identified many anomalies across these campaigns.

Different campaigns, common traits

A wide variety of approaches was observed. Individuals, shared mailboxes and external contractors were all targeted. Two emails originated from compromised current vendors, while two came from unknown compromised organizations - one in an associated industry. The sender organizations were either familiar or, at the very least, professional in appearance, with no unusual alphanumeric strings or suspicious top-level domains (TLDs). Subject line, such as “New Approved Statement From [REDACTED]” and “[REDACTED] - Proposal Document” appeared unremarkable and were not designed to provoke heightened emotions like typical social engineering or BEC attempts.

All emails had been given a Microsoft Spam Confidence Level of 1, indicating Microsoft did not consider them to be spam or malicious [2]. They also passed authentication checks (including SPF, and in some cases DKIM and DMARC), meaning they appeared to originate from an authentic source for the sender domain and had not been tampered with in transit.  

All observed phishing emails contained a link hosted on a legitimate and commonly used file-sharing site. These sites were often convincingly themed, frequently featuring the name of a trusted vendor either on the page or within the URL, to appear authentic and avoid raising suspicion. However, these links served only as the initial step in a more complex, multi-stage phishing process.

A legitimate file sharing site used in phishing emails to host a secondary malicious link.
Figure 1: A legitimate file sharing site used in phishing emails to host a secondary malicious link.
Another example of a legitimate file sharing endpoint sent in a phishing email and used to host a malicious link.
Figure 2: Another example of a legitimate file sharing endpoint sent in a phishing email and used to host a malicious link.

If followed, the recipient would be redirected, sometimes via CAPTCHA, to fake Microsoft login pages designed to capturing credentials, namely http://pub-ac94c05b39aa4f75ad1df88d384932b8.r2[.]dev/offline[.]html and https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws[.]com/s3cure0line-0365cql0.19db86c3-b2b9-44cc-b339-36da233a3be2ml0qin/s3cccql0.19db86c3-b2b9-44cc-b339-36da233a3be2%26l0qn[.]html#.

The latter made use of homoglyphs to deceive the user, with a link referencing ‘s3cure0line’, rather than ‘secureonline’. Post-incident investigation using open-source intelligence (OSINT) confirmed that the domains were linked to malicious phishing endpoints [3] [4].

Fake Microsoft login page designed to harvest credentials.
Figure 3: Fake Microsoft login page designed to harvest credentials.
Phishing kit with likely AI-generated image, designed to harvest user credentials. The URL uses ‘s3cure0line’ instead of ‘secureonline’, a subtle misspelling intended to deceive users.
Figure 4: Phishing kit with likely AI-generated image, designed to harvest user credentials. The URL uses ‘s3cure0line’ instead of ‘secureonline’, a subtle misspelling intended to deceive users.

Darktrace Anomaly Detection

Some senders were unknown to the network, with no previous outbound or inbound emails. Some had sent the email to multiple undisclosed recipients using BCC, an unusual behavior for a new sender.  

Where the sender organization was an existing vendor, Darktrace recognized out-of-character behavior, in this case it was the first time a link to a particular file-sharing site had been shared. Often the links themselves exhibited anomalies, either being unusually prominent or hidden altogether - masked by text or a clickable image.

Crucially, Darktrace / EMAIL is able to identify malicious links at the time of processing the emails, without needing to visit the URLs or analyze the destination endpoints, meaning even the most convincing phishing pages cannot evade detection – meaning even the most convincing phishing emails cannot evade detection. This sets it apart from many competitors who rely on crawling the endpoints present in emails. This, among other things, risks disruption to user experience, such as unsubscribing them from emails, for instance.

Darktrace was also able to determine that the malicious emails originated from a compromised mailbox, using a series of behavioral and contextual metrics to make the identification. Upon analysis of the emails, Darktrace autonomously assigned several contextual tags to highlight their concerning elements, indicating that the messages contained phishing links, were likely sent from a compromised account, and originated from a known correspondent exhibiting out-of-character behavior.

A summary of the anomalous email, confirming that it contained a highly suspicious link.
Figure 5: Tags assigned to offending emails by Darktrace / EMAIL.

Figure 6: A summary of the anomalous email, confirming that it contained a highly suspicious link.

Out-of-character behavior caught in real-time

In another customer environment around the same time Darktrace / EMAIL detected multiple emails with carefully crafted, contextually appropriate subject lines sent from an established correspondent being sent to 30 different recipients. In many cases, the attacker hijacked existing threads and inserted their malicious emails into an ongoing conversation in an effort to blend in and avoid detection. As in the previous, the attacker leveraged a well-known service, this time ClickFunnels, to host a document containing another malicious link. Once again, they were assigned a Microsoft Spam Confidence Level of 1, indicating that they were not considered malicious.

The legitimate ClickFunnels page used to host a malicious phishing link.
Figure 7: The legitimate ClickFunnels page used to host a malicious phishing link.

This time, however, the customer had Darktrace / EMAIL fully enabled to take Autonomous Response against suspicious emails. As a result, when Darktrace detected the out-of-character behavior, specifically, the sharing of a link to a previously unused file-sharing domain, and identified the likely malicious intent of the message, it held the email, preventing it from reaching recipients’ inboxes and effectively shutting down the attack.

Figure 8: Darktrace / EMAIL’s detection of malicious emails inserted into an existing thread.*

*To preserve anonymity, all real customer names, email addresses, and other identifying details have been redacted and replaced with fictitious placeholders.

Legitimate messages in the conversation were assigned an Anomaly Score of 0, while the newly inserted malicious emails identified and were flagged with the maximum score of 100.

Key takeaways for defenders

Phishing remains big business, and as the landscape evolves, today’s campaigns often look very different from earlier versions. As with network-based attacks, threat actors are increasingly leveraging legitimate tools and exploiting trusted relationships to carry out their malicious goals, often staying under the radar of security teams and traditional email defenses.

As attackers continue to exploit trusted relationships between organizations and their third-party associates, security teams must remain vigilant to unexpected or suspicious email activity. Protecting the digital estate requires an email solution capable of identifying malicious characteristics, even when they originate from otherwise trusted senders.

Credit to Jennifer Beckett (Cyber Analyst), Patrick Anjos (Senior Cyber Analyst), Ryan Traill (Analyst Content Lead), Kiri Addison (Director of Product)

Appendices

IoC - Type - Description + Confidence  

- http://pub-ac94c05b39aa4f75ad1df88d384932b8.r2[.]dev/offline[.]html#p – fake Microsoft login page

- https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws[.]com/s3cure0line-0365cql0.19db86c3-b2b9-44cc-b339-36da233a3be2ml0qin/s3cccql0.19db86c3-b2b9-44cc-b339-36da233a3be2%26l0qn[.]html# - link to domain used in homoglyph attack

MITRE ATT&CK Mapping  

Tactic – Technique – Sub-Technique  

Initial Access - Phishing – (T1566)  

References

1.     https://gitnux.org/third-party-risk-statistics/

2.     https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/defender-office-365/anti-spam-spam-confidence-level-scl-about

3.     https://www.virustotal.com/gui/url/5df9aae8f78445a590f674d7b64c69630c1473c294ce5337d73732c03ab7fca2/detection

4.     https://www.virustotal.com/gui/url/695d0d173d1bd4755eb79952704e3f2f2b87d1a08e2ec660b98a4cc65f6b2577/details

The content provided in this blog is published by Darktrace for general informational purposes only and reflects our understanding of cybersecurity topics, trends, incidents, and developments at the time of publication. While we strive to ensure accuracy and relevance, the information is provided “as is” without any representations or warranties, express or implied. Darktrace makes no guarantees regarding the completeness, accuracy, reliability, or timeliness of any information presented and expressly disclaims all warranties.

Nothing in this blog constitutes legal, technical, or professional advice, and readers should consult qualified professionals before acting on any information contained herein. Any references to third-party organizations, technologies, threat actors, or incidents are for informational purposes only and do not imply affiliation, endorsement, or recommendation.

Darktrace, its affiliates, employees, or agents shall not be held liable for any loss, damage, or harm arising from the use of or reliance on the information in this blog.

The cybersecurity landscape evolves rapidly, and blog content may become outdated or superseded. We reserve the right to update, modify, or remove any content

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October 1, 2025

Announcing Unified OT Security with Dedicated OT Workflows, Segmentation-Aware Risk Insights, and Next-Gen Endpoint Visibility for Industrial Teams

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The challenge of convergence without clarity

Convergence is no longer a roadmap idea, it is the daily reality for industrial security teams. As Information Technology (IT) and Operational Technology (OT) environments merge, the line between a cyber incident and an operational disruption grows increasingly hard to define. A misconfigured firewall rule can lead to downtime. A protocol misuse might look like a glitch. And when a pump stalls but nothing appears in the Security Operations Center (SOC) dashboard, teams are left asking: is this operational or is this a threat?

The lack of shared context slows down response, creates friction between SOC analysts and plant engineers, and leaves organizations vulnerable at exactly the points where IT and OT converge. Defenders need more than alerts, they need clarity that both sides can trust.

The breakthrough with Darktrace / OT

This latest Darktrace / OT release was built to deliver exactly that. It introduces shared context between Security, IT, and OT operations, helping reduce friction and close the security gaps at the intersection of these domains.

With a dedicated dashboard built for operations teams, extended visibility into endpoints for new forms of detection and CVE collection, expanded protocol coverage, and smarter risk modeling aligned to segmentation policies, teams can now operate from a shared source of truth. These enhancements are not just incremental upgrades, they are foundational improvements designed to bring clarity, efficiency, and trust to converged environments.

A dashboard built for OT engineers

The new Operational Overview provides OT engineers with a workspace designed for them, not for SOC analysts. It brings asset management, risk insights and operational alerts into one place. Engineers can now see activity like firmware changes, controller reprograms or the sudden appearance of a new workstation on the network, providing a tailored view for critical insights and productivity gains without navigating IT-centric workflows. Each device view is now enriched with cross-linked intelligence, make, model, firmware version and the roles inferred by Self-Learning AI, making it easier to understand how each asset behaves, what function it serves, and where it fits within the broader industrial process. By suppressing IT-centric noise, the dashboard highlights only the anomalies that matter to operations, accelerating triage, enabling smoother IT/OT collaboration, and reducing time to root cause without jumping between tools.

This is usability with purpose, a view that matches OT workflows and accelerates response.

Figure 1: The Operational Overview provides an intuitive dashboard summarizing all OT Assets, Alerts, and Risk.

Full-spectrum coverage across endpoints, sensors and protocols

The release also extends visibility into areas that have traditionally been blind spots. Engineering workstations, Human-Machine Interfaces (HMIs), contractor laptops and field devices are often the entry points for attackers, yet the hardest to monitor.

Darktrace introduces Network Endpoint eXtended Telemetry (NEXT) for OT, a lightweight collector built for segmented and resource-constrained environments. NEXT for OT uses Endpoint sensors to capture localized network, and now process-level telemetry, placing it in context alongside other network and asset data to:

  1. Identify vulnerabilities and OS data, which is leveraged by OT Risk Management for risk scoring and patching prioritization, removing the need for third-party CVE collection.
  1. Surface novel threats using Self-Learning AI that standalone Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) would miss.
  1. Extend Cyber AI Analyst investigations through to the endpoint root cause.

NEXT is part of our existing cSensor endpoint agent, can be deployed standalone or alongside existing EDR tools, and allows capabilities to be enabled or disabled depending on factors such as security or OT team objectives and resource utilization.

Figure 2: Darktrace / OT delivers CVE patch priority insights by combining threat intelligence with extended network and endpoint telemetry

The family of Darktrace Endpoint sensors also receive a boost in deployment flexibility, with on-prem server-based setups, as well as a Windows driver tailored for zero-trust and high-security environments.

Protocol coverage has been extended where it matters most. Darktrace now performs protocol analysis of a wider range of GE and Mitsubishi protocols, giving operators real-time visibility into commands and state changes on Programmable Logic Controllers (PLCs), robots and controllers. Backed by Self-Learning AI, this inspection does more than parse traffic, it understands what normal looks like and flags deviations that signal risk.

Integrated risk and governance workflows

Security data is only valuable when it drives action. Darktrace / OT delivers risk insights that go beyond patching, helping teams take meaningful steps even when remediation isn't possible. Risk is assessed not just by CVE presence, but by how network segmentation, firewall policies, and attack path logic neutralize or contain real-world exposure. This approach empowers defenders to deprioritize low-impact vulnerabilities and focus effort where risk truly exists. Building on the foundation introduced in release 6.3, such as KEV enrichment, endpoint OS data, and exploit mapping, this release introduces new integrations that bring Darktrace / OT intelligence directly into governance workflows.

Fortinet FortiGate firewall ingestion feeds segmentation rules into attack path modeling, revealing real exposure when policies fail and closing feeds into patching prioritization based on a policy to CVE exposure assessment.

  • ServiceNow Configuration Management Database (CMDB) sync ensures asset intelligence stays current across governance platforms, eliminating manual inventory work.

Risk modeling has also been made more operationally relevant. Scores are now contextualized by exploitability, asset criticality, firewall policy, and segmentation posture. Patch recommendations are modeled in terms of safety, uptime and compliance rather than just Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) numbers. And importantly, risk is prioritized across the Purdue Model, giving defenders visibility into whether vulnerabilities remain isolated to IT or extend into OT-critical layers.

Figure 3: Attack Path Modeling based on NetFlow and network topology reveals high risk points of IT/OT convergence.

The real-world impact for defenders

In today’s environments, attackers move fluidly between IT and OT. Without unified visibility and shared context, incidents cascade faster than teams can respond.

With this release, Darktrace / OT changes that reality. The Operational Overview gives Engineers a dashboard they can use daily, tailored to their workflows. SOC analysts can seamlessly investigate telemetry across endpoints, sensors and protocols that were once blind spots. Operators gain transparency into PLCs and controllers. Governance teams benefit from automated integrations with platforms like Fortinet and ServiceNow. And all stakeholders work from risk models that reflect what truly matters: safety, uptime and compliance.

This release is not about creating more alerts. It is about providing more clarity. By unifying context across IT and OT, Darktrace / OT enables defenders to see more, understand more and act faster.

Because in environments where safety and uptime are non-negotiable, clarity is what matters most.

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About the author
Pallavi Singh
Product Marketing Manager, OT Security & Compliance
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