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December 9, 2024

Darktrace is Positioned as a Leader in the IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Network Detection and Response 2024 Vendor Assessment

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09
Dec 2024
Darktrace is recognized as a Leader in the IDC MarketScape. Read this blog to find out more about Darktrace's leadership in the market and our pioneering leadership in AI over the past decade, alongside a variety of other unique differentiators and innovations in the NDR industry.

Darktrace is pleased to announce that we have been positioned as a Leader in the IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Network Detection and Response 2024 Vendor Assessment. We believe this further highlights Darktrace’s position as a pioneer in the NDR market and follows similar recognition from KuppingerCole, who recently named Darktrace as an Overall Leader, Product Leader, Market Leader and Innovation Leader in the KuppingerCole Leadership Compass: Network Detection and Response (2024).

Network Detection and Response (NDR) solutions are uniquely positioned to provide visibility over the core hub of a business and employee activity, analyzing North-South and East-West traffic to identify threats across the modern network. NDR provides a rich and true source of anomalies and goes beyond process level data that is relied on by Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) agents that do not provide network level visibility and can be misconfigured at any time.1

Metadata from network traffic can be used to detect a variety of different threats based on events such as anomalous port usage, unusual upload/download activity, impossible travel and many other activities. This has been accelerated by the increased usage of user behavioral analytics (UBA) in network security, which establishes statistical baselines about network entities and highlights deviations from expected activity.1

Darktrace is recognized as a Leader in the IDC MarketScape due to our leadership in the market and our pioneering leadership in AI over the past decade, alongside a variety of other unique differentiators and innovations in the NDR industry.

Darktrace / NETWORK™ delivers full visibility, real time threat detection and Autonomous Response capabilities across an organization’s on-premises, cloud, hybrid and virtual environments, including remote worker endpoints.

Unique Approach to AI

Most NDR vendors and network security tools such as IDS/IPS rely on detecting known attacks with historical data and supervised machine learning, leaving organizations blind and vulnerable to novel threats such as zero-days, variants of known attacks, supply chain attacks and insider threats.

These vendors also tend to apply AI models that are trained globally, and are not unique to each organization’s environment, which creates a high number of false positives and alerts that ultimately lack business context.

The IDC MarketScape recognizes that Darktrace takes a differentiated approach in the market with regards to delivering network detection and response capabilities, noting; “Darktrace is unique in that it does not rely on rules and signatures but rather learns what constitutes as normal for an organization and generates alerts when there is a deviation.”1

Darktrace / NETWORK achieves this through the use of Self-Learning AI and unsupervised machine learning to understand what is normal network behavior, continuously analyzing, mapping and modeling every connection to create a full picture of devices, identities, connections and potential attack paths. Darktrace Self-Learning AI autonomously optimizes itself to cut through the noise and quickly surface genuine, prioritized network security incidents – significantly reducing false positives and removing the hassle of needing to continually tuning alerts manually.

Darktrace’s unique approach to AI also extends to the investigation and triage of network alerts with Cyber AI Analyst. Unlike a chat or prompt based LLM, Cyber AI Analyst investigates all relevant alerts in an environment, including third party alerts, autonomously forming hypotheses and reaching conclusions just like a human analyst would, accelerating SOC Level 2 analyses of incidents by 10x. Cyber AI Analyst also typically providing SOC teams with up to 50,000 additional hours annually of Level 2 analysis producing high level alerts and written reporting, transforming security operations.2

Darktrace also uses its deep understanding of what is normal for a network to identify suspicious behavior, leveraging Autonomous Response capabilities to shut down both known and novel threats in real time, taking targeted actions without disrupting business operations. Darktrace / NETWORK is the only NDR solution that can autonomously enforce a pattern of life based on what is normal for a standalone device or group of peers, rapidly containing and disarming threats based on the overall context of the environment and a granular understanding of what is normal for a device or user – instead of relying on historical attack data.

Continued NDR Market Leadership

Darktrace has been recognized as a Leader in the NDR market, and the IDC MarketScape listed a variety of strengths:

  • Darktrace achieves roughly one-fifth of all global NDR revenue. This is important because other IT and cybersecurity solutions providers necessarily want to have integration with Darktrace.
  • The AI algorithms that Darktrace uses for NDR have had 10 years of deployments, tuning, and learning to draw from.
  • Darktrace is available as a SaaS, as an enterprise license, and as physical, hybrid, or virtual appliances. Darktrace also offers an endpoint agent and visibility into VPN and ZTNA.
  • Darktrace integrates with 30+ different interfaces including SIEM, SOAR, XDR platforms, IT ticketing solutions, and their own dashboards. The Darktrace Threat Visualizer highlights events and incidents from the entire deployment including cloud, apps, email, endpoint, zero trust, network, and OT.
  • Darktrace / NETWORK charts the progress that the SOC is making over time with key metrics such as MTTD/MTTR, alerts generated and processed, and other criteria.
  • Darktrace reported coverage of 14 MITRE ATT&CK categories, 158 techniques, and 184 subtechniques

Proactive Network Resilience

The IDC MarketScape notes, “Ultimately, NDR shines as a standalone detection and response technology but is especially powerful when combined with other platforms. NDR in combination with other control points such as endpoint, data, identity, and application provides the proper context when winnowing alerts and trying to uncover a single source of truth.” . Darktrace comprehensively addresses this as part of the ActiveAI Security Platform, by combining network alerts with data from / EMAIL, / IDENTITY, / ENDPOINT, / CLOUD and / OT, providing deeper contextual analysis for each network alert and automatically enriching investigations.

Darktrace also goes beyond NDR solutions with capabilities that are closely linked to our NDR offering, helping clients to achieve and maintain a state of proactive network resilience:

  • Darktrace / Proactive Exposure Management – look beyond just CVE risks to discover, prioritize and validate risks by business impact and how to address them early, reducing the number of real threats that security teams need to handle.
  • Darktrace / Incident Readiness & Recovery – lets teams respond in the best way to each incident and proactively test their familiarity and effectiveness of IR workflows with sophisticated incident simulations based on their own analysts and assets.

Together, these solutions allow Darktrace / NETWORK to go beyond the traditional approach to NDR and shift teams to a more hardened and proactive stance.

Protecting Clients with Continued Innovation

Darktrace invests heavily in Research and Development to continue providing customers with market-leading NDR capabilities and innovations, which was reflected in our position in the Leader category of the MarketScape report for both capabilities and strategy. We are led by the needs and challenges of our customers, which serve as the driving force behind our continued innovation and leadership in the NDR market. The IDC MarketScape report underlines this approach with the following feedback presented by Darktrace customers:

“A customer intimated that 99% of their detections were OOTB with little need to tune or define parameters.”
“A customer reported that it had early warnings for adversarial tactics such as suspicious SMB scanning, suspicious remote execution, remote desktop protocol (RDP) scanning, data exfiltration, C2C, LDAP query, and suspicious Kerberos activity.”
“The client could use Regex to determine if suspicious behavior was found elsewhere on the network.”

Thousands of customers around the world across all industries and sectors rely on Darktrace / NETWORK to protect against known and novel threats. From the latest vulnerabilities in network hardware to sophisticated new strains of ransomware and everything in-between, Darktrace helps clients detect and respond to all types of threats affecting their networks and avoid business disruption, even from the latest attacks.

Find out more about the unique capabilities of Darktrace / NETWORK and our application of AI in network security in the IDC MarketScape excerpt.

References

  1. IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Network Detection and Response 2024 Vendor Assessment (Doc #US51752324, November 2024)
  2. Darktrace Cyber AI Analyst Customer Fleet Data
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.
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Mikey Anderson
Product Marketing Manager, Network Detection & Response
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February 19, 2025

Darktrace Releases Annual 2024 Threat Insights

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Introduction: Darktrace’s threat research

Defenders must understand the threat landscape in order to protect against it. They can do that with threat intelligence.

Darktrace approaches threat intelligence with a unique perspective. Unlike traditional security vendors that rely on established patterns from past incidents, it uses a strategy that is rooted in the belief that identifying behavioral anomalies is crucial for identifying both known and novel threats.

For Darktrace analysts and researchers, the incidents detected by the AI solution mark the beginning of a deeper investigation, aiming to connect mitigated threats to wider trends from across the threat landscape. Through hindsight analysis, the Darktrace Threat Research team has highlighted numerous threats, including zero-day, n-day, and other novel attacks, showcasing their evolving nature and Darktrace’s ability to identify them.

In 2024, the Threat Research team observed major trends around vulnerabilities in internet-facing systems, new and re-emerging ransomware strains, and sophisticated email attacks. Read on to discover some of our key insights into the current cybersecurity threat landscape.

Multiple campaigns target vulnerabilities in internet-facing systems

It is increasingly common for threat actors to identify and exploit newly discovered vulnerabilities in widely used services and applications, and in some cases, these vulnerability exploitations occur within hours of disclosure.

In 2024, the most significant campaigns observed involved the ongoing exploitation of zero-day and n-day vulnerabilities in edge and perimeter network technologies. In fact, in the first half of the year, 40% of all identified campaign activity came from the exploitation of internet-facing devices. Some of the most common exploitations involved Ivanti Connect Secure (CS) and Ivanti Policy Secure (PS) appliances, Palo Alto Network (PAN-OS) firewall devices, and Fortinet appliances.

Darktrace helps security teams identify suspicious behavior quickly, as demonstrated with the critical vulnerability in PAN-OS firewall devices. The vulnerability was publicly disclosed on April 11, 2024, yet with anomaly-based detection, Darktrace’s Threat Research team was able to identify a range of suspicious behavior related to exploitation of this vulnerability, including command-and-control (C2) connectivity, data exfiltration, and brute-forcing activity, as early as March 26.

That means that Darktrace and our Threat Research team detected this Common Vulnerabilities and Exposure (CVE) exploitation 16 days before the vulnerability was disclosed. Addressing critical vulnerabilities quickly massively benefits security, as teams can reduce their effectiveness by slowing malicious operations and forcing attackers to pursue more costly and time-consuming methods.

Persistent ransomware threats continue to evolve

The continued adoption of the Ransomware-as-a-Service (RaaS) model provides even less experienced threat actors with the tools needed to carry out disruptive attacks, significantly lowering the barrier to entry.

The Threat Research team tracked both novel and re-emerging strains of ransomware across the customer fleet, including Akira, LockBit, and Lynx. Within these ransomware attempts and incidents, there were notable trends in attackers’ techniques: using phishing emails as an attack vector, exploiting legitimate tools to mask C2 communication, and exfiltrating data to cloud storage services.

Read the Annual 2024 Threat Report for the complete list of prominent ransomware actors and their commonly used techniques.

Onslaught of email threats continues

With a majority of attacks originating from email, it is crucial that organizations secure the inboxes and beyond.

Between December 21, 2023, and December 18, 2024, Darktrace / EMAIL detected over 30.4 million phishing emails across the fleet. Of these, 70% successfully bypassed Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance (DMARC) verification checks and 55% passed through all other existing layers of customer email security.

The abuse of legitimate services and senders continued to be a significant method for threat actors throughout 2024. By leveraging trusted platforms and domains, malicious actors can bypass traditional security measures and increase the likelihood of their phishing attempts being successful.

This past year, there was a substantial use of legitimately authenticated senders and previously established domains, with 96% of phishing emails detected by Darktrace / EMAIL utilizing existing domains rather than registering new ones.

These are not the only types of email attacks we observed. Darktrace detected over 2.7 million emails with multistage payloads.

While most traditional cybersecurity solutions struggle to cover multiple vectors and recognize each stage of complex attacks as part of wider malicious activity, Darktrace can detect and respond across email, identities, network, and cloud.

Conclusion

The Darktrace Threat Research team continues to monitor the ever-evolving threat landscape. Major patterns over the last year have revealed the importance of fast-acting, anomaly-based detection like Darktrace provides.

For example, response speed is essential when campaigns target vulnerabilities in internet-facing systems, and these vulnerabilities can be exploited by attackers within hours of their disclosure if not even before that.

Similarly, anomaly-based detection can identify hard to find threats like ransomware attacks that increasingly use living-off-the-land techniques and legitimate tools to hide malicious activity. A similar pattern can be found in the realm of email security, where attacks are also getting harder to spot, especially as they frequently exploit trusted senders, use redirects via legitimate services, and craft attacks that bypass DMARC and other layers of email security.

As attacks appear with greater complexity, speed, and camouflage, defenders must have timely detection and containment capabilities to handle all emerging threats. These hard-to-spot attacks can be identified and stopped by Darktrace.

Download the full report

Discover the latest threat landscape trends and recommendations from the Darktrace Threat Research team.

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The Darktrace Threat Research Team

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February 18, 2025

Unifying IT & OT With AI-Led Investigations for Industrial Security

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As industrial environments modernize, IT and OT networks are converging to improve efficiency, but this connectivity also creates new attack paths. Previously isolated OT systems are now linked to IT and cloud assets, making them more accessible to attackers.

While organizations have traditionally relied on air gaps, firewalls, data diodes, and access controls to separate IT and OT, these measures alone aren’t enough. Threat actors often infiltrate IT/Enterprise networks first then exploit segmentation, compromising credentials, or shared IT/OT systems to move laterally, escalate privileges, and ultimately enter the OT network.

To defend against these threats, organizations must first ensure they have complete visibility across IT and OT environments.

Visibility: The first piece of the puzzle

Visibility is the foundation of effective industrial cybersecurity, but it’s only the first step. Without visibility across both IT and OT, security teams risk missing key alerts that indicate a threat targeting OT at their earliest stages.

For Attacks targeting OT, early stage exploits often originate in IT environments, adversaries perform internal reconnaissance among other tactics and procedures but then laterally move into OT first affecting IT devices, servers and workstations within the OT network. If visibility is limited, these threats go undetected. To stay ahead of attackers, organizations need full-spectrum visibility that connects IT and OT security, ensuring no early warning signs are missed.

However, visibility alone isn’t enough. More visibility also means more alerts, this doesn’t just make it harder to separate real threats from routine activity, but bogs down analysts who have to investigate all these alerts to determine their criticality.

Investigations: The real bottleneck

While visibility is essential, it also introduces a new challenge: Alert fatigue. Without the right tools, analysts are often occupied investigating alerts with little to no context, forcing them to manually piece together information and determine if an attack is unfolding. This slows response times and increases the risk of missing critical threats.

Figure 1: Example ICS attack scenario

With siloed visibility across IT and OT each of these events shown above would be individually alerted by a detection engine with little to no context nor correlation. Thus, an analyst would have to try to piece together these events manually. Traditional security tools struggle to keep pace with the sophistication of these threats, resulting in an alarming statistic: less than 10% of alerts are thoroughly vetted, leaving organizations vulnerable to undetected breaches. As a result, incidents inevitably follow.

Darktrace’s Cyber AI Analyst uses AI-led investigations to improve workflows for analysts by automatically correlating alerts wherever they occur across both IT and OT. The multi-layered AI engine identifies high-priority incidents, and provides analysts with clear, actionable insights, reducing noise and highlighting meaningful threats. The AI significantly alleviates workloads, enabling teams to respond faster and more effectively before an attack escalates.

Overcoming organizational challenges across IT and OT

Beyond technical challenges like visibility and alert management, organizational dynamics further complicate IT-OT security efforts. Fundamental differences in priorities, workflows, and risk perspectives create challenges that can lead to misalignment between teams:

Non-transferable practices: IT professionals might assume that cybersecurity practices from IT environments can be directly applied to OT environments. This can lead to issues, as OT systems and workflows may not handle IT security processes as expected. It's crucial to recognize and respect the unique requirements and constraints of OT environments.

Segmented responsibilities: IT and OT teams often operate under separate organizational structures, each with distinct priorities, goals, and workflows. While IT focuses on data security, network integrity, and enterprise applications, OT prioritizes uptime, reliability, and physical processes.

Different risk perspectives: While IT teams focus on preventing cyber threats and regulatory violations, OT teams prioritize uptime and operational reliability making them drawn towards asset inventory tools that provide no threat detection capability.

Result: A combination of disparate and ineffective tools and misaligned teams can make any progress toward risk reduction at an organization seem impossible. The right tools should be able to both free up time for collaboration and prompt better communication between IT and OT teams where it is needed. However, different size operations structure their IT and OT teams differently which impacts the priorities for each team.

In real-world scenarios, small IT teams struggle to manage security across both IT and OT, while larger organizations with OT security teams face alert fatigue and numerous false positives slowing down investigations and hindering effective communication with the IT security teams.

By unifying visibility and investigations, Darktrace / OT helps organizations of all sizes detect threats earlier, streamline workflows, and enhance security across both IT and OT environments. The following examples illustrate how AI-driven investigations can transform security operations, improving detection, investigation, and response.

Before and after AI-led investigation

Before: Small manufacturing company

At a small manufacturing company, a 1-3 person IT team juggles everything from email security to network troubleshooting. An analyst might see unusual traffic through the firewall:

  • Unusual repeated outbound traffic from an IP within their OT network destined to an unidentifiable external IP.

With no dedicated OT security tools and limited visibility into the industrial network, they don’t know what the internal device in question is, if it is beaconing to a malicious external IP, and what it may be doing to other devices within the OT network. Without a centralized dashboard, they must manually check logs, ask operators about changes, and hunt for anomalies across different systems.

After a day of investigation, they concluded the traffic was not to be expected activity. They stop production within their smaller OT network, update their firewall rules and factory reset all OT devices and systems within the blast radius of the IP device in question.

After: Faster, automated response with Cyber AI Analyst

With Darktrace / OT and Cyber AI Analyst, the IT team moves from reactive, manual investigations to proactive, automated threat detection:

  • Cyber AI Analyst connects alerts across their IT and OT infrastructure temporally mapping them to attack frameworks and provides contextual analysis of how alerts are linked, revealing in real time attackers attempting lateral movement from IT to OT.
  • A human-readable incident report explains the full scope of the incident, eliminating hours of manual investigation.
  • The team is faster to triage as they are led directly to prioritized high criticality alerts, now capable of responding immediately instead of wasting valuable time hunting for answers.

By reducing noise, providing context, and automating investigations, Cyber AI Analyst transforms OT security, enabling small IT teams to detect, understand, and respond to threats—without deep OT cybersecurity expertise.

Before: Large critical infrastructure organization

In large critical infrastructure operations, OT and IT teams work in separate silos. The OT security team needs to quickly assess and prioritize alerts, but their system floods them with notifications:

  • Multiple new device connected to the ICS network alerts
  • Multiple failed logins to HMI detected
  • Multiple Unusual Modbus/TCP commands detected
  • Repeated outbound OT traffic to IT destinations

At first glance, these alerts seem important, but without context, it’s unclear whether they indicate a routine error, a misconfiguration, or an active cyber-attack. They might ask:

  • Are the failed logins just a mistake, or a brute-force attempt?
  • Is the outbound traffic part of a scheduled update, or data exfiltration?

Without correlation across events, the engineer must manually investigate each one—checking logs, cross-referencing network activity, and contacting operators—wasting valuable time. Meanwhile, if it’s a coordinated attack, the adversary may already be disrupting operations.

After: A new workflow with Cyber AI Analyst

With Cyber AI Analyst, the OT security team gets clear, automated correlation of security events, making investigations faster and more efficient:

  • Automated correlation of OT threats: Instead of isolated alerts, Cyber AI Analyst stitches together related events, providing a single, high-confidence incident report that highlights key details.
  • Faster time to meaning: The system connects anomalous behaviors (e.g., failed logins, unusual traffic from an HMI, and unauthorized PLC modifications) into a cohesive narrative, eliminating hours of manual log analysis.
  • Prioritized and actionable alerts: OT security receives clear, ranked incidents, immediately highlighting what matters most.
  • Rapid threat understanding: Security teams know within minutes whether an event is a misconfiguration or a cyber-attack, allowing for faster containment.

With Cyber AI Analyst, large organizations cut through alert noise, accelerate investigations, and detect threats faster—without disrupting OT operations.

An AI-led approach to industrial cybersecurity

Security vendors with a primary focus on IT may lack insight into OT threats. Even OT-focused vendors have limited visibility into IT device exploitation within OT networks, leading to failed ability to detect early indicators of compromise. A comprehensive solution must account for the unique characteristics of various OT environments.

In a world where industrial security is no longer just about protecting OT but securing the entire digital-physical ecosystem as it interacts with the OT network, Darktrace / OT is an AI-driven solution that unifies visibility across IT, IoT and OT, Cloud into one cohesive defense strategy.

Whether an attack originates from an external breach, an insider threat, a supply chain compromise, in the Cloud, OT, or IT domains Cyber AI Analyst ensures that security teams see the full picture - before disruption occurs.

Learn more about Darktrace / OT 

  • Unify IT and OT security under a single platform, ensuring seamless communication and protection for all interconnected devices.
  • Maintain uptime with AI-driven threat containment, stopping attacks without disrupting production.
  • Mitigate risks with or without patches, leveraging MITRE mitigations to reduce attack opportunities.

Download the solution brief to see how Darktrace secures critical infrastructure.

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About the author
Daniel Simonds
Director of Operational Technology
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