The importance of understanding ‘self’ in a new era of attack

The combination of Microsoft technology and Darktrace’s self-learning AI provides bespoke and evolving cybersecurity, giving defenders ‘cyber stability’

By Tony Jarvis on 02 August 2022

The importance of understanding ‘self’ in a new era of attack

The transition to the cloud represents an opportunity for organisations seeking productivity and efficiency gains, and cyberattackers looking to scale up their attacks.

The boundaries of the traditional network perimeter have blurred, and attack surfaces have expanded significantly. Cybercriminals are constantly innovating, embracing new technologies to increase the speed and scale of their campaigns.

Security teams are tasked with defending against phishing attacks, as well as account takeovers in Microsoft 365 and other software-as-a-service platforms. And in today’s interconnected digital environments, an attack that starts in the cloud can easily develop into a costly ransomware attack, disrupting business or even physical operations.

As a leading cloud provider, Microsoft has unparalleled visibility over global threats, and its in-built security provides tremendous value in using this intelligence to push protections to end points quickly.

The pace of attacker innovation means the focus has increasingly shifted towards attacks never seen before in the wild, and it is often these that now cause the greatest disruption. This is where Darktrace’s self-learning artificial intelligence technology adds another layer of protection by taking a completely different approach to cybersecurity. The technology learns each customer’s bespoke business from the inside out. It is constantly learning and updating its understanding of each business, which means their cybersecurity grows more powerful every day. Rather than trying to work out if a specific file or website is good or bad, Darktrace learns the minute details of what makes each organisation unique, powering bespoke, comprehensive and continuously evolving security.

These different, complementary approaches – Microsoft’s global visibility of threats, together with Darktrace’s deep and evolving understanding of its customers – allow defenders to achieve complete ‘cyber stability’ in the wake of novel and sophisticated attacks.

We both take an enterprise-wide approach to cybersecurity, so every corner of our customers’ businesses – email, Microsoft 365 including SharePoint, OneDrive and Teams, Microsoft Azure, and remote end points – is protected from the full range of known and unknown threats.

Consequently, chief information security officers have been able to consolidate their cybersecurity stack, moving from several security vendors to just two platforms that break down traditional silos and protect the enterprise from ‘cyber disruption’.

Tony Jarvis is the director of enterprise security for APAC and Japan at Darktrace

This article was originally published in the Summer 2022 issue of Technology Record. To get future issues delivered directly to your inbox, sign up for a free subscription.