An introduction to Darktrace - A breakthrough in Cyber Security

Who and What is Darktrace?

Darktrace is a global leading artificial intelligence (AI) company that specialises in developing AI cyber-security technology, aimed at businesses of all sizes within any industry. Darktrace’s core product offering includes Darktrace PREVENT, DETECT, RESPOND, and HEAL, all of which utilise continuous data feedback and an understanding of the organisation, in order to identify and respond to potential cyber threats in real time.

Darktrace’s products can pre-empt cyber-attacks before they happen, using AI to, in their own words, “think like an attacker.” Darktrace makes use of its Cyber AI Loop to continuously learn and monitor data, feeding everything it identifies into every section of the 4-stage AI loop. It not only learns from cyber-security data but also your organisation’s data, to understand the big picture.

What is Darktrace PREVENT?

Darktrace Prevent is the first stage of Darktrace’s Cyber AI Loop; it is the first piece of the puzzle, that constantly monitors your digital assets to identify risks- vulnerabilities and threats from external sources.

PREVENT uses artificial intelligence to identify assets that belong to your organisation, trawling through servers, networks and IP addresses in order to find assets that your business may not even know it has. On average, Darktrace PREVENT is able to surface between 30 and 50% more assets than are known about.

As previously mentioned, not only does PREVENT identify cyber-attacks before they happen, but it also communicates its learnings to the rest of the AI Loop, providing Darktrace DETECT and Darktrace RESPOND key data, to toughen up protections around your organisation’s critical areas.

The testing doesn’t stop, as PREVENT carries out around-the-clock emulations of attacks to test vulnerabilities within your organisation and on the surface of your assets. Darktrace’s key aim with PREVENT, is to stay ahead of malicious intent and ensure that cyber-attacks on your business are more costly for the attacker than for you.

What is Darktrace DETECT?

DETECT is the second stage in the Cyber AI Loop, which autonomously detects and responds to cyber-attacks and threats. Leveraging data from all stages of the Loop, including stages that follow afterwards, DETECT can provide instant visibility to every attack, including new and unknown threats, and can also disable them before they disrupt your business operations.

Making use of anomaly detection techniques, threat emulation, and behavioural analysis, DETECT is capable of detecting unusual activity within your organisation’s user access logs, your network traffic, and even your user’s hardware.

Because Darktrace DETECT is always on, it continually learns from activity, whether normal or malicious, to understand how your business operates normally, in order to detect malicious intent, whether it has been seen before or not. DETECT is able to understand your business within a matter of days after it has been implemented into your IT infrastructure.

What is Darktrace RESPOND?

The third stage in the Cyber AI Loop is RESPOND, a continuous and autonomous threat detection system that can respond to, and disarm, threats and attacks within mere seconds of their occurring.

RESPOND can immediately isolate devices or networks, to prevent the spread of malicious activity, and reduce the amount of damage caused. The fact that RESPOND can do this so quickly makes it the most effective service on the market for protecting your networks and devices from unknown or zero-day threats, which would otherwise be extremely difficult to detect and mitigate through human intervention.

Darktrace’s Self-Learning AI algorithms leverage this attack data to feed its entire AI Loop, teaching the other stages of new types of attack and activity, meaning that the chances of future attacks become even slimmer, as the preceding stages of the Loop become even smarter.

Darktrace HEAL

HEAL is the final stage in the Cyber AI Loop. While not yet available, we do know that Darktrace intends this platform to be used to restore assets, devices, and networks to pre-attack states, without causing interruption and disruption in your organisation’s operations.

Using all of the data provided throughout the AI Loop, HEAL will learn from your business’s digital DNA in order to recognise your normal patterns of activity to ensure that it can respond rapidly and effectively, in an entirely autonomous manner, so that your cyber-security and IT teams can work on other aspects of your platform while removing threats in real-time.

In most instances, HEAL will action your recovery plans, decisions, and actions, before you even know there was an attack. However, HEAL will also be able to provide insightful data to your teams, so that they can make informed decisions on how best to restore and recover affected systems.

HEAL will complete the Cyber AI Loop and is due to be available in 2023.

What can Draktrace protect?

Darktrace serves businesses and organisations of all sizes and doesn’t feature limits on devices, users, accounts or the amount of email flowing through your network. Darktrace describes itself as built for “Enterprise, Government, Critical Infrastructure and SMB [SMEs].”

The platform can be used across industries and can be seamlessly integrated into your infrastructure thanks to its open architecture. Whether you make use of Google Cloud Platform or Google Workspace, AWS, Microsoft 365, or Slack, Darktrace’s service will effortlessly integrate with your existing platforms and data.

Providing real-time security for your cloud solutions, office applications, email, networks and endpoints, the platform is able to protect just about any device and system within your business.

Darktrace Use Cases

If you’re still not sure how Darktrace can be beneficial for your business, why not take a look at some of the example use cases below to see how the service could help step up your cyber security in 2023:

• Stop malicious activity under the guise of your brand. Making use of PREVENT, you can identify malicious activity using your business’s assets such as domains etc. Take a look here to see a Darktrace example.

• Is your business about to go through a merger or an acquisition? If so, you may well have considered the implications to your IT networks and platforms, but have you considered the cyber security implications of such an event? Take a look here to see how Darktrace PREVENT can help you to reduce risk.

• Have you ever considered that misconfigurations in any of your business’s critical IT infrastructure could be exposing you to cyber threats? Whether the answer to that question is yes or no, take a look at how PREVENT can uncover them and protect you from exposure.

• Ever found your systems being flooded by malicious traffic? RESPOND is a great way to prevent DDoS attacks. Why not take a look at Darktrace’s incident report from a recent attack on one of its clients and see how the platform could protect your business too.

Summary

Whether you’ve already got a grasp on your cyber-security, or you haven’t even started to consider it, Darktrace could well be a solution that should top your security wishlist this Christmas.

While AI may be the service’s main selling point, there’s also the fact that Darktrace provides useful insights to your teams, human control points if you don’t feel comfortable with AI just yet, as well as the most effective protection against unknown and zero-day attacks.

With its over 7000 customers across over 100 countries, Darktrace is a service that seems to be going from strength to strength, and it can do the same for your business. However, if you’re still unsure and you want to talk to someone who can decide if it’s the right solution for your organisation, why not give us a message or call and we’ll talk you through it in a way that you understand.