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New Report Finds Lack of Cyber Preparedness in an AI-Threatened World
AI is beginning to amplify the already complex threats faced by cyber security professionals. The rise of offensive AI combined with automation and cybercrime-as-a-service is increasing the speed, sophistication, and success of cyber security attacks. Multi-stage and multi-domain attacks are now widely used by adversaries, who take advantage of a lack of visibility and siloes to move undetected between systems.

A new Darktrace-commissioned report released today underscores the challenges facing businesses in this rapidly evolving cyber-threat landscape. Darktrace’s State of AI Cybersecurity 2024 report, which surveyed nearly 1,800 security leaders and practitioners in 14 countries, found 74 percent of respondents believe AI-augmented cyber threats are already having a significant impact on their organizations, yet 60 percent believe they are currently unprepared to defend against these attacks. The report also found:
• Organizations face two top inhibitors to defending against AI-augmented threats: insufficient knowledge or use of AI-driven countermeasures[1] and insufficient personnel to manage tools and alerts[2].
• Security professionals surveyed believe defensive AI will effectively counter offensive AI, with 71 percent of respondents indicating they are confident that AI-augmented security solutions will be able to detect and block AI-augmented threats. However, only 26 percent fully understand which types of AI are used in their security stack today.
• As they prepare for these threats, security teams want to consolidate their tools. 85 percent of those surveyed agreed that a platform approach is more effective at stopping threats.

Introducing the Darktrace ActiveAI Security Platform
Against this backdrop, Darktrace is introducing the Darktrace ActiveAI Security Platform to help organizations transform their security operations from a focus on reactive threat detection to proactive cyber resilience. The platform includes Darktrace’s core detection and autonomous response capabilities with pre-breach prevention, attack simulation and recovery capabilities in a single, holistic solution with a common AI architecture. The platform enables teams to visualize and correlate events across a broad set of domains including cloud, email, endpoint, identity, network, and OT environments.

The platform is built on Darktrace’s Self-Learning AI engine, which directly applies multiple types of Al to the data of each business so that it can continuously learn from its unique digital environment to understand what is normal and what is not. Darktrace’s AI detects known, unknown, and novel threats in real-time and provides an autonomous response that contains active threats without disrupting business operations.

New features and innovations unveiled today in the Darktrace ActiveAI Security Platform include:
• More explainable, automated, and customizable investigations for all alerts: Darktrace Cyber AI Analyst™ will now reveal the results of its investigations for every security alert, rather than just those escalated to an incident. This helps security analysts understand how the AI reached its conclusion that escalation wasn’t required. Cyber AI Analyst also can now be customized to perform investigations that are tailored to each business’s unique needs. For example, it can investigate activity surrounding a threat intelligence finding from a 3rd party alert for evidence of a cyber incident or investigate activity surrounding violations of a company-specific compliance policy for evidence of an insider threat. Cyber AI Analyst was and uses AI trained to mirror how human security analysts conduct investigations. Unique in the industry, it automatically investigates every alert to completion and identifies precise response actions that can be taken autonomously to contain threats. Rather than security teams triaging a small portion of alerts, Cyber AI Analyst triages all of them. This helps to reduce alert fatigue and free up time for security teams, who can instead focus on proactively hardening their security controls and refining incident handling procedures.
• Decryption: The platform will include new integrations with third-party network solutions to provide decrypted traffic feeds and decryption keys. It will also include native decryption for Microsoft Windows and Apple Mac applications, including internet browsers.
• New Firewall Rule Analysis to Pre-empt Threats: Darktrace PREVENT/End-to-End™, which provides pre-breach preparation, now includes the ability to analyze firewall rules, allowing it to provide a more comprehensive view of potential unauthorized traversal points or attack paths within IT, OT or in between, identifying risks in configuration and pre-empt threats.

Additionally, Darktrace will release enhancements to its best-in-class email and OT security solutions, which can be purchased as stand-alone products based on each organization’s unique project needs.

Darktrace/Email™ will include new features that use AI to stop early-stage phishing, spot early symptoms of account compromise across a broader range of communications and increase SOC efficiency. The new features include:
• New data loss prevention capabilities that use AI to detect abnormal user behavior and changes to content beyond those offered by native email providers, helping teams identify the full spectrum of accidental and malicious data loss.
• Coverage for Microsoft Teams to detect and stop novel, insider, and sophisticated early phishing threats often missed by other solutions, especially when communications span both collaboration and email tools.
• New Darktrace/DMARC creates an easy way to help protect an organization’s brand with an industry first AI-assisted deployment of the Domain-based Message Authentication (DMARC) email authentication protocol to continuously stop others spoofing and phishing from a business’s domain names.
• More robust account takeover protection that can now prevent lateral mail compromise with an addition to our AI behavioral profile for each user that spots early symptoms of account compromise and malicious insiders before a link or attachment payload is sent and exfiltration occurs.
• New Mailbox Security Assistant feature helps to reduce reporting of potential false positives by 60 percent[3], which can help the security team save time on analysis. The feature provides end-users with a natural language summary and context of why an email may be malicious. This helps improve their knowledge and decrease the risk of successful phishing attempts.
• New behavioral link analysis capabilities that can reveal hidden intent within interactive and dynamic webpages to help users and security teams detect more sophisticated malicious phishing links.

Darktrace/OT™ will include new capabilities that go beyond traditional Common Vulnerability and Exposure (CVE) scoring to help organizations identify, prioritize, mitigate, and continuously review the risks and potential attack paths that are specific to their OT infrastructure. In addition to identifying and prioritizing risks more effectively, Darktrace/OT can now evaluate each business’s defenses against the tactics of Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) Groups. Darktrace/OT maps MITRE techniques and known threat groups tools, tactics, and procedures (TTPs) against unique attack paths identified within the business.

Availability
New features in the Darktrace ActiveAI Security Platform are expected to be available in early calendar Q2 2024.