Telecom
Sophos Acquires Braintrace to Boost Adaptive Cybersecurity Ecosystem
Sophos, a global leader in next-generation cybersecurity, today announced that it has acquired Braintrace, further enhancing Sophos’ Adaptive Cybersecurity Ecosystem with Braintrace’s proprietary Network Detection and Response (NDR) technology.
Braintrace’s NDR provides deep visibility into network traffic patterns, including encrypted traffic, without the need for Man-in-the-Middle (MitM) decryption.
Located in Salt Lake City, Utah, Braintrace launched in 2016 and is privately held.
As part of the acquisition, Braintrace’s developers, data scientists and security analysts have joined Sophos’ global Managed Threat Response (MTR) and Rapid Response teams.
Sophos’ MTR and Rapid Response services business has expanded rapidly, establishing Sophos as one of the largest and fastest-growing MDR providers in the world, with more than 5,000 active customers.
Braintrace’s NDR technology will support Sophos’ MTR and Rapid Response analysts and Extended Detection and Response (XDR) customers through integration into the Adaptive Cybersecurity Ecosystem, which underpins all Sophos products and services.
The Braintrace technology will also serve as the launchpad to collect and forward third-party event data from firewalls, proxies, virtual private networks (VPNs), and other sources.
These additional layers of visibility and event ingestion will significantly improve threat detection, threat hunting and response to suspicious activity.
Joe Levy, chief technology officer, Sophos
“You can’t protect what you don’t know is there, and businesses of all sizes often miscalculate their assets and attack surface, both on-premises and in the cloud. Attackers take advantage of this, often going after weakly protected assets as a means of initial access. Defenders benefit from an ‘air traffic control system’ that sees all network activity, reveals unknown and unprotected assets, and exposes evasive malware more reliably than Intrusion Protection Systems (IPS),” said Joe Levy, chief technology officer, Sophos. “We’re particularly excited that Braintrace built this technology specifically to provide better security outcomes to their Managed Detection and Response (MDR) customers. It’s hard to beat the effectiveness of solutions built by teams of skilled practitioners and developers to solve real world cybersecurity problems.”
Sophos will deploy Braintrace’s NDR technology as a virtual machine, fed from traditional observability points such as a Switched Port Analyzer (SPAN) port or a network Test Access Point (TAP) to inspect both north-south traffic at boundaries or east-west traffic within networks.
These deployments help discover threats inside any type of network, including those that remain encrypted, serving as a complement to the decryption capabilities of Sophos Firewall.
The technology’s packet and flow engine feeds a variety of machine learning models trained to detect suspicious or malicious network patterns, such as connections to Command and Control (C2) servers, lateral movement and communications with suspicious domains.
Since Braintrace built its NDR technology specifically for predictive, passive monitoring, its engine also provides intelligent network packet capture that IT security administrators and threat hunters can use as supporting evidence during investigations. The novel NDR analysis and prediction technique is patent pending.
According to Gartner, “compared with traditional approaches, where malicious behavior is defined ahead of time in the form of prebuilt signatures and detection engines inspecting traffic looking for matches, NDR takes a different approach. Instead of only inspecting traffic against a list of known bad payloads or behaviors, NDR also focuses on looking for unknown patterns in the network traffic, calculating a probability as to whether that anomaly is malicious.”
Gartner further notes that, “the machine learning algorithms that are at the core of many NDR products help to detect anomalous traffic that is often missed by other detection techniques. The optional automated response capabilities help to offload some of the workload for incident responders. The threat hunting functionality provides valuable tools for incident responders.”
“NDR is critical to successful threat hunting. Braintrace’s competitive differentiation is its unique NDR technology that our MDR analysts leveraged for finding, interrupting and remediating cyberattacks,” said Bret Laughlin, CEO and co-founder of Braintrace. “With our own NDR technology, the team responds faster and more accurately because of the real-time, automated visibility and threat verification they have into encrypted traffic. We built Braintrace’s NDR technology from the ground up for detection and now, with Sophos, it will fit into a complete system to provide cross-product detection and response across a multi-vendor ecosystem.”
British cybersecurity software and hardware company Sophos Group plc’s Silicon Valley office in Santa Clara, California by Gettyimages
Braintrace’s NDR technology is a key component for defending against cyberattacks today and in the future. Sophos research demonstrates how adversaries aggressively and constantly change tactics to evade detection and execute their attacks.
Braintrace’s technology helps uncover malicious C2 traffic from malware, such as ColbaltStrike, BazaLoader and TrickBot, as well as zero-days, that could lead to ransomware and other attacks.
This visibility allows threat hunters and analysts to pre-empt any potential ransomware attack, including recent strikes by REvil and DarkSide.
Sophos plans to introduce Braintrace’s NDR technology for MTR and XDR in the first half of 2022.
Terrorists belonging to Lakurawa group have reportedly killed three staff of a leading telecommunication firm.
The insurgents were said to have invaded a construction site at Gumki village in Arewa Local Government Area of Kebbi State.
The bandits reportedly attacked a construction site at Gumki village in Arewa Local Government Area of Kebbi State when their victims were installing a surveillance mast for the Nigeria Immigration Service and killed them and one other person who is yet to be identified.
There was a conflicting report of which organization the victims belonged as the police said three of the deceased were Airtel staff and the residents identified them to be Immigration staff.
A staff of Sir Yahaya Specialist Hospital however corroborated the villagers, saying the three victims brought to the hospital were Immigration staff.
But SP Nafiu Abubakar, police spokesperson, said four persons lost their lives, one indigene and three staff of Airtel.
He said from the report the police got, Bello M Sani, state Commissioner of Police, alongside with CIS Muhammad Bashir, Comptroller, Nigeria Immigration Service, Kebbi State Command, Lawali mobilized their men to the scene to evacuate the corpses to Sir Yahaya Memorial Hospital in Birnin Kebbi.
He said his CP has deployed additional tactical teams to the area and charged them to decisively deal with the suspected bandits operating in the area.
He said the CP also had meeting with people in the area and appealed to them to always assist the police and other security agencies with relevant information for their prompt response.
Nigeria has an average data cost of $0.38 per gigabyte, making her the most affordable countries globally and one of the cheapest in Africa for mobile data services.
United States averages $6 per gigabyte and South Africa with $1.77 per gigabyte rank the highest globally and in Africa respectively.
According to the GSMA, Nigerian data costs, as a percentage of Gross National Income (GNI) per capita, are among the lowest across Africa.
The reports by the body lends weight to telecom operators advocacy for tariff adjustments to address economic pressures threatening the sector’s sustainability.
The GSMA report, titled “The Role of Mobile Technology in Driving the Digital Economy in Nigeria,” highlighted Nigeria’s competitive data pricing, which is significantly lower than other African nations, such as Kenya ($0.59 per gigabyte), Ethiopia ($0.68 per gigabyte), and South Africa ($1.77 per gigabyte).
By contrast, the United States averages $6 per gigabyte, underscoring Nigeria’s advantage in offering cost-effective connectivity.
The cost of mobile data in Africa varies greatly by country and region.
Data costs can refer to the cost of mobile data or the cost of acquiring, maintaining, and using business data.
In 2023, the average cost of 1 GB of mobile data in Sub-Saharan Africa was $3.31, while in Northern Africa it was $0.86.
Telecommunications operators in Nigeria have been requesting some policy changes as well as tariff rebalancing to enable them deliver support to the Government’s digital economy objectives.
They have called for the simplification and improvement of the Right of Way (RoW) charging and administration process, harmonised across the country
According to them, all government authorities (at national and sub-national levels) should apply the national maximum RoW fee of N145 per/LSQM adopted by the National Economic Council (NEC) for the deployment of fibre across all states in Nigeria.
There should be a single point of contact in each state for the RoW application process while the duration for the approval process should be digitalised and limited to a maximum of one month.
Simplification and reduction of the tax burden on the mobile sector
On tariff, recall that the Association of Licensed Telecommunications Operators of Nigeria (ALTON) and the Association of Telecommunications Companies of Nigeria (ATCON) had urged the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) to consider reviewing tariffs upward to address rising operational costs.
Nodding in agreement, Bismarck Rewane, chief executive officer, Financial Derivatives, said the proposed tariff hike by telecommunications will help reduce inflation in the country.
He said it would help to reduce inflation because it increases productivity, stressing that the price of MTN shares went up by 10% to 220.
Rewane reiterated that investors had already factored that in, adding that they are expecting a lot of good goodies.
“But more important to think about is the fact that because of an increase in tariff and an increase in investment to make the industry sustainable, they’re going to see an increase in productivity, not directly but indirectly.
“Any increase in productivity and output is likely to allow inflation to moderate, which is the goal. So, we heard from the policymaker, Bosun Tijani, who was very clear that we want a sustainable sector. But we also heard from the regulator saying that we will hold these guys to quality of service.
“We also heard from the operators, MTN that they are all revving up. So in all, there are economic benefits because of increased output and productivity. Two, policymakers are aligned because they want this to lead to a moderation in inflation,” he added.
He further said that it was not a bad deal and re-echoed the minister’s comment that the tariff hike will not be 100 per cent.
“Will they get 100%? No, they will definitely not. We suspect that we are going to likely see something between 40 and 50% which is fair after so many years of static changes,” Rewane added.
Bismarck Rewane, chief executive officer, Financial Derivatives, has said the proposed tariff hike by telecommunications will help reduce inflation in the country.
Rewane made this statement on Channels Television’s Business Morning on Thursday.
Recall that Association of Licensed Telecommunications Operators of Nigeria (ALTON) and the Association of Telecommunications Companies of Nigeria (ATCON) had urged the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) to consider reviewing tariffs upward to address rising operational costs.
On January 3, Karl Toriola, chief executive officer (CEO), MTN Nigeria, said telcos want a 100 percent tariff hike.
According to Rewane, who previously supported the plans for a tariff hike, the move will make the sector more sustainable.
He said it would help to reduce inflation because it increases productivity, stressing that the price of MTN shares went up by 10% to 220.
Rewane reiterated that investors had already factored that in, adding that they are expecting a lot of good goodies.
“But more important to think about is the fact that because of an increase in tariff and an increase in investment to make the industry sustainable, they’re going to see an increase in productivity, not directly but indirectly.
“Any increase in productivity and output is likely to allow inflation to moderate, which is the goal. So, we heard from the policymaker Bosun Tijani, who was very clear that we want a sustainable sector. But we also heard from the regulator saying that we will hold these guys to quality of service.
“We also heard from the operators, MTN that they are all revving up. So in all, there are economic benefits because of increased output and productivity. Two, policymakers are aligned because they want this to lead to a moderation in inflation,” he added.
He further said that it was not a bad deal and re-echoed the minister’s comment that the tariff hike will not be 100 per cent.
“Will they get 100%? No, they will definitely not. We suspect that we are going to likely see something between 40 and 50% which is fair after so many years of static changes,” Rewane added.
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