General News
Sophos MDR Defends 26,000 Customers Worldwide with New Enhancements

Sophos, a global leader of innovative security solutions for defeating cyberattacks, today announced that its Sophos Managed Detection and Response (MDR) service has reached a major milestone, now protecting more than 26,000 organizations globally, growing its customer base by 37% in 2024.
This achievement highlights the increasing demand for Sophos’ proactive, expert-led security solutions, which help organizations of all sizes stay protected 24/7 against increasingly sophisticated cyber threats, including the most advanced ransomware, business email compromise (BEC) and phishing attacks.
Sophos MDR offers a comprehensive suite of capabilities that go beyond standard threat containment to include full-scale incident response, such as root cause analysis, the removal of malicious tools or artifacts used by attackers, and investigations across customers’ environments to ensure adversaries are fully ejected to prevent another attack.
What further differentiates Sophos is that these incident response services are included with Sophos MDR on an unlimited basis, meaning customers are not additionally charged and there is no limit on the number of incident response hours.
Sophos MDR Complete also includes a breach protection warranty covering up to $1 million USD in incident response expenses. Sophos provides flexibility for how customers can work with the MDR analysts, including the ability to pre-authorize them to contain an active threat.
Sophos Investment in MDR and New Features
Sophos has made significant investments into its MDR offering with increased analyst capacity, AI assisted workflows, new features and expanded integrations to help deliver the best possible outcomes through improved protection, detection and investigation of threats. Sophos has added the following new features:
· Proof of Value: New Sophos MDR service insights to explain the MDR team’s actions including highlighting the human hours spent threat hunting and creating and tuning detections. High-value dashboard enhancements include details of MITRE ATT&CK tactics uncovered in proactive threat hunts conducted by Sophos’ MDR team, MDR analyst coverage, case investigation summaries and an account health check status.
· Enhanced Security for Microsoft Customers: New Sophos-proprietary detections for Microsoft Office 365 identify threats including business email compromise and adversary in the middle account takeover attacks, independent of the customer’s Microsoft license level.
· Expanded Compatibility with Third Parties: This expanded ecosystem of turnkey integrations with third-party cybersecurity and IT tools includes a new Backup and Recovery integration category.
· Proactive Vulnerability Mitigation: Sophos Managed Risk powered by Tenable provides attack surface vulnerability management as a new managed service option for Sophos MDR customers.
· Efficiency and Automation: Sophos MDR has added AI-powered workflows to streamline the operational processes and drive better security outcomes for our customers. This innovation delivers a reduced mean time to respond (MTTR) through more efficient triage, while also ensuring that all legitimate threats are rapidly investigated. This enables analysts to concentrate on other tasks such as threat hunting, account health monitoring and detection engineering.
“Attackers are continuously advancing their tactics to outmanoeuvre traditional security defenses,” said Rob Harrison, senior vice president of product management at Sophos.
“Our customers rely on Sophos MDR to help their organizations tackle today’s threats 24/7 with full-scale incident response to remove active adversaries and conduct root cause analysis to identify the underlying issues that led to an incident.
“We’re consistently evolving our solutions with new offerings and integrations, just like attackers are constantly evolving their tactics, so customers can disrupt threats before they escalate into destructive attacks.”
Better Together: Sophos MDR Integrations
Sophos has invested significantly in third party integrations for its MDR customers to ingest and analyze events and alerts from an even broader range of tools and products, while also expanding propriety detections based on suspicious behaviour identified in Microsoft environments. This includes:
· A new Backup and Recovery integration pack with Acronis, Rubrik and Veeam integrations to strengthen defenses against ransomware.
· Microsoft Office 365 Management Activity integrations, enabling the ingestion of audit logs and security alerts across the Microsoft ecosystem. More than 9,000 customers have this integration in the Sophos MDR solution.
Sophos MDR Accolades
Sophos MDR has received multiple recognitions and accolades from customers, analysts and media in 2024:
Sophos named a Leader in the IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Managed Detection and Response (MDR) 2024 Vendor Assessment *
Sophos named a Leader in the IDC MarketScape: European Managed Detection and Response (MDR) Services in 2024 Vendor Assessment **.
· Sophos named a Leader in Frost & Sullivan’s 2024 Frost Radar™ for Global Managed Detection and Response (MDR)
· Sophos MDR declared the Winner of the “Best Managed Detection and Response Service” award in the 2024 SC Awards, and “Best Managed Security Service” award in the 2024 SC Awards Europe
· Sophos named a Gartner® Peer Insights™ Customers’ Choice for MDR Services for the 2nd year in a row
· Sophos MDR named CRN 2024 Products of The Year for Revenue and Profit
Threat Landscape from Sophos MDR
In the last 12 months, Sophos shared findings from the following MDR cases it analyzed for customers:
· In December 2024, Sophos released The Bite from Inside: The Sophos Active Adversary Report that provides an in-depth look at the changing behaviors and attack techniques that adversaries used in the first half of 2024. The data is derived from nearly 200 IR and MDR cases and found that attackers are looking for ways to hide in plain sight by abusing trusted applications or “Living off the Land” binaries or LOLbins. Sophos saw a 51% increase in abusing these applications.
· Sophos X-Ops released information that it is seeing an uptick of Akira ransomware cases across its MDR and Incident Response customers with eight cases since November 2024 across Akira’s 127 victims disclosed in the past six months.
· In June 2024, Sophos MDR published details on a nearly two-year long cyber espionage campaign they uncovered against a high-level government entity in Southeast Asia. The operation, which Sophos named Crimson Palace, involved three separate clusters of threat activity that overlapped with several well-known Chinese nation-state groups.
What Sophos MDR Customers Are Saying
Sophos was named a Customers’ Choice vendor in the second Gartner® Peer Insights™ Voice of the Customer Report for MDR. Sophos scored the highest overall customer rating of 4.9/5, based on 344 reviews, as of Sept. 30, 2024, with verified customer reviews celebrating Sophos MDR’s innovation.
Here’s what customers are saying about Sophos MDR:
· “Earlier it was very difficult for us to manage the alerts and incidents generated by the tools and technology but after MDR deployment we have complete peace of mind. We also have other products from Sophos so our overall experience from a manageability point of view is also good,” from assistant director of IT in the healthcare and biotech industry.
· “Sophos MDR is a wonderful product and services by Sophos, you don’t need a SOC after getting MDR,” from an IT manager in the IT services industry.
· “Sophos MDR is one of the best in the market. It’s a good service to have good sleep at night, as the burden of threat hunting is offloaded,” from an IT infrastructure specialist in the retail industry.
· “We have had an incredibly positive experience using Sophos MDR. We rest more easily knowing that their team is acting as an extension of our own team in doing threat hunting/detection/remediation in our environment on a 24/7 basis,” from an operations associate.
General News
UK Businesses Look to Africa As Strategic Growth Partners

New research by UK-based Strategy Management Partners reveals that a growing number of British businesses are identifying Africa as a key strategic growth region – drawn by structural reforms, demographic momentum, and rapid digital transformation across the continent.
The research, based on a survey of senior decision-makers from 250 large UK-based companies, finds that 50% are already active in African markets and planning to expand further.
An additional 28% are considering entry, signalling a clear uptick in long-term interest from international businesses with the resources to scale regionally.
The findings challenge outdated perceptions of Africa as a high-risk or secondary market. Instead, they highlight key drivers behind renewed commercial interest: • 61 per cent of UK leaders cited Africa’s large and growing consumer markets as a major draw. • 61 per cent pointed to the continent’s rapid pace of digital and technological adoption. • 50 per cent highlighted the potential of Africa’s young, skilled, and digitally native population.
The study also suggests that Africa is no longer viewed simply as a market for philanthropic initiatives or shortterm gain. Only 20 per cent of respondents cited philanthropic motives, while most are focused on building commercially viable, long-term operations.
Initiatives like the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA), are also laying the groundwork for significant economic growth.
With 23 countries already implementing preferential tariffs, the framework is expected to facilitate smoother intra-regional trade, enable market scale, and support more efficient supply chains.
These structural improvements are making Africa more attractive to global firms with the ambition to operate at scale.
However, despite rising optimism, significant operational and policy challenges remain. The top four barriers to investment cited by UK business leaders were: political and country risk (68%); safety and security issues 66.4%); regulatory barriers and tariffs (60.4%); and the complexity of cross-border transactions (60%).
Addressing these issues will be crucial to unlocking Africa’s full potential for UK investment. UK companies are showing the most interest in sectors that align with Africa’s core strengths, such as natural resources, agriculture, a young and expanding population, and infrastructure development.
These areas are seen as the backbone for long-term commercial growth, offering opportunities to build local supply chains, expand digital services, scale manufacturing, and meet rising consumer demand.
However, for companies looking to invest or expand into Africa, success also depends on key enabling conditions. According to business leaders surveyed, the top factors supporting investment are: • The size of market and consumer demand (49.6%) • Reliable and consistent energy supply (48.4%) • Access to affordable, educated and capable talent (44.8%) • Efficient transportation networks, such as roads, ports, airports (38%) • A favourable macroeconomic environment: low interest rates, low inflation, stable exchange rates, and seamless cross-border transactions and repatriation of earnings(38%).
“UK businesses are increasingly seeing Africa as a strategic growth market, driven by structural reforms, digital adoption, and the momentum behind the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA),” says Muibat Ijaiya, Partner at Strategy Management Partners.
“But real progress will depend on practical cooperation with African governments. The AfCFTAis a pivotal step forward – what’s needed now is a deeper alignment between public policy and private investment to address trade, regulatory and infrastructure barriers, and unlock long-term, sustainable growth.”
General News
FG Plans N50m STEEM Grant to Support Student Innovation in August

In a giant stride to support innovation, entrepreneurship and economic transformation, the Federal Government is set to unveil a N50 million grant for Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics and Medical Sciences (STEEM) students in Nigeria’s tertiary institutions.
The project, which is referred to as the Student Venture Capital Grant (S-VCG), is a pioneering initiative designed to empower the students towards building the next generation of scalable, job-creating ventures.
According to a statement by the Director of Press and Public Relations in the Ministry of Education, Folashade Boriowo, Friday, the initiative will be formally unveiled in August by the Minister of Education, Dr. Tunji Alausa.
Boriowo stated that the minister made the disclosure during a stakeholders’ engagement session held in Abuja in the presence of vice-chancellors, provosts, rectors, student leaders, academic staff, and development partners, and will chart a collective course for nurturing student-led innovation.
The statement noted that the grant targets full-time undergraduate students in STEMM disciplines (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics and Medical Sciences), specifically those in 300 level and above.
“Each selected student-led project will be eligible to receive startup funding of up to N50 million, along with access to mentorship, incubation services and business development support.
“The initiative will be implemented in partnership with the Bank of Industry (BoI) to ensure financial transparency, impact measurement and effective project execution.
“S-VCG is not just a grant. It’s a launchpad for bold, young innovators to lead Nigeria’s industrial and technological transformation,” said Alausa.
Speaking at the session, the Minister of State for Education, Prof. Suwaiba Sa’id Ahmad, described the grant as a strategic investment in Nigeria’s knowledge economy.
“We’re building a stronger, more competitive future by supporting innovation from the ground up,” she said, adding that the programme’s design was informed by months of consultation with students, faculty and institutional leaders.
Participants at the event welcomed the STEMM-Up Grant as a timely, strategic and high-impact initiative that will drive youth innovation, tackle graduate unemployment, and position Nigeria as a hub for student-led entrepreneurship in Africa.
General News
Experts Champion Sustainability at Lagos Green Economy Forum

Lagos State’s transition to a greener economy is gaining momentum, with female leaders from top corporations taking the lead and the state government beginning to record early wins from its plastic bag policy.
At the Lagos Green Economy Forum held on July 23, senior executives from MTN Nigeria, IHS Towers, TechnoServe, and other large organisations highlighted the role of corporate innovation in advancing sustainability.
The all-female panel also emphasised the urgent need to integrate Nigeria’s thousands of small and medium enterprises (SMEs) into the country’s green transition.
“We’re not just here to share strategies,” said Temilade Olabanji, Senior Manager, Sustainability and Shared Value, MTN Nigeria. “We are here to build local resilience. Our Project Zero is not only helping us cut emissions but also equipping our suppliers with the knowledge to do the same.”
MTN’s Project Zero aims for net-zero emissions by 2040, with a 50% reduction target by 2030. The company is already powering base stations and data centres with renewables, while training suppliers to understand carbon footprints and adopt circular practices. MTN has pledged that by 2026, 80% of its top suppliers will align with its sustainability goals.
Titilope Oguntuga, Director of Sustainability, IHS Towers, reinforced this approach, noting that the company’s Project Green is decarbonising its over 16,000 tower sites across Nigeria by switching to renewable energy. “Project Green is enabling all sites to run effectively with more renewable sources of energy rather than the typical fossil fuels,” she said. IHS also runs Clinic Without Walls, a free micro-health insurance scheme for underserved communities.
From the nonprofit sector, Juliet Ezeani, Senior Business Advisor of TechnoServe, explained how the organisation supports vendors through environmental impact assessments, sustainability training, and responsible procurement.“For all our projects, we look at how the project runs and especially how it affects the environment,” she said.
Meanwhile, the Lagos State Government provided an update on its green policy efforts, especially the plastic bag ban introduced two months ago.
“All of what we have done so far is towards making the economy of Lagos or the quality of life of the average Lagosian much better,” said Dr. Babatunde Ajayi, General Manager of the Lagos Environmental Protection Agency (LASEPA), who represented the Honourable Commissioner, Mr. Tokunbo Wahab.
On the plastic bag ban, he added: “What that [the ban] has also done is to free up our drainage from the plastic waste. In some way, we have reduced flooding, reduced pollution, and reduced the headache and the cost of maintaining drainages and labourers.”
Dr. Ajayi emphasised that green transition is not just a compliance issue for SMEs but an economic opportunity. “It helps them drive their engines, their entire businesses in a more sustainable manner.”
As Lagos accounts for nearly 30% of Nigeria’s GDP, the increasing alignment between corporate leaders and public policy towards a greener economy is positioning the state as a model for inclusive, environmentally responsible development.
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