Innovative cyber security: a great enabler of growth

Imagine your business is a unique living organism. An organism that has everything it needs to function at its optimum output from day to day, and importantly, to grow. Now imagine that organism under constant attack, where exposure from any part of it to infection might cause long-term damage. And imagine that those attacks evolve, constantly finding new ways to exploit a weakness. What that otherwise perfect organism needs is a strong immune system, one that constantly learns and understands every part of it so that when a threat occurs it can detect it, deal with it, and let the organism heal and grow again.

Forgive the biological metaphor, but Darktrace’s unique approach to cyber security is designed to offer that immune system. 

“Any business that is growing has got finite time and energy and they want to be spending it investing in what will grow their organisation,” says Darktrace co-founder and chief exec Poppy Gustafsson. “And they are the best at what they do and that's why they're doing that job, they don't want to be worrying about the customer response to a cyber breach or not being able to access their laptop on a Monday morning.”

Cyber security is evolving to keep pace with ever more sophisticated threats

The threat from cyber-attacks is relentless. And the criminals behind the increasingly sophisticated attacks are indiscriminate. They don’t care if it’s a hotel chain or a children’s hospital. If there’s a weakness, they will exploit it. And it’s not just an organisation’s security that could expose it to risk. 

“Every business now is so digitally intertwined with all the other businesses it interacts with, says Gustafsson. “If you’re transacting with a supplier that doesn’t have great cybersecurity, then you’re exposed.”

This happened to Formula One race team McLaren recently when its CEO Zak Brown was targeted by a phishing email that made its way to his personal inbox via a supplier. The email was a highly convincing payment request that looked exactly like the kind that would have been a part of Brown’s routine to sign off. Thankfully for McLaren, Darktrace’s AI was able to identify the email as suspicious and lock it before Brown had the chance to open it. 

Traditionally the focus on cyber security has always been outward, trying to identify where the next potential threat is likely to come from and in what form. Darktrace instead embeds itself within an organisation and learns about it from within, identifying behaviours by analysing data to quickly assess when that 1% of threats make their way through the net and understand that something is wrong – just like an immune system.

That has been the approach since the product’s launch almost ten years ago, but the development is ongoing – with its response capability now in action, containing and neutralising threats in real time allowing people within the organisations it serves to carry on with their jobs uninterrupted. And the company recently launched its Prevent capability, which gets into the mindset of the attacker and proactively spots vulnerabilities, ensuring that any weaknesses aren’t exploited.

 “Every second of every day somewhere, we are autonomously responding to an in-progress cyber threat,” says Gustafsson. “That is awesome, isn't it?” A graduate of mathematics from the University of Sheffield, Gustafsson is appropriately excited to see such an impactful application of her field of expertise.

How diverse thinking can make innovation fizz

As Darktrace continues to develop and build on its technology – the next iteration of which is developing a way that AI can help to heal a business after a cyber-attack – it would be easy to pinpoint Darktrace’s success in its algorithms.

“It is just a selection of algorithms, and we are really good at our selection of algorithms, but the reason we're able to do it is the people that have worked long and hard to figure out what that unique combination of algorithms should be.”

Gustafsson is proud of her Cambridge-based development team that put together these cutting-edge mathematical applications. And it isn’t just made up of mathematical geniuses and computer programmers; there’s a medieval historian, a theoretical linguist, there’s someone who studies how viruses move through the human body. “If you put a fizzy drink in a glass and there's that one slight imperfection on the edge of the glass, that's where the bubbles congregate around,” says Gustafsson, who sees innovation best fuelled by diversity of thought. “You get all this disruptive creativity. You don't want to create something that's too homogeneous. You need those slight differences, which is where the bubbles and the energy accumulates, and I think that's what we've got at Darktrace.”

At its core, cyber security is a great enabler and allows your organisation the breathing space to grow. “Suddenly you're able to focus on what you do,” adds Gustafsson. “You're able to benefit from all the new, exciting, innovative tech, whether it is your new SaaS applications or whatever it is that your business needs. But you can do so knowing that if the worst were to happen, you're protected.”

Hear directly from Darktrace’s Poppy Gustafsson for an in-depth session at the CBI Annual Conference. Book now to learn about the increasingly sophisticated cyber threats that businesses face, how you can innovate, adapt and use AI to mitigate risks and learn best practices, and practical tips and tricks in case the worst case becomes reality.