Despite the plethora of threat mitigation tools available, research carried out by the Ponemon Institute indicates that fully containing a breach can still take companies months in some cases. Darktrace, a British security startup that has raised over $100 million from investors, believes that the solution is to automate the threat response process.  

The firm is tackling the task with a new hardware-based platform called Antigena that aims to serve as a “digital antibody” for corporate networks. It’s designed to work with Darktrace’s flagship offering, the Enterprise Immune System, which is a physical appliance that can plug into an organization’s infrastructure and constantly look for potential security breaches.

When the device identifies a sign of malicious activity, Antigena automatically starts working on a way to fight off the threat. Its algorithms can size up an incident and carry out a set of remediative actions that are fine-tuned according to its severity. If a worker downloads an unusually large amount of information from a database, for example, the system might suspend access to the system, while the presence of a known malware strain on a desktop would trigger a full-blown quarantine.

The idea is to address threats in a targeted manner so that the impact to business operations can be kept to a minimum. Darktrace claims that Antigena has already helped early adopters stave off multiple attacks during early trials. One unnamed healthcare company saw the system isolate a ransomware infection before it could spread, while a capital management firm was saved from an attempt by a hacker to steal internal client information.

Antigena is available as part of three modules for the Enterprise Immune System that each focus on a different attack vector. One is designed to block hacking attempts that come through the public web, another aims to regulate the traffic flowing over a company’s internal network and the third is designed to regulate team communications channels.

There’s a big addressable market for Antigena: Darktrace claims that there are more than 2,000 deployments of its Enterprise Immune System in 60 countries. The startup estimates that the software has detected some 30,000 “previously unknown” breaches to date for customers.

Image: Darktrace