Darktrace launches new family of security AI tools 

If there’s anything that the continuous increase in data breaches has shown us, it’s that most organization’s security teams can’t keep up with the pace of modern threat actors through manual work alone.

It’s for this reason that more and more security teams are turning to automation and Artificial Intelligence (AI) to automate investigative tasks and alert triaging to detect threat actors faster.  In fact, according to IBM, 64% of organizations have implemented AI for security capabilities so far.  

In an attempt to enhance its existing security AI capabilities, Darktrace today announced the launch of Darktrace PREVENT, a new interconnected product family of AI products that uses AI to “think like an attacker,” to automatically identify an enterprise’s critical assets and exposures. 

One of the new products, PREVENT/E2E (End-to-end) provides enterprises with attack path modelling, automated penetration testing, breach and attack emulation, security awareness testing and training, and vulnerability prioritization to help identify and mitigate cyber risks that exist in the environment. 

Another, PREVENT/ASM (Attack Surface Management), uses AI to perform reconnaissance on a named target, to automatically increase transparency over shadow IT, the software supply chain and configuration errors. 

Security AI’s role in the current threat landscape

Darktrace PREVENT”s launch comes as more organizations are struggling to keep up with the fast growing attack surface, with the company’s research showing that high-priority security incidents increased by 49% between January and June 2022 across its customer base. 

“Darktrace’s latest product family is set to proactively defend organizations against the heightened volume and sophistication of cyber threats, which is making identification and prioritization of their most pressing vulnerabilities increasingly difficult,” said VP Tactical Risk and Response at Darktrace, Justin Fier. 

“At the same time, security teams are contending with an ever-increasing volume of vulnerabilities, and they do not have the resources to fight on all fronts With the launch of PREVENT, Darktrace provides more predictive and preventing solutions to tackle cyber threats and business risk – rather than waiting for breaches to occur before action is taken,” Fier said. 

By using AI, organizations can proactively probe their defenses from the perspective of an attacker, and identify vulnerabilities before an attacker has a chance to exploit them. Continually mitigating the most severe vulnerabilities enables a security team to make significant improvements to its security posture over a short period of time.   

A look at the security AI market 

The PREVENT launch comes as the cybersecurity AI market is in a state of growth, with researchers anticipating it will grow from a value of $8.8 billion in 2019, to $38.2 billion by 2026. 

Darktrace is widely regarded as one of the biggest providers in the market, with over 1,600 employees and reportedly generating $343 million in annual recurring revenue in 2021. 

One of Darktrace’s main competitors is Crowdstrike, which offers an exploit prediction AI called ExPRT AI.

ExPRT AI uses threat intelligence data, real-time monitoring and assigns vulnerabilities with a rating so that security analysts can assess how likely it is to be exploited. Crowdstrike recently announced raising $431 million in revenue in Q2 of fourth quarter of fiscal 2022. 

Another key competitor is SentinelOne, which offers an XDR and AI endpoint security platform that uses static and behavioral AI, and announced $65.6 million in revenue in the fourth quarter of fiscal year 2022. 

However, Fier argues that while there are other vendors that offered siloed capabilities “nobody has the breach  of capabilities, nor are they combining and synthesizing them the way that Darktrace does,” to “augment human teams and feed back into detection and response systems,” with self-learning AI.