Darktrace, a New Competitor in the 2022 ‘ASTORS’ Homeland Security Awards Program, has launched Darktrace PREVENT™, an interconnected set of AI products that deliver a proactive cyber security capability to help organizations pre-empt future cyber-attacks.

PREVENT is the third product area in Darktrace’s delivery of a Cyber AI Loop, the industry-first set of AI capabilities that work together autonomously to optimize an organization’s state of security through a continuous feedback loop.

The new PREVENT product family is based on breakthroughs developed in the firm’s Cambridge Cyber AI Research Centre and the capabilities gained through the acquisition of Cybersprint in March 2022.

Darktrace PREVENT uses AI to ‘think like an attacker,’ finding pathways to an organization’s most critical assets from inside and outside. Underpinned by AI that ‘knows you,’ it continuously analyzes the most disruptive attacks for an organization and feeds that information back into DETECT and RESPOND to support continuous learning and automation to harden systems.

“Our team is finding Darktrace PREVENT very useful as it provides the types of insights and reflections we need to ensure we maintain a level of transparency and validity within our digital environment,” explained Michael Lee Sherwood, Chief Innovation Officer, City of Las Vegas.

“I can see lots of ROI for municipal environments, especially those built-in cloud and virtual environments, use cases for external auditing, visibility into IoT environments, continuous pen-testing, and actively monitoring risk.

“It also addresses some of the skilled analyst shortages the cyber security industry faces.”

A number of organizations in the U.S., U.K., and Northern Europe are early adopters of Darktrace PREVENT products, including the City of Las Vegas and Sedgwick, a leading global provider of technology-enabled risk, benefits, and integrated business solutions.

“Darktrace PREVENT pairs up our inside and outside views and integrates them with DETECT and RESPOND, which is a game changer, added Eric Schmitt, Global Chief Information Security Officer at Sedgwick.

“Our customers are advocating that we need to be continuously testing the efficacy of our security. Darktrace PREVENT does just that.”

This latest Darktrace 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.

In new data, Darktrace reveals that high-priority attempts to breach customer systems increased by 49% globally between January and June 2022. Over the same period, Darktrace saw a 138% increase in attempted cyber-attacks targeting customers in government-related sectors globally.

In the month of June, the Information and Communication sector was the most highly targeted across Darktrace’s global customer base as it was in the U.S. In the U.K., the most targeted industry was the public sector and government-related sectors.

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 is providing more predictive and preventative solutions to tackle cyber-threats and business risk, rather than waiting for breaches to occur before acting.

Based on external vulnerability data of over 150 organizations, Darktrace reveals that 85% of high-risk vulnerabilities are not patched within one week, and that 70% are still unpatched after one month.

Defenders do not have the resources to fight on every front, and they cannot simply be reactive anymore.

“Organizations don’t have bottomless budgets and security teams don’t have endless time,” says Poppy Gustafsson OBE, CEO at Darktrace.

“By helping human teams get a much better picture of their security vulnerabilities and prioritizing the areas that need hardening first so they can protect their most critical assets, we hope we can help our customers free themselves of cyber disruption.”

“I’m so excited about today’s launch of our PREVENT products, which is a major milestone for Darktrace and brings us one step closer to fulfilling our vision of a Cyber AI Loop.”

Darktrace believes that no organization is invulnerable to this new era of cyber-attacks. Self-learning AI technology protects over 6,800 organizations – from renewable energy suppliers to education and healthcare providers – letting them focus on their respective goals.

“A purely reactive approach to security is quickly becoming inadequate,” explains Chris Kissel, Research Director at the International Data Corporation (IDC).

“Early data from research into how organizations are mitigating cyber risk and threats shows a shift towards proactive, ‘always-on’ technologies continually running tests on existing systems.”

“Yet a continuous approach is fundamentally impossible to achieve without automation and AI, and Darktrace’s combination of AI technology that learns self and its new PREVENT product family will bring real value to thinly stretched security teams.”