By Juliet Umeh

Cybersecurity experts, Sophos, said it has acquired Braintrace, to enhance its Adaptive Cybersecurity Ecosystem.

Braintrace provides deep visibility into network traffic patterns, including encrypted traffic, without the need for Man-in-the-Middle, MitM decryption.

The company’s proprietary Network Detection and Response, NDR technology makes this possible.

As part of the acquisition, Braintrace’s developers, data scientists and security analysts have joined Sophos’ global Managed Threat Response, MTR and Rapid Response teams. 

Sophos’ MTR and Rapid Response services business has expanded rapidly, establishing Sophos as one of the largest and fastest-growing MDR providers in the world, with more than 5,000 active customers.

Braintrace’s NDR technology will support Sophos’ MTR and Rapid Response analysts and Extended Detection and Response, XDR customers through integration into the Adaptive Cybersecurity Ecosystem, which underpins all Sophos’ products and services. The Braintrace technology will also serve as the launchpad to collect and forward third-party event data from firewalls, proxies, virtual private networks, VPNs, and other sources.

These additional layers of visibility and event ingestion will significantly improve threat detection, threat hunting and response to suspicious activity.

Chief Technology Officer at Sophos, Joe Levy said: “You can’t protect what you don’t know is there, and businesses of all sizes often miscalculate their assets and attack surfaces, both on-premises and in the cloud. Attackers take advantage of this, often going after weakly protected assets as a means of initial access. Defenders benefit from an ‘air traffic control system’ that sees all network activity, reveals unknown and unprotected assets, and exposes evasive malware more reliably than Intrusion Protection Systems, IPS.

“We’re particularly excited that Braintrace built this technology specifically to provide better security outcomes to their Managed Detection and Response, MDR customers. It’s hard to beat the effectiveness of solutions built by teams of skilled practitioners and developers to solve real world cybersecurity problems.”

Also speaking, CEO and co-founder of Braintrace, Bret Laughlin said: “NDR is critical to successful threat hunting. Braintrace’s competitive differentiation is its unique NDR technology that our MDR analysts leveraged for finding, interrupting and remediating cyberattacks.

“With our own NDR technology, the team responds faster and more accurately because of the real-time, automated visibility and threat verification they have into encrypted traffic.

“We built Braintrace’s NDR technology from the ground up, for detection and now, with Sophos, it will fit into a complete system to provide cross-product detection and response across a multi-vendor ecosystem.”