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RESEARCH, ANALYSIS & TRENDS

Business transformation poses always a

security risk

The sudden and wide-scale transformation to change!” And indeed, living and surviving in times of
remote and hybrid working changed the digital COVID is physically, socially and economically tough
landscape overnight and introduced heightened and requires constant adaptation. We had to see how
risks and new challenges. Well-established legacy solutions that rely on hard-coded rules and deny
procedures were quickly rewritten, best lists struggled in a new threat landscape which ren-
dered many of these rules inappropriate or ineffective.
practices rethought, and policies stretched to These solutions failed to adapt when attackers sought
breaking point. out new vulnerabilities and new routes into the organi-
Business transformation is always a security risk. New zation, while producing false positives on the legitimate
technology and working practices need new security and necessary changes that were occurring in work-
measures, but normally this risk is managed carefully, force behaviors and technologies.
and over time. Unsurprisingly, cyber-criminals were
quick to capitalize on the unforeseen nature of the Based on observations across its global customer
changes brought about by COVID-19, exploiting not base, Darktrace identified in its 2021 Threat Report four
only the overnight changes in working practices, but key trends in the cyber-threat landscape. Every stage
also the general sense of fear and uncertainty, with of the attack lifecycle is explored, from reconnaissance
pandemic-related phishing emails and social engineer- and initial intrusion, through to the final stage of the kill
ing playing a key part in changes to the cyber-threat chain: ransomware and data exfiltration. The report
landscape. details seven real-world cyber-threats that evades tradi-
tional, legacy security tools but were detected and in-
All this demonstrated the necessity for companies’ vestigated on in real time by Darktrace’s AI. In many
cyber security strategies to be dynamic and adaptive. cases, the threats were neutralized within seconds by
Just as Charles Darwin discovered, “It is not the strong- Darktrace’s Autonomous Response technology
est of the species that survives, not the most intelligent “Darktrace Antigena”.
that survives, but the one that is most adaptable to

March 2021: Data Privacy & Ethics in Marketing 5