Darktrace, a global leader in cyber security AI, today announced that its Antigena ‘machine fights back’ technology has autonomously responded to an increasing number of attacks on cloud and collaboration applications this year. The company reports a 50% increase in AI actions taken during the first half of 2021 compared to the latter half of 2020, to thwart attacks on business-critical Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), collaboration and video conferencing applications hosted in the cloud.

Powered by Self-Learning AI, Darktrace’s Antigena technology is capable of taking precise and proportionate actions at machine speed to mitigate in-progress attacks across any SaaS application, without disrupting the business. With an in-depth understanding of the behavior of users across multiple environments, including Microsoft 365, Teams, Salesforce, Zoom, Slack, and Google Workspace, the technology protects users from both known and novel attacks, such as account takeovers, insider threat, data theft, and impersonation attacks.

In addition, Darktrace for SaaS now incorporates a context gathering capability for Microsoft 365 users, displaying contextual information about the user including their groups, assigned roles and licenses. This data on users within SaaS environments is fed back into Self-Learning AI for enhanced threat detection, and can also be used to escalate autonomous responses.

“AI has been profound in highlighting threats that we may not have seen otherwise, and Autonomous Response acts across all of our data and applications,” said Jenny Moshea, CIO at Sellen Construction, a US Pacific Northwest construction company. “It buys us back time we wouldn’t have had otherwise, and helps us sleep better at night knowing all of our infrastructure across our cloud, SaaS, and Microsoft Suite is being kept safe.”

“The adoption of virtual collaboration tools and SaaS applications continues to rise, and is one of the key trends in Enterprise technology still,” says Dave Palmer, Chief Product Officer, Darktrace. “These platforms not only allow quick team calls or simple ways of sharing data, but are used by everyone from governments to global banks, and now house confidential conversations and critical data. This sharp rise in attacks demonstrates why organizations need Self-Learning AI to autonomously detect, investigate and respond to threats everywhere to secure the modern workforce.”

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