Sophos acquires Cybersecurity startup Braintrace

Sophos has acquired Cybersecurity provider Braintrace to enhance Sophos’ Adaptive Cybersecurity Ecosystem.

Founded in 2016, Utah based cybersecurity startup Braintrace offers a network detection and response (NDR) solution. The NDR solution offers deep visibility into network traffic patterns, including encrypted traffic, without the need for Man-in-the-Middle (MitM) decryption. To date, the cybersecurity startup raised a total of $10 million in three funding rounds.

Chief Technology Officer, 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 surface, 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."

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."

Post-acquisition, Braintrace’s developers, data scientists, and security analysts now joined Sophos’ global Managed Threat Response (MTR) and Rapid Response, teams.

Braintrace’s NDR will be integrated into the Adaptive Cybersecurity ecosystem. The integration will support Sophos’ MTR and Rapid Response analysts. Braintrace technology will also allow Sophos to collect and forward third-party event data from firewalls, proxies, virtual private networks (VPNs), and other sources, notes the announcement.