Renowned international end-to-end cybersecurity firm WithSecure (formerly known as F-Secure Business) recently introduced a new unit called WithSecure Intelligence (WithIntel) that combines approaches from threat research and machine learning to improve and develop intelligence-driven protection capabilities for use in WithSecure’s solutions and services.
Its regional director (Asia Pacific) Yong Meng Hong (left in above pic) told Business Today that the company’s unique blend of expertise – such as machine learning, malware analysis, reverse engineering, threat intelligence, detection engineering, and data analysis – enables it to identify significant emerging threats facing organisations.
“WithIntel was conceived to help organisations constantly stay safe online since the world’s increasingly fraught geopolitical situation has precipitated a concerning variety of cyber attacks targeting individuals, corporations, civil infrastructure, and governments,” said Yong.
“These threats have become progressively abundant and sophisticated in nature, leading WithSecure to create this new unit to help combat such adversaries.”
WithIntel will utilise the depth and breadth of the company’s technologies to develop and improve the company’s services and solutions. Specific areas of research include endpoint threat detection, cloud and web security, detection and response, data-driven threat insights, tracking and understanding advanced persistent threats, attacks against machine learning systems and how to defend against them, and more.
Meanwhile, WithSecure vice president Paolo Palumbo (right in pic) said that threats are evolving faster than defences, and intelligence needed to counter attacks often lacks nuance or relevance to potential targets.
“Aggregating and analysing a wide range of data sources allows us to monitor the current threat landscape accurately, predict new attacks, and use this knowledge to stop attackers through our technologies and services,” said Palumbo.
“Working toward this goal supports WithSecure’s efforts in providing clients with security outcomes that help them minimize the risks and damages caused by these threats.”
“Additionally, WithIntel will leverage innovations in endpoint intelligence generated by our company’s Project Blackfin,” he added.
Project Blackfin is a multi-year research effort aimed at investigating how to apply collective intelligence in the cyber security domain.
The research, which is being led by WithSecure’s Artificial Intelligence Centre of Excellence, is a company-wide effort involving WithSecure’s engineers, researchers data scientists, and academic partners. The near-term goals of this research are to develop new, more generic methods for detecting adversarial actions, create mechanisms capable of tracking attacker actions across multiple endpoints on a network and further improve and automate threat intelligence gathering capabilities.
Project Blackfin is also aimed at understanding how to implement and improve automated response actions while implementing mechanisms that are able to perform contextual risk analysis at each endpoint.
