A Sentinel That Cuts Through Clutter

It could have taken months for the systems administrators at a large bank in Rome to figure out that one of their servers was talking to Facebook, a red flag given that networks in banks don't need to know how many "likes" they've received. And they might not have noticed the streams of data the server then sent to an array of unknown computers. This kind of threat--coming from inside the network, not from outside its firewall--is difficult to detect. According to IT researcher Gartner, it can take an average 229 days for a business to figure out it's been compromised this way. What tipped off the bank's IT department was a little black box containing software from Darktrace, a U.K. startup founded in 2013 by a group of former British spooks and Cambridge University Ph.D.s.