How Sophos' Project Darwin embraces AI to combat evolving threats

Cyber security vendor Sophos is invoking the spirit of famed English evolutionary scientist Charles Darwin to rally the security industry around its vision for connected cyber defence, opening the company up to working with APIs and other third parties to tackle sophisticated threats. Former Sophos product SVP Dan Schiappa, who is now the company's chief innovation officer, said the industry should take a joined-up approach to applying artificial intelligence to security decisions. Speaking with Computerworld UK, Schiappa explained how the company's internally named'Darwin Project' evolved from its previous work. "About four years ago we introduced the concept of'synchronised security' and this is where security products speak directly to one another, and share information," he said during a telephone interview. "The simplest example was, if we saw a compromise at an endpoint, it would share that information to the firewall and then the firewall would eliminate that endpoint from being able to talk to the outside world."