Intelligent ways to tackle cyber attack

In early March 2020, UK artificial intelligence (AI) security startup Darktrace was able to contain the spread of a sophisticated attack by Chinese cyber espionage and cyber crime group APT41 exploiting a zero-day vulnerability in Zoho ManageEngine. In a blog post describing the attack, Max Heinemeyer, director of threat hunting at Darktrace, wrote: "Without public indicators of compromise (IoCs) or any open source intelligence available, targeted attacks are incredibly difficult to detect. Even the best detections are useless if they cannot be actioned by a security analyst at an early stage. Too often, this occurs because of an overwhelming volume of alerts, or simply because the skills barrier to triage and investigation is too high." Heinemeyer says Darktrace's Cyber AI platform was able to detect the subtle signs of this targeted, unknown attack at an early stage, without relying on prior knowledge.