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Sophos Acquires Braintrace to Boost Adaptive Cybersecurity Ecosystem
Sophos, a global leader in next-generation cybersecurity, today announced that it has acquired Braintrace, further enhancing Sophos’ Adaptive Cybersecurity Ecosystem with Braintrace’s proprietary Network Detection and Response (NDR) technology.
Braintrace’s NDR provides deep visibility into network traffic patterns, including encrypted traffic, without the need for Man-in-the-Middle (MitM) decryption.
Located in Salt Lake City, Utah, Braintrace launched in 2016 and is privately held.
As part of the acquisition, Braintrace’s developers, data scientists and security analysts have joined Sophos’ global Managed Threat Response (MTR) and Rapid Response teams.
Sophos’ MTR and Rapid Response services business has expanded rapidly, establishing Sophos as one of the largest and fastest-growing MDR providers in the world, with more than 5,000 active customers.
Braintrace’s NDR technology will support Sophos’ MTR and Rapid Response analysts and Extended Detection and Response (XDR) customers through integration into the Adaptive Cybersecurity Ecosystem, which underpins all Sophos products and services.
The Braintrace technology will also serve as the launchpad to collect and forward third-party event data from firewalls, proxies, virtual private networks (VPNs), and other sources.
These additional layers of visibility and event ingestion will significantly improve threat detection, threat hunting and response to suspicious activity.
Joe Levy, chief technology officer, Sophos
“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),” said Joe Levy, chief technology officer, Sophos. “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.”
Sophos will deploy Braintrace’s NDR technology as a virtual machine, fed from traditional observability points such as a Switched Port Analyzer (SPAN) port or a network Test Access Point (TAP) to inspect both north-south traffic at boundaries or east-west traffic within networks.
These deployments help discover threats inside any type of network, including those that remain encrypted, serving as a complement to the decryption capabilities of Sophos Firewall.
The technology’s packet and flow engine feeds a variety of machine learning models trained to detect suspicious or malicious network patterns, such as connections to Command and Control (C2) servers, lateral movement and communications with suspicious domains.
Since Braintrace built its NDR technology specifically for predictive, passive monitoring, its engine also provides intelligent network packet capture that IT security administrators and threat hunters can use as supporting evidence during investigations. The novel NDR analysis and prediction technique is patent pending.
According to Gartner, “compared with traditional approaches, where malicious behavior is defined ahead of time in the form of prebuilt signatures and detection engines inspecting traffic looking for matches, NDR takes a different approach. Instead of only inspecting traffic against a list of known bad payloads or behaviors, NDR also focuses on looking for unknown patterns in the network traffic, calculating a probability as to whether that anomaly is malicious.”
Gartner further notes that, “the machine learning algorithms that are at the core of many NDR products help to detect anomalous traffic that is often missed by other detection techniques. The optional automated response capabilities help to offload some of the workload for incident responders. The threat hunting functionality provides valuable tools for incident responders.”
“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,” said Bret Laughlin, CEO and co-founder of Braintrace. “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.”
British cybersecurity software and hardware company Sophos Group plc’s Silicon Valley office in Santa Clara, California by Gettyimages
Braintrace’s NDR technology is a key component for defending against cyberattacks today and in the future. Sophos research demonstrates how adversaries aggressively and constantly change tactics to evade detection and execute their attacks.
Braintrace’s technology helps uncover malicious C2 traffic from malware, such as ColbaltStrike, BazaLoader and TrickBot, as well as zero-days, that could lead to ransomware and other attacks.
This visibility allows threat hunters and analysts to pre-empt any potential ransomware attack, including recent strikes by REvil and DarkSide.
Sophos plans to introduce Braintrace’s NDR technology for MTR and XDR in the first half of 2022.
African women remain among the most digitally excluded globally, with smartphone affordability and digital literacy among the key barriers. New data from the 2025 GSMA Mobile Gender Gap Report, launched recently, reveals a persistent global gender gap in mobile internet use across low- and middle-income countries (LMICs).
It further notes that literacy, digital skills, safety, and affordability of data also remain critical barriers. The report highlights that 885 million women across these regions still do not use mobile internet, with nearly 60% of them living in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia.
While mobile internet is the primary way women in LMICs access the internet, offering critical lifelines to health, education, and financial services, the pace of female adoption has stalled, leaving 235 million fewer women than men connected.
Claire Sibthorpe, head of digital inclusion at GSMA, highlighted that the gender gap had narrowed significantly between 2017 and 2020, but progress flatlined in recent years.
Although 2023 brought a slight improvement, restoring the gap to 15%, 2024 saw minimal change, with the gap settling at 14%.
The disparity is most severe in Sub-Saharan Africa, where women are 29% less likely than men to use mobile internet.
“It’s disheartening that progress in reducing the mobile internet gender gap has stalled. The digital divide is driven by deep-rooted socio-economic and cultural factors that disproportionately impact women,” said Sibthorpe.
GSMA projects that closing the gender gap by 2030 could add $1.3 trillion to GDP across LMICs and deliver $230 billion in revenue to the mobile industry.
The report, funded by the UK FCDO, Sida, and the Gates Foundation, stresses the urgent need for targeted investment and policy action to bridge the digital divide and ensure that no woman is left offline.
“The mobile internet gender gap is not going to close on its own. It is driven by deep-rooted social, economic, and cultural factors that disproportionately impact women,” said Sibthorpe.
In a recent interview, MTN Nigeria reaffirmed that its ongoing infrastructure investment is a strategic step to improve network quality, speed, and nationwide coverage.
Speaking on Beyond the Headlines with Nifemi Oguntoye, Ugonwa Nwoye, Chief Customer and Experience Officer at MTN Nigeria, explained that although public concern is valid, the company undertook several internal cost-efficiency measures before making structural adjustments.
She emphasised that improved investment is critical to fast-tracking improvements across MTN’s network.
Nwoye explained that MTN undertook extensive internal reforms before embarking on structural changes needed to support this scale of investment.
The company completed its phased roll-out of the increase between February and March, ensuring that every existing data plan was below the 50% increase, and most remained below 25%.
She also noted that customers were proactively informed about all changes, particularly when certain legacy plans were retired and replaced with new ones. “We gave customers six to eight weeks’ notice,” she explained.
“This is why it has taken us some time to complete this process, where we let customers know that at a certain date, this particular tariff is not going to exist.”
Nwoye stressed that MTN had exhausted other internal measures before turning to broader structural updates. Now, with the new pricing structure in place, the company is accelerating its investment in infrastructure, spending over ₦200 billion in the first quarter of 2025 alone, a 159% increase from the same period last year. A total capital expenditure of ₦800 billion is planned for the year.
She noted that this investment is a direct outcome of long-term operational restructuring aimed at improving service quality.
She added, “We are investing over ₦800 billion this year alone in our infrastructure. This will translate into better customer experience, reduced congestion, faster internet speeds, and wider network reach.”
This investment will support the upgrade of over 1,000 cell sites and the expansion of more than 2,000 transmission links nationwide.
Nwoye stressed that these upgrades are designed to deliver faster data speeds, fewer dropped calls, and broader network reach, especially in underserved areas.
She acknowledged the public’s expectations for immediate service improvements but emphasised that large-scale infrastructure takes time to deploy.
Nonetheless, MTN expects customers to begin experiencing visible improvements in network performance by the second half of the year.
In a sector where service quality and customer satisfaction are closely watched, MTN maintains that its ongoing investments are not merely capital commitments but vital enablers of improved digital experiences across Nigeria.
Remita, the pioneering Nigerian payment technology platform developed by SystemSpecs, is charting a bold new course with its planned expansion into markets across Africa.
What began as a payroll feature in an HR application has now become a robust ecosystem processing over ₦60 trillion annually—one that stands on the verge of reshaping the continent’s fintech landscape, Mr. Deremi Atanda, Managing Director/CEO of Remita Payment Services Limited, says in an exclusive interview that will grace the cover of eGovernance Nigeria Magazine.
The forthcoming edition of eGovernance Nigeria Magazine, a publication of the Technology Times media brand owned and operated by Digital Transformation Media Limited (DTML), will spotlight this extraordinary journey, and present Remita’s evolution as an inspiring tale that informs, educates, and entertains readers about indigenous innovation making global strides.
“We’ve become an ecosystem of rails, products, and services—robust,” Atanda, Managing Director/CEO of Remita explains during the exclusive interview with eGovernance Nigeria Magazine.
“Layering all of that with the many different customers we’ve had, typically every year we process in excess of maybe ₦60 trillion in transactions in Nigerian Naira. And this can only grow, especially as we begin to think of a vibrant Pan-African expansion. We’re at the fringe of that.”
In a compelling narrative that mixes grit, vision, and innovation, Atanda recounts Remita’s early days. “What many people know today as Remita actually started out as a feature within our HR/payroll application.
“You process salaries, and you just want to pay—so just remit salaries. And by the way, that’s where the name ‘Remita’ came from: Remittance. We just took out one ‘T’ and left it at ‘A.’”
Even the company’s logo carries symbolism of that transformation. “I don’t know if you’ve seen our logo—it has three dots, in ascending size. There are many stories in that logo. It started as a feature, and then we brought it out as a product,” Atanda explains.
Yet the road was not without its bumps. “The first time we brought it out as a product was to bid for the National Pension Commission. This was in 2004, with the PenCom Act.
“We packaged this into a product in less than two weeks to take care of end-to-end pensions as it was conceived. Trust me, that vision is still viable today. But we lost that bid.”
Undeterred, SystemSpecs pivoted. “We went back and said, ‘What do we do with this asset?’ If it’s not going to work for pensions, let it become a product. And that’s how we renamed pensions.com.ng as Remita, and it became a product.”
As demand grew, Remita expanded beyond payroll. “Some people want to do their own payroll and just make payments, so let them have a site to go to. Later, it evolved into not just payroll payments. People wanted to do other types of payments. If you want to do non-salary payments, you go to Remita,” he says.
Today, Remita has fully matured into a standalone company. “So those three things—feature, product, company. That’s been the evolution.” With a Tier 1 licence from the Central Bank of Nigeria, Remita is now a fintech powerhouse. “We do switching, we do payment service provisioning, we do super agency, we do terminals—everything you can think about. We provide some basic services within the payment space, including payment service advisory.”
A lesser-known chapter of Remita’s growth includes building Nigeria’s first account-to-accountswitch. “Before TSA, we had built a rail—Nigeria’s first account-to-account switch, worked with all the banks. Not many people know that story. Account-to-account. The front of it, the application, and the rail—first of its kind.”
On the pivotal Treasury Single Account (TSA) deal with the Federal Government of Nigeria, Atanda reveals, “TSA was a happenstance. The government was looking to solve a problem, and we were looking to get regulated. It’s that term people use—when they say ‘luck,’ it’s just preparation meeting opportunity.”
Reflecting on the journey, he adds, “These have been some of those moments where you feel validated, where the visionary leadership that set the business up feels the vision is being realized.”
Today, Remita employs over 300 Nigerians and looks beyond its home shores. “The vision is huge, and we’re committed to that. So, we see exponential growth, and we’re positioning for that.”
Mr. Shina Badaru, Chairman of DTML, says Remita’s story is an inspirational example of local innovation with global relevance. “Remita’s success highlights the critical role of indigenous technology solutions in redefining Africa’s digital economy,” he says.
“As the cover story of the next issue of eGovernance Nigeria Magazine, we aim to showcase how homegrown innovation is not only solving problems locally but is also poised to transform markets across the African continent.”
According to Badaru, “Remita’s inspiring journey connects seamlessly with our article of faith to continue to showcase Nigeria’s growing contributions to the global technology industry.”
eGovernance Nigeria Magazine is a flagship DTML platform with operations across print, digital, TV, events, and e-commerce channels.
“This feature not only celebrates Remita’s evolution,” Badaru adds, “but also signals a pivotal shift in the narrative of Nigerian and African technology—from survival to scale, from local impact to continental transformation.”
As Remita sets its sights on Africa, it is poised to bring financial inclusion, digital infrastructure, and innovative fintech solutions to new and underserved markets. With a strong foundation and visionary leadership, the company is ready to deliver the next phase of its remarkable journey.
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