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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.
MoMo PSB, MTN Nigeria’s fintech powerhouse, sealed a game-changing pact with the Small and Medium Enterprises Development Agency of Nigeria (SMEDAN) on February 3 at its Victoria Island headquarters, unleashing digital and financial tools to turbocharge SMEs nationwide for seamless operations, revenue surges, and sustainable scaling.
MoMo PSB, SMEDAN
The partnership arms SMEDAN-registered merchants with MoMo’s multi-channel arsenal—apps, POS, USSD, partner portals, and custom platforms—to hoover payments across streams, automate payrolls, juggle tills and shop chains, and boss core business metrics from one slick dashboard.
This powerhouse duo targets Nigeria’s SME engine room, where digital chokepoints throttle growth, injecting MTN’s MoMo muscle to slash friction and unlock efficiencies for mama-put hustles to mid-tier factories alike.
Industry watchers hail the MoU as a masterstroke in President Tinubu’s economic revival playbook, fusing government SME scaffolding with private-sector fintech firepower to birth a new breed of digitally dominant entrepreneurs primed for AfCFTA conquests.
MTN Foundation and SAIL Innovation Lab have roared into Phase Two of their blockbuster Teachers Fellowship Programme, onboarding 5,000 elite educators from Nigeria’s 36 states and the FCT since January 13 to turbocharge public schools with cutting-edge digital wizardry and global teaching firepower.
MTN
This mobile-first crusade, laser-focused on arming primary and secondary school titans for the digital economy showdown, kicks off with a grueling four-week virtual bootcamp via WhatsApp and Google Classroom—slashing travel barriers for even the remotest rural warriors.
Organisers promise peer-to-peer fireworks and real-time gut-checks, capping Stage One with a virtual gala saluting milestones before culling the pack to a fierce “Top 500” via engagement, assessments, and hustle for Phase Two’s inquiry-based mastery and deep-dive digital metamorphosis.
MTN Foundation’s Executive Director Odunayo Sanya lit the fuse: “Teachers are the backbone of our education system. By empowering them with digital competencies and innovative teaching methods, we are directly investing in the future of our youth.
This Fellowship Programme is designed to ensure that our educators are not just keeping pace with global best practices but are actively shaping the next generation of innovators and leaders.”
Nigeria’s heftiest private teacher uprising scales from last year’s triumphs, minting classroom commandos as state ambassadors to ignite inquiry-driven, tech-fueled learning revolutions coast-to-coast.
Onafriq Nigeria Payments Ltd, a CBN licenced payment service provider, partners with The Pan-African Payment and Settlement System (PAPSS) to pilot the continent’s first wallet-based outbound payments from Nigeria to Ghana – fully in Naira and instant, without relying on hard currency conversion, in partnership with Banks and Mobile Money Operators.
The pilot service, approved by the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), enables cross-border intra-Africa payments for individuals, merchants, and traders.
In particular, the service will benefit SMEs, the real engine of intra-African trade; all now have access to a faster, cheaper way to reach customers and suppliers across the border.
By reducing barriers to cross-border trade, the new service will allow these businesses to grow their addressable markets and activity. From the 1st of December, this service will be fully operational for a 6-month period.
Through the partnership with PAPSS, Onafriq is supporting the operationalization of the AfCFTA (Africa Continental Free Trade Area) mandate.
The mandate itself is driving tariff-free trade for the 54 member states of AfCFTA. Within the partnership itself, Onafriq provides the mobile money rails, with an ecosystem consisting of over 1 billion mobile wallets.
Meanwhile, PAPSS brings a network of over 160 commercial banks, representing an ecosystem of more than 400 million bank accounts across its 19 African countries of operation.
The two partners are essentially seamlessly connecting two worlds: mobile money and banking. As a consequence, intra-African trade transactions will take place more easily and opportunities will be created.
Currently, Africa is made up of bank and mobile-led markets, with siloes often inhibiting transactions between these economies. However, this partnership will remove these boundaries. With over one billion mobile wallets and 500 million bank wallets across Africa, this partnership will allow for cross-border collaboration at scale.
This partnership builds on Onafriq and PAPSS’ existing partnership for payments into Ghana, announced earlier this year.
Mxolisi Msutwana, Managing Director Anglophone West Africa said, “Our work with PAPSS shows what collaboration at scale can unlock—seamless, secure connections between banking systems and mobile money ecosystems.
“This is how we open bi-directional trade corridors, reduce costs for businesses, and give African enterprises the rails they need to trade with confidence in their own currencies. The vision is continental, but it starts with practical steps like this one.”
Ositadimma Ugwu, Chief Information Officer, PAPSS, added “Too often, African businesses and individuals see borders as roadblocks instead of opportunities. With this step, we’re challenging that mindset, giving Nigerians the ability to send value next door with the same ease as sending a text message.
“Our vision is simple: make Africa’s borders invisible to payments. This pilot makes that a reality, moving us closer to a continent where payments don’t pause at the border.”
This new Nigeria-to-Ghana outbound capability builds on the successful Ghana-to-Nigeria instant payments corridor launched earlier this year – further proof that Africa’s payments future is local, instant, and inclusive.
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