General News
Sophos MDR Defends 26,000 Customers Worldwide with New Enhancements
Sophos, a global leader of innovative security solutions for defeating cyberattacks, today announced that its Sophos Managed Detection and Response (MDR) service has reached a major milestone, now protecting more than 26,000 organizations globally, growing its customer base by 37% in 2024.
This achievement highlights the increasing demand for Sophos’ proactive, expert-led security solutions, which help organizations of all sizes stay protected 24/7 against increasingly sophisticated cyber threats, including the most advanced ransomware, business email compromise (BEC) and phishing attacks.
Sophos MDR offers a comprehensive suite of capabilities that go beyond standard threat containment to include full-scale incident response, such as root cause analysis, the removal of malicious tools or artifacts used by attackers, and investigations across customers’ environments to ensure adversaries are fully ejected to prevent another attack.
What further differentiates Sophos is that these incident response services are included with Sophos MDR on an unlimited basis, meaning customers are not additionally charged and there is no limit on the number of incident response hours.
Sophos MDR Complete also includes a breach protection warranty covering up to $1 million USD in incident response expenses. Sophos provides flexibility for how customers can work with the MDR analysts, including the ability to pre-authorize them to contain an active threat.
Sophos Investment in MDR and New Features
Sophos has made significant investments into its MDR offering with increased analyst capacity, AI assisted workflows, new features and expanded integrations to help deliver the best possible outcomes through improved protection, detection and investigation of threats. Sophos has added the following new features:
· Proof of Value: New Sophos MDR service insights to explain the MDR team’s actions including highlighting the human hours spent threat hunting and creating and tuning detections. High-value dashboard enhancements include details of MITRE ATT&CK tactics uncovered in proactive threat hunts conducted by Sophos’ MDR team, MDR analyst coverage, case investigation summaries and an account health check status.
· Enhanced Security for Microsoft Customers: New Sophos-proprietary detections for Microsoft Office 365 identify threats including business email compromise and adversary in the middle account takeover attacks, independent of the customer’s Microsoft license level.
· Expanded Compatibility with Third Parties: This expanded ecosystem of turnkey integrations with third-party cybersecurity and IT tools includes a new Backup and Recovery integration category.
· Proactive Vulnerability Mitigation: Sophos Managed Risk powered by Tenable provides attack surface vulnerability management as a new managed service option for Sophos MDR customers.
· Efficiency and Automation: Sophos MDR has added AI-powered workflows to streamline the operational processes and drive better security outcomes for our customers. This innovation delivers a reduced mean time to respond (MTTR) through more efficient triage, while also ensuring that all legitimate threats are rapidly investigated. This enables analysts to concentrate on other tasks such as threat hunting, account health monitoring and detection engineering.
“Attackers are continuously advancing their tactics to outmanoeuvre traditional security defenses,” said Rob Harrison, senior vice president of product management at Sophos.
“Our customers rely on Sophos MDR to help their organizations tackle today’s threats 24/7 with full-scale incident response to remove active adversaries and conduct root cause analysis to identify the underlying issues that led to an incident.
“We’re consistently evolving our solutions with new offerings and integrations, just like attackers are constantly evolving their tactics, so customers can disrupt threats before they escalate into destructive attacks.”
Better Together: Sophos MDR Integrations
Sophos has invested significantly in third party integrations for its MDR customers to ingest and analyze events and alerts from an even broader range of tools and products, while also expanding propriety detections based on suspicious behaviour identified in Microsoft environments. This includes:
· A new Backup and Recovery integration pack with Acronis, Rubrik and Veeam integrations to strengthen defenses against ransomware.
· Microsoft Office 365 Management Activity integrations, enabling the ingestion of audit logs and security alerts across the Microsoft ecosystem. More than 9,000 customers have this integration in the Sophos MDR solution.
Sophos MDR Accolades
Sophos MDR has received multiple recognitions and accolades from customers, analysts and media in 2024:
Sophos named a Leader in the IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Managed Detection and Response (MDR) 2024 Vendor Assessment *
Sophos named a Leader in the IDC MarketScape: European Managed Detection and Response (MDR) Services in 2024 Vendor Assessment **.
· Sophos named a Leader in Frost & Sullivan’s 2024 Frost Radar™ for Global Managed Detection and Response (MDR)
· Sophos MDR declared the Winner of the “Best Managed Detection and Response Service” award in the 2024 SC Awards, and “Best Managed Security Service” award in the 2024 SC Awards Europe
· Sophos named a Gartner® Peer Insights™ Customers’ Choice for MDR Services for the 2nd year in a row
· Sophos MDR named CRN 2024 Products of The Year for Revenue and Profit
Threat Landscape from Sophos MDR
In the last 12 months, Sophos shared findings from the following MDR cases it analyzed for customers:
· In December 2024, Sophos released The Bite from Inside: The Sophos Active Adversary Report that provides an in-depth look at the changing behaviors and attack techniques that adversaries used in the first half of 2024. The data is derived from nearly 200 IR and MDR cases and found that attackers are looking for ways to hide in plain sight by abusing trusted applications or “Living off the Land” binaries or LOLbins. Sophos saw a 51% increase in abusing these applications.
· Sophos X-Ops released information that it is seeing an uptick of Akira ransomware cases across its MDR and Incident Response customers with eight cases since November 2024 across Akira’s 127 victims disclosed in the past six months.
· In June 2024, Sophos MDR published details on a nearly two-year long cyber espionage campaign they uncovered against a high-level government entity in Southeast Asia. The operation, which Sophos named Crimson Palace, involved three separate clusters of threat activity that overlapped with several well-known Chinese nation-state groups.
What Sophos MDR Customers Are Saying
Sophos was named a Customers’ Choice vendor in the second Gartner® Peer Insights™ Voice of the Customer Report for MDR. Sophos scored the highest overall customer rating of 4.9/5, based on 344 reviews, as of Sept. 30, 2024, with verified customer reviews celebrating Sophos MDR’s innovation.
Here’s what customers are saying about Sophos MDR:
· “Earlier it was very difficult for us to manage the alerts and incidents generated by the tools and technology but after MDR deployment we have complete peace of mind. We also have other products from Sophos so our overall experience from a manageability point of view is also good,” from assistant director of IT in the healthcare and biotech industry.
· “Sophos MDR is a wonderful product and services by Sophos, you don’t need a SOC after getting MDR,” from an IT manager in the IT services industry.
· “Sophos MDR is one of the best in the market. It’s a good service to have good sleep at night, as the burden of threat hunting is offloaded,” from an IT infrastructure specialist in the retail industry.
· “We have had an incredibly positive experience using Sophos MDR. We rest more easily knowing that their team is acting as an extension of our own team in doing threat hunting/detection/remediation in our environment on a 24/7 basis,” from an operations associate.
This Valentine’s Day, PalmPay is celebrating love in all its forms with the launch of #LoveWithPalmPay, a campaign highlighting how simple, everyday shared money moments can bring relationships closer.
Valentine’s Day is more than grand gestures; it’s built on the small, meaningful actions that shape relationships, sending timely support, saving together, or managing shared responsibilities. PalmPay encourages users to share 30–60 second real-life stories, either solo or duet style, showing how PalmPay always works and has helped them support or stay connected with someone they love.
The campaign runs from February 9th to 21st across Facebook, Instagram, X (formerly Twitter), and TikTok. Four winners will receive ₦100,000 each week for two weeks, totalling a prize pool of ₦800,000.
Entries can take many forms, including couple videos, solo stories, split-screen duets for long-distance couples, or voiceover narratives with photos or clips, making the campaign inclusive for married couples, parents, and long-term partners.
How to Participate:
- Share an authentic love story about your partner
- Clearly show PalmPay in action (transfers, savings, or other in-app activities)
- Be creative and emotionally engaging
- Post between February 9th – 21st with the hashtag #LoveWithPalmPay
- Share on any of PalmPay’s social media platforms
“Love evolves, and so do relationships,” said Olorunfemi Hanson, Head of Marketing and Communication, PalmPay. “From dating to parenthood, the small money moments we share every day play a big role in keeping us connected. With #LoveWithPalmPay, we want to celebrate those stories and show how PalmPay always works, making everyday love simpler, reliable, and meaningful.”
This Valentine’s Day, PalmPay celebrates love as it truly is real, intentional, and built on shared moments.
PalmPay is a leading digital banking platform driving financial inclusion and economic empowerment in underserved emerging markets. Through its secure, user-friendly, and inclusive suite of financial services, PalmPay empowers individuals and businesses with tools to manage and grow their money.
PalmPay offers a comprehensive range of products, including mobile payments, savings, and micro-insurance via its app and mobile money agent network.
Since launching in Nigeria in 2019 under a Mobile Money Operator license, the platform has grown to over 35 million app users and processes up to 15 million transactions daily. PalmPay has operations in Nigeria, Ghana, Tanzania, and Bangladesh. For more information, visit www.palmpay.com
Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN)and the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) have proposed that customers must receive refunds within 30 seconds for failed airtime and data purchases to curb persistent billing complaints in the telecommunications sector.
This was indicated in the Exposure Draft of the Joint CBN–NCC Framework for Resolution of Failed Airtime and Data Purchase Transactions, which was published on the website of the CBN on Monday.
The landmark exposure draft, dated 5 February 2026, seeks to “institutionalise clear accountability” and establish a “coordinated approach to consumer redress” across the financial and telecommunications sectors.
The most significant shift in the proposed framework is the introduction of standardised, automated timelines for resolving failed transactions.
Currently, Nigerians often face long delays when airtime purchases fail at the bank, aggregator, or Mobile Network Operator level.
To solve this, the regulators have proposed a 30-second window for automated reversals. Section 6.0 (ii) of the draft exposure, which dwelt on failed transactions, especially as it relates to unfulfilled airtime/data delivery, proposes a time to refund the purchaser of 30 seconds “if the transaction failed at the bank level… Failed transaction delivery from NCC Authorised Licensees… Failed transaction delivery from MNO to the NCC Authorised Licensee.”
The draft emphasised that stakeholders must “automate reversal processes across all stakeholders” to ensure that refunds require no human intervention from the customer.
The draft exposure also stated that “all parties involved in airtime and data transactions shall take the following actions to ease usage and facilitate consumer satisfaction: a. Stakeholders must immediately connect ONLY to relevant authorised licensees of the NCC and CBN. b. MNOs and banks must only connect to NCC Authorised Licensees/MNO digital channel partners for airtime and data vending… Notifications of failure create final settlement obligations between MNO and NCC-authorised licensees… The NCC and CBN will audit stakeholder compliance jointly or individually at quarterly or other intervals as may be determined.”
From a business and oversight perspective, the regulators are proposing a Central Monitoring Dashboard to be hosted jointly by the CBN and NCC, which will track reversals, Service Level Agreement breaches, and customer complaints in real-time.
“There shall be a Central Monitoring Dashboard hosted by CBN/NCC for tracking reversals, SLA breaches, and customer complaints. This will facilitate the establishment of a real-time national ‘Failed Transactions Dashboard’ with a uniform error code with end-to-end visibility across the value chain’, read the draft exposure.
This is designed to eliminate the “unclear ownership of liability” that often occurs when banks and telcos blame each other for failed recharges. To support this, banks and MNOs will be required to maintain and share daily reports of successful and failed cases.
The proposed framework also addresses the common problem of “lost” money when customers recharge ported phone numbers. The draft mandates that MNOs must validate a phone number against the ported number database before processing any recharge. If the system identifies a number as ported out or invalid, it must “proactively stop recharges” and send a failure code back to the bank to ensure the customer is not debited.
For erroneous recharges sent to the wrong person, the framework sets clear protocols: below N20,000, MNOs will request the recipient’s consent before a reversal, and when it is above N20,000, an affidavit of indemnity or notarised letter is required to process the recovery.
The CBN and NCC in the exposure draft signalled they will take a firm stance on compliance. Both agencies will conduct joint quarterly audits of all stakeholders, including banks, payment service providers, and MNOs, to verify compliance with the new rules. The regulators have warned they will “impose penalties for any breach” of the framework’s provisions.
Banks and other financial institutions have until 10 February 2026 to submit their inputs on the draft before it is finalised. Once implemented, the framework is expected to significantly restore “subscriber trust” in Nigeria’s digital financial ecosystem.
Federal government has unveiled a new digital platform to connect millions of women to finance, skills training, and market opportunities, in what officials call the country’s largest technology-driven women’s inclusion initiative to date.
The Happy Woman App Platform, which was unveiled at the Presidential Villa in Abuja, would serve as a single interface for women to access funding facilities, business development support, governmental initiatives, and critical services.
The digital drive comes as Nigeria grapples with expanding gender gaps in financial access, with women much less likely than males to maintain bank accounts or obtain formal credit, limiting their capacity to grow informal enterprises they primarily run.
Yet women remain central to the economy, accounting for a large share of micro and small enterprises that contribute nearly half of the country’s GDP.
According to the Social Institutions and Gender Index, only about 35 percent of Nigerian women have a bank account at a financial institution, compared with 55 percent of men, underscoring the depth of persistent financial exclusion and the urgency of targeted interventions.
The launch coincided with the expansion of the Nigeria for Women Programme, which the administration now plans to scale nationwide to reach 25 million women.
President Bola Tinubu, represented by vice president Kashim Shettima, said the scale-up is central to Nigeria’s economic growth strategy.
“A nation that relegates its women is a nation bound for implosion,” he said, adding that women must be placed “at the centre of national planning and productivity.”
The expanded programme builds on a pilot phase in six states that reached over one million women, many organised into Women Affinity Groups to access grants, savings schemes and livelihood support.
The government says the new app will streamline beneficiary registration, payments and training, reducing leakages and improving delivery.
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