Sophos announced on Thursday that it is acquiring Braintrace, a startup with technology that detects malicious data traffic in enterprises’ on-premises and public cloud environments. Sophos is a major player in the cybersecurity game and is owned by Thoma Bravo, a private equity firm that acquired it for $3.9 in 2019.
Sophos is based in the UK and provides malware detection software and firewalls that run on employee devices or other related enterprise products companies use.
More than 100 million end-users scattered across the globe use its products, including its freemium antivirus.
What Braintrace offers
Braintrace, based in Salt Lake City, offers two primary solutions; malicious network traffic detection and managed security services.
The company’s managed services assist enterprises with daily tasks that involve system security, freeing up resources for in-house IT teams. It deploys experts to run the firewalls and other systems that the client relies on to thwart attacks while investigating any security incidents.
The main reason Sophos is buying Braintrace is that the latter has a superb network monitoring platform. It detects breaches by identifying malicious data traffic in the protected environments.
Internal and external watchdog
Braintrace uses machine learning algorithms to identify traffic sent from inside the corporate network to external destinations, including malware command and control servers operated by cybercriminals.
The algorithm is also capable of spotting malicious traffic travelling within a business environment. With these capabilities in place, outside attacks and internal attacks aiming to breach even more systems don’t go very far.
As the Braintrace team joins Sophos’ Managed Threat Response and Rapid Response security services units as part of the deal, Sophos has begun to make Braintrace’s software available as a VM sometime in the first half of 2022.