BlackBerry juices up threat hunting software
Things changed at BlackBerry, more than once, to be fair.
The company that used to be known as Research in Motion (RIM) decided to drop the somewhat incongruous name and some bright spark in marketing decided to rename the company after the device brand that we once all knew and loved.
BlackBerry marketing hasn’t always been too sharp of course; the (arguably) bizarre appointment of singer Alicia Keys to the post of BlackBerry global creative director back in 2013 goes down alongside Will.I.Am and his smartwatch launch in association with Salesforce at Dreamforce in 2014 as some of the weirdest stuff we’ve seen.
Marketing shenanigans notwithstanding, things changed yet again at BlackBerry… the company that used to be a device company reinvented itself under ex-Sybase CEO John Chen as a trusted security software and services company.
It made sense i.e. BlackBerry had always been popular with governments and big enterprises.
CylanceGUARD
New products from CylanceGUARD this year include CylanceGUARD, a managed detection and response (MDR) solution that uses BlackBerry Cylance security experts and its native AI platform to provide continuous threat hunting and monitoring.
Acquired by BlackBerry in February of this year,Cylance has been described as the first company to apply artificial intelligence, algorithms and machine learning to cyber security.
Cylance’s machine learning and artificial intelligence technology was strategic addition to BlackBerry’s end-to-end communications portfolio. Notably, its embeddable AI technology is being used to accelerate the development of BlackBerry Spark, a secure communications platform for the Internet of Things (IoT).
Threat hunting
BlackBerry says that for an enterprise to consider itself an ‘elite security organisation’, threat hunting (rather than just plain old anti-virus provisioning) is needed to take a proactive stance to threat detection; however, there are only a handful of organisations in industries such as financial services, high-tech manufacturing and defence that can claim to have productive threat hunting teams that deliver results.
According to Jason Bevis in his position as vice president of threat hunting at BlackBerry Cylance, CylanceGUARD is a subscription-based piece of software that validates, triages, analyses, prioritises and automates analyst and incident engagement.
“With alert automation, artificial intelligence and an advanced orchestration engine, CylanceGUARD simplifies complex technologies and workflows to dramatically reduce the time it takes to identify intrusions and act against attack proliferation,” noted Bevis and team.
Bevis concludes by noting that BlackBerry Cylance customers can access a web portal for visibility into their security environments, as well as receive mobile warnings on iOS and Android devices, including delivered context to streamline investigations.