Fortinet has announced it has acquired the cloud-based threat analytics firm ZoneFox and will be using the company’s machine learning threat detection technology to enhance protection against insider threats.
As companies are migrating data and infrastructure to the cloud, more and more endpoints and users are accessing cloud resources. While those resources need to be accessed by employees for legitimate work purposes, they can also be accessed by rogue employees for the purpose of sabotage or data theft.
According to Verizon’s 2018 Data Breach Investigations Report, 30% of data breaches are caused by negligent or malicious insiders. It is therefore important for businesses to implement security solutions that are capable of monitoring for suspicious activity and can identify insider threats quickly.
Fortinet already provides endpoint and Security Information and Event Management solutions. The inclusion of ZoneFox machine learning cloud-based threat hunting technology will allow Fortinet customers to eliminate network blind spots and better defend the ever-increasing attack surface.
ZoneFox is a privately held company based in Edinburgh, Scotland. The company has developed award-winning machine learning and threat hunting technology which will complement FortiClient endpoint security and add user entity behavior analytics (UEBA) features to FortiSIEM. Combined, enterprises will be able to detect anomalous user behavior faster and response to insider threats much more rapidly.
“We’re pleased to join the Fortinet team and bring together our shared vision of alleviating CISO concerns about insider threats. Integrating our solution with the Fortinet Security Fabric will allow us to extend our reach to a broad spectrum of Fortinet and third-party solutions to solve customers’ most difficult challenges in network security,” said Dr. Jamie Graves, chief executive officer and founder, ZoneFox.
