Global cyber security leader Forcepoint today launched the X-Labs division, the world's first dedicated research division that combines deep security expertise with behavioural science research. The new X-Labs team will use data insights from the entire Forcepoint product portfolio to drive innovation in modern, risk-adaptive security solutions. This will deliver enterprises and government agencies with more flexible and effective cyber security solutions appropriate for today's intricate, cloud-first threat landscape.
In the past seven years, more than $1 trillion has been spent on cyber security to deliver a 95% success rate, for the attackers. Today, legacy security products are failing because they are not designed for modern cyber security challenges and fail to address the two constants in any organisation: people and data.
X-Labs will transform and augment cyber security solutions built on traditional threat intelligence with patent-pending behavioural intelligence insights into human and machine behaviour. Over time, this unique behavioural intelligence corpus will integrate into the new Forcepoint Converged Security Platform to extend automated and risk-adaptive protection across an organisation's entire on-premises and cloud infrastructure.
"Forcepoint X-Labs' mission is to understand digital identities and their related cyber behaviours, particularly as they interact with high-value data and intellectual property," said Nicolas Fischbach, chief technology officer, Forcepoint. "Forcepoint's unique approach to cyber security delivers insights built on behavioural intelligence. Delivered within a privacy-by-design process, these behavioural insights have never been integrated into security products before. CISOs need a security partner that can pinpoint normal and abnormal behaviour on today's hybrid IT environments, and can dynamically deliver automated, risk-adaptive security solutions."
Risk-adaptive protection leverages Adaptive Trust Profile and artificial intelligence
Enterprises are constantly challenged by millions of security events and are forced to make discreet decisions: permit or deny. This legacy approach to security introduces friction into a business and creates missed opportunities to prevent an incident from happening. Humans and machines, collectively recognised as "entities" on a network, each pose a dynamically changing level of risk to a company which can shift in a matter of seconds.
As a core building block of Forcepoint's Converged Security Platform, the X-Labs team will leverage the Adaptive Trust Profile (ATP). More than a technology, the ATP is a collection of attributes, models and inferences about entities which derives, through applied artificial intelligence and analytics, a set of risks for each entity. The ATP allows security professionals to focus on those entities which truly pose the highest level of risk to the business or other employees, relieving understaffed security teams from the business frictions plaguing current point security products.
"We are moving away from reactive 'yes' and 'no' security decisions to dynamically scored risk-based decisions," said Raffael Marty, vice-president of research and intelligence, Forcepoint. "By providing both threat and behavioural intelligence insights, and natively integrating these with our products, we offer true risk-adaptive protection which understands people and their behaviour. This significantly reduces security friction in an organisation and allows business leaders to unleash the power of productivity and innovation for competitive advantage today."
The ATP is designed to natively integrate with Forcepoint's behaviour-based analytics which collect data from sensors across cloud, endpoint, third-party applications, services (including SaaS) and more. The artificial intelligence models within the ATP then contextualise the events and compute a risk score for each entity. Risk scores are calculated by utilising an expansive behaviour catalogue comprised of innumerable scenarios, such as a user stealing data or when an individual's account credentials are compromised.
Diverse X-Labs team innovates solutions for today's modern threat landscape
The broad skill set within the X-Labs team is unique in the world. No other cyber security vendor is teaming security researchers with data scientists, psychologists and counter-intelligence specialists to innovate security solutions that truly understand people and their cyber behaviours. X-Labs specialists are situated globally, including teams based in Austin, Texas; Baltimore, Maryland; San Diego, California; Cork and Dublin, Ireland; Reading, United Kingdom; and Helsinki, Finland.
Additional resources:
X-Labs
Blog: X-Labs Leads Behavior-Intelligence Innovation in Cybersecurity
Blog: Beyond Buzzwords: What Cognitive Science means to Cybersecurity
Report: 2019 Forcepoint Cybersecurity Predictions Report
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