Threat protection firm Endgame today announced a new AI-powered chatbot feature within its Endgame Detect and Respond (EDR) platform designed to support security analysts.
Dubbed Artemis, named after the mythological goddess of the hunt, the feature could be described as a ‘Siri for SOCs’; an intelligent assistant whose purpose is to simplify and automate the hunt for network-resident attackers.
EDR’s purpose is the automated use of machine learning to detect subtle indications of anomalous behavior that might indicate the presence of an attacker.
EDR is a hunter; but like all hunters it is most efficient with the help of a terrain guide. In modern Security Operations Centers, that guide is the system analyst, who directs and controls the hunter. Together, top-tier analysts and machine-learning automation is seen as the most effective method of detecting attackers before they can do damage.
The problem is the security skills gap — the sparsity and cost of professional talent. According to HPE’s recently published 2017 State of Security Operations report, staffing issues are one of the prime causes for SOCs failing to reach the required level of maturity. Artemis is designed to help this problem as an intelligent conversational assistant to systems analysts.
“Security teams are faced with two major challenges,” says Jamie Butler, CTO at Endgame: “insufficient resources to stop attacks in-progress and lack of automated solutions to uncover malicious behavior in time to prevent information theft. Just as digital assistants like Siri or Alexa proved their ability to give time back to our day by tackling complex tasks, Artemis is an assistant that automatically combs through millions of data points to provide intelligent decisions for the security industry. Security teams,” he adds, “especially those that lack sufficient resources, will now have the analytic depth required to find malicious activity across all enterprise endpoints and eliminate threats in time to stop damage and loss.”
As an example, if an analyst were to ask Artemis “what is suspicious in my network today?”, Artemis would comb through millions of events across endpoints in seconds and provide the user with a comprehensive list of malicious activity. But Artemis goes beyond detection into response. She then recommends a course of action and can be instructed to kill dangerous processes instantly.
In effect, Artemis empowers less-experienced Tier 1 analysts to behave at the same level of sophistication as a Tier 3. She helps SOCs adopt automation without suffering from the usual staffing problems.
Endgame raised $23 million in Series B funding in March 2013, followed by $30 million in Series C funding in November 2014.
In December 2016, Endgame announced that it had been awarded an $18.8 million contract with the U.S. Air Force to have elite Air Force Cyber Protection Teams leverage the Endgame platform to protect endpoints and critical infrastructure.
