U.K. firm buys Braintrace

Salt Lake City cybersecurity company Braintrace has been purchased by Oxford, England-based Sophos. Sophos expects Braintrace’s proprietary network detection and response technology (NDR) to enhance its own cybersecurity ecosystem.

Founded in 2016, Braintrace is privately held and employs about 60 people.

As part of the acquisition, Braintrace’s developers, data scientists and security analysts have joined Sophos’ global Managed Threat Response (MTR) and Rapid Response teams. Sophos’ MTR and rapid response services business has expanded rapidly, establishing Sophos as one of the largest and fastest-growing managed detection and response (MDR) providers in the world, with more than 5,000 active customers, according to Sophos.

“You can’t protect what you don’t know is there, and businesses of all sizes often miscalculate their assets and attack surface, both on-premises and in the cloud. Attackers take advantage of this, often going after weakly protected assets as a means of initial access,” said Joe Levy, chief technology officer at Sophos. “We’re particularly excited that Braintrace built this technology specifically to provide better security outcomes to their MDR customers. It’s hard to beat the effectiveness of solutions built by teams of skilled practitioners and developers to solve real-world cybersecurity problems.”

“NDR is critical to successful threat hunting. Braintrace’s competitive differentiation is its unique NDR technology that our MDR analysts leveraged for finding, interrupting and remediating cyberattacks,” said Bret Laughlin, CEO and co-founder of Braintrace. “With our own NDR technology, the team responds faster and more accurately because of the real-time, automated visibility and threat verification they have into encrypted traffic. We built Braintrace’s NDR technology from the ground up for detection and now, with Sophos, it will fit into a complete system to provide cross-product detection and response across a multi-vendor ecosystem.”

Sophos plans to introduce Braintrace’s technology in the first half of 2022.