British security software and hardware firm sophos said it has acquired us-based cybersecurity firm Braintrace for an undisclosed amount. As part of the acquisition, the company will integrate Braintrace's proprietary Network Detection and Response (NDR) technology into its Adaptive Cybersecurity Ecosystem.

Braintrace's developers, data scientists, and security analysts have joined Sophos' global Managed Threat Response (MTR) and Rapid Response Teams as part of the acquisition, said the company.

Braintrace's NDR technology will be integrated into the Adaptive Cybersecurity Ecosystem, which underpins all Sophos products and services, to support Sophos' MTR and Rapid Response analysts and Extended Detection and Response (XDR) customers.

Braintrace's technology will also be used to collect and forward event data from third-party firewalls, proxies, virtual private networks (VPNs), and other sources. These additional layers of visibility and event ingestion will improve threat detection, threat hunting, and response to suspicious activity significantly, said the company.

Joe Levy, chief technology officer, Sophos said: “We're particularly excited that Braintrace built this technology specifically to provide better security outcomes to their Managed Detection and Response (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.”

Sophos will deploy Braintrace's NDR technology as a virtual machine that will be fed by traditional observability points such as a Switched Port Analyzer (SPAN) port or a network Test Access Point (TAP) in order to inspect both north-south traffic at network boundaries and east-west traffic within networks, said the company.  The novel technique for analysing and forecasting NDRs is patent-pending.

Bret Laughlin, CEO and co-founder of Braintrace said: “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.”

In the first half of 2022, Sophos plans to introduce Braintrace's NDR technology for MTR and XDR, said the company.