Blackberry Limited (BB.T) announced today that it has added its new partners Okta, Mimecast, Stellar Cyber, and XM Cyber to its extended detection and response (XDR) ecosystem. These new partnerships are intended to assist the Company in delivering a cohesive, holistic view of a customer’s security threat posture.
“The global shift to remote work arrangements has increased cybersecurity risks beyond experts’ initial estimates. To address the growing number and severity of cyberthreats BlackBerry is expanding its XDR partner ecosystem to work with industry leaders and meet the demands of today’s workplace, delivering comprehensive solutions that include network telemetry, behavioral analysis and continuous authentication, in addition to the capabilities that our partners are providing,” comments Billy Ho, Executive Vice President of Product Engineering, BlackBerry.
Aside from its iconic phones from way-back-when, BlackBerry is recognized for providing intelligent security software and services to enterprises and governments around the world. By leveraging Artificial Intelligence (AI) and machine learning, the Company offers innovative solutions in the areas of cybersecurity, safety, and data privacy. Furthermore, BlackBerry is a leader in the areas of endpoint security, endpoint management, encryption, and embedded systems. To put things into perspective, the Company secures more than 500,000,000 endpoints, including more than 195,000,000 vehicles. For context, an endpoint refers to any device that is physically an endpoint on a network. For example, laptops, mobile phones, servers, and virtual environments are all endpoints.
With this in mind, BlackBerry’s XDR is built on the foundation of the Company’s endpoint detection and response (EDR) workflows, expanding across the entire attack surface. For starters, let’s talk about XDR. An XDR collects and automatically correlates data across multiple security layers and endpoints, including emails, servers, cloud workloads, and networks. This allows for faster detection of threats and improves investigation and response times through security analysis. More specifically, XDR collects and correlates detections and deep activity data, providing automated analysis and faster threat detection. By utilizing both XDR and EDR, BlackBerry’s XDR ecosystem is able to prevent and detect known and unknown threats in real-time. What sets BlackBerry’s XDR apart from the rest? BlackBerry’s XDR is unique in the market due to its structure. While conventional XDR ecosystems use a response-first approach, BlackBerry’s XDR is built on a prevention-first platform approach. This allows threats to be identified in a partner’s telemetry before the threat propagates further into an environment.
“Email is the number one attack vector for threat actors, and in this new era of remote and hybrid work, attacks have become more advanced and prolific. Defending against email threats is essential – so with the threat protection provided by Mimecast’s comprehensive cloud-based email security solution combined with endpoint, user, and network visibility from BlackBerry’s XDR platform, joint customers will have greater insights into the threat vectors attempting to compromise a business email,” said Jules Martin, VP ecosystem and alliances at Mimecast.
Overall, BlackBerry’s XDR is intended to address the many challenges faced by Security Operation Center (SOC) teams. Keep in mind, SOC teams are responsible for quickly identifying threats to limit risk and damage to an organization. That is a heavy burden to bear, especially with the amount of alerts security analysts must analyze at any given time. For example, a company with an average of 1,000 employees can see a peak of up to 22,000 events per second enter its security information and event management (SIEM) system. Thankfully, XDR automatically groups together series of lower-confidence activities into a higher-confidence event. In other words, XDR makes the lives of security analysts a little bit more bearable by prioritizing alerts. By partnering with Okta, Mimecast, Stellar Cyber, and XM Cyber, BlackBerry’s XDR will be fortified with additional threat protection and detection.
BlackBerry’s share price opened at $9.59, up from a previous close of $9.34. The Company’s shares are up 7.82% and were trading at $10.07 as of 11:00 AM ET.
