With the number of COVID-19-related email attacks surging over the course of the pandemic, McLaren decided to extend its AI-based security system to protect its Microsoft Office 365 system, and safeguard its workforce from malicious emails, including the team’s drivers.
Darktrace’s Antigena Email solution is critical in protecting highly sensitive data including car updates that could be at risk from phishing attacks.
Powered by cyber AI, Antigena Email is currently Darktrace’s fastest-growing product area, with its ability to prevent novel and targeted malicious emails from being delivered to the user. It works by forming an evolving understanding of ‘normal activity’ for individual email users and the email environment as a whole, and detects subtle indicators of change that traditional approaches miss. McLaren already relies on Darktrace’s cyber AI technology to protect other parts of its digital infrastructure, including cloud services, data centers, and the IoT sensors on the cars.
“Like with any organisation, our employees are busy doing their jobs, and too often face very convincing social engineering email attacks, where the sender pretends to be someone that they are not,” said Karen McElhatton, Chief Information Officer at McLaren. “Whereas traditional email security tools take a binary approach to distinguishing bad from legitimate emails, Darktrace AI has a far more nuanced view, and can stop never-before-seen, hoax emails before they are even delivered to the user.”