Last updated at Thu, 07 Dec 2023 16:18:04 GMT

Digital transformation has created immense opportunity to generate new revenue streams, better engage with customers and drive operational efficiency. A decades-long transition to cloud as the de-facto delivery model of choice has delivered undeniable value to the business landscape. But any change in operating model brings new challenges too.

The speed, scale and complexity of modern IT environments results in security teams being tasked with analyzing mountains of data to keep pace with the ever-expanding threat landscape. This dynamic puts security analysts on their heels, constantly reacting to incoming threat signals from tools that weren’t purpose-built to solve hybrid environments, creating coverage gaps and a need to swivel-chair between a multitude of point solutions. Making matters worse? Attackers have increasingly looked to weaponize AI technologies to launch sophisticated attacks, benefiting from increased scale, easy access to AI-generated malware packages, as well as more effective social engineering and phishing using generative AI.

To combat these challenges, we need to equip our security teams with modern solutions leveraging AI to cut through the noise and boost signals that matter.  Our AI algorithms alleviate alert and action fatigue by delivering visibility across your IT environment and intelligently prioritizing the most important risk signals.

Rapid7 Has Been an AI Innovator for Decades

There has been a groundswell of development and corresponding interest in generative AI, particularly in the last few years as mainstream adoption of large language models (LLMs) grows. Most notably OpenAI’s ChatGPT - has brought AI to the forefront of people’s minds. This buzz has resulted in a number of vendors in the security space launching their own intelligent assistants and working to incorporate AI/ML into their respective solutions to keep pace.

From our perspective, this is great news and a huge step forward in the data & AI space. Rapid7 is also accelerating investment, but we’re certainly not starting from scratch. In fact, Rapid7 was a pioneer in AI development for security use cases, starting all the way back to our earliest days with our VM Expert System in the early 2000’s.

Built on decades of risk analysis and continuously trained by our expert SOC team, Rapid7 AI enables your team to focus on what matters most by proactively shrinking your attack surface and intelligently re-balancing the scales between signal and noise.

With visibility across your hybrid attack surface, the Insight Platform enables proactive prevention, leveraging a proprietary AI-based detection engine to spot threats faster than ever and automatically prioritize the signals that matter most based on likelihood of exploitation and potential business impact. Based on learnings from your own environment and security operations over time, the platform will intelligently recommend updates to detection rule settings in an effort to reduce excess noise and eliminate false positives.

By integrating our AI capabilities into the Rapid7 platform, customers benefit from:

  • World class threat efficacy, with AI-driven detection of anomalous activity.  With a vast amount of legitimate activity occurring across customer environments, our AI algorithms validate if activity is actually malicious, allowing teams to spot unknown threats faster than ever.
  • Help to cut through the noise, by identifying the signals that matter most.  Our AI algorithms  automatically prioritize risks and threats, intelligently, suppressing benign alerts to eliminate the noise so analysts can focus on what matters most.
  • The confidence that they’re taking action on AI-generated insights they can trust, built on decades of risk and threat analysis and trained by a team of recognized innovators in AI-driven security.

Recent Innovations in AI-driven Threat Detection

We’ve recently announced two new AI/ML-powered threat detection capabilities aimed at enabling teams to detect unknown threats across a customer’s  environment faster than ever before without introducing excess noise.

  • Cloud Anomaly Detection
    Cloud Anomaly Detection is an AI-powered, agentless detection capability designed to detect and prioritize anomalous activity within an organization’s own cloud environment. The proprietary AI engine goes beyond simply detecting suspicious behavior; it automatically suppresses benign signals to reduce noise, eliminate false positives, and enable teams to focus on investigating highly-probable active threats.
  • Intelligent Kerberoasting Detection
    We’ve expanded existing AI-driven detections for attack types such as data exfiltration, phishing and credential theft to include intelligent detection, validation and prioritization of Kerberoasting attacks. The platform goes beyond traditional tactics for detecting Kerberoasting by applying a deep understanding of typical user activity across the organization. With this context, SOC teams can respond with confidence knowing the signals they are receiving are actually indicative of a Kerberoasting attack.

Rapid7 continues to explore and invest in ways we can leverage AI/ML to better-equip our customers to defend their organizations against the ever-expanding threat landscape. Keep an eye out in the near-future for additional innovations to come out in this space.