Operating in the electrical supplies industry requires leaning on production simulation applications that use a continuous flow of data from inside the company to various external partners. Digimax has little control over the security of these applications, leaving it vulnerable to supply chain risk and third-party attacks.

In 2021, Digimax learned of a ransomware attack on another supplier which had cost over four million euros. To avoid a similar incident, it wanted to improve its capacity to monitor its IT network, with the goal of appearing as a reliable supplier for some of its more important partners.  

“Business is very sensitive to business continuity,” said Fabio Perin, IT Infrastructure Manager & Cyber Security Engineer at Digimax. “This was one of the CEO’s fears and one of the reasons why Darktrace was chosen, was that it demonstrated, even at a high level, how much it could help avoid company downtime.”

During a Darktrace trial, Digimax gained enhanced visibility and control over the network, which ensured that it could avoid interruptions to production – even if anomalies arose – without limiting relationships with external suppliers. Overall, Digimax has found that Darktrace / NETWORK helped reduce its risk by around 30%.

Beyond risk reduction, the capacity to respond autonomously and instantly to limit problems, as well as speeding up the production of technical reports, also saved the team time and even led to insurance benefits by reducing its premiums.

Implementing Darktrace also helped Digimax to strengthen its relationships with strategic customers who require high levels of security from their suppliers. As a result, it gained several high-value supplier contracts with aerospace and defense security partners. “With partners who require high levels of security, these relationships for Digimax already account for 45% of turnover and are continuing to increase,” Perin said.

As a relatively small company with ambitious cybersecurity goals, Digimax was looking for technology that could give it control over its IT resources and help augment its internal team’s capabilities.

Faced with competing priorities, the IT team didn’t have time to continuously manage the maintenance of a traditional tool. Darktrace’s AI monitors the network 24/7 and helps offload daily security tasks, while Cyber AI Analyst automates the role of a human security analyst while drawing context from across the business – saving on average 50 hours of work a month. “Darktrace works for the team where there are no resources to do certain things,” Perin said.

The Autonomous Response function of Darktrace also helps save the time – by containing or isolating live issues within the network, the team can limit problems before they become critical and require lengthy remediation processes.

The Darktrace Mobile App allows members of the security team to maintain control over the most critical alerts with ease, including out-of-hours or when off-site. During one holiday period, a critical security event occurred, which was reported via the app. From his mobile phone, Perin was able to approve response actions in human confirmation mode to contain the incident. Afterwards, he set Darktrace to autonomous mode to act as a trusted first responder to all incidents.

After seeing how Darktrace detection and response worked when deployed across the network, Digimax was interested in expanding coverage to more areas of the digital estate.

Email was another area of the business that was contingent on continuous data flows from external suppliers. Compared to its previous solution, Darktrace / EMAIL successfully blocked 20-25% more suspicious emails. Furthermore, the interaction with Darktrace NETWORK provided greater context and allowed for the identification of more extensive digital attacks as they traversed digital environments.

Similarly, Digimax previously had no visibility into what was happening in its application environments. Extending into Darktrace / IDENTITY provided real-time control over authentication attempts on user accounts and Azure applications, meaning that the security team could anticipate attacks quickly from a user-targeting perspective.

With Darktrace’s interconnected AI engines, data is shared across network, email systems, and cloud-based apps to improve the accuracy of threats detected.

“Thanks to the visibility acquired, I am able to anticipate business continuity practices and optimize resources and projects, also reducing company costs,” Perin said.