In an industry where stable supply chains are essential to maintaining profits, the food manufacturer Sanabel Al-Salam knew it wasn't worth taking risks when it came to cyber security. It was aware of recent cases like that of JBS, a leading meat supplier in the US which was struck by a ransomware attack in 2021, paying out $11 million in ransom payments and halting its production.

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Sanabel Al-Salam's IT team did all it could to respond to their own threats manually, but this was an arduous and time-consuming process not sustainable in the long run. Yousef Shaban, the company's IT Director, recalls, "The IT team were spending hours reviewing emails and we were still subject to several spoofing, impersonation and phishing attacks". These kinds of attacks, which often evade traditional, rule-based email filtering measures, are precisely those which Darktrace's Self-Learning AI is uniquely equipped to counter.  
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Where other email security systems rely upon knowledge of previous attacks to implement future blocks and filters, Darktrace's Self-Learning AI uses an extensive knowledge of the company's digital landscape to spot even novel threats. It does this by learning a 'pattern of life' for each user in Sanabel Al-Salam's email system, an understanding of familiar or expected behaviors from which threats emerge as clear and actionable anomalies. In this way, Self-Learning AI learns the business, not the breach, and requires no manual training or tuning.

Securing the inbox through which its supply chain logistics run every day was a clear priority for Sanabel Al-Salam. It turned to Darktrace's Antigena Email and watched as the backlog of false positives which had been holding up its IT team was alleviated by the AI's more targeted responses.
"Antigena Email only took ten or fifteen minutes to get going, and the value it would bring to the company hit home almost straightaway," comments Shaban, "Darktrace was detecting the kind of email attacks which previously would have made it right through to our employees".
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By the time Shaban reviews an attack, which he chooses to do through a weekly report on the Darktrace Mobile App, focused action has already been taken against the threat by Antigena Email. Darktrace's technology neutralizes threats in the inbox with surgical precision, ensuring that the processes necessary for Sanabel Al-Salam's normal business operations can continue unaffected. "Darktrace's AI buys back a huge amount of time for the IT team without disruption to the business," says Shaban, "We've never had anything like it before."

Sanabel Al-Salam saw the value of Antigena Email when a particularly targeted phishing attack was directed at its finance team. The attacker, posing as a Sanabel Al-Salam employee, concealed a malicious URL behind what looked to be a regular security email. With Antigena Email implemented in the company's system, however, the anomalous behavior of the sender and the unusual URL were among factors which identified the email as malicious, and had it held from the employee. Shaban comments, "Only three other security vendors picked up on that malicious URL, and all did so at least 24 hours after the attack hit our company. Without Antigena Email, the consequences might have been disastrous."

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Darktrace operates across the entire digital ecosystem, including the network, cloud services, industrial systems and endpoints. Having experienced first-hand the capabilities of its technology in the inbox, Sanabel Al-Salam are now looking to extend Darktrace's coverage across the company's SaaS applications. Darktrace's seamless integration with services such as Microsoft 365 means Shaban and his team will be able to widen and strengthen their security efforts, neutralizing a broader range of threats, including Microsoft 365 account takeover. This will come as a relief not only to Shaban and the rest of the Sanabel Al-Salam team, but to their valuable clients and customers as well.