Darktrace, the leader in Enterprise Immune System technology, has today announced that Korean industry leader, KB Life Insurance Co., Ltd., subsidiary of KB Financial Group Inc., has deployed its machine learning technology to detect emerging cyber-threats, at the earliest sign of infection.

Headquartered in Seoul, South Korea, KB Life Insurance was established in 2004 and belongs to one of the country’s largest financial groups. The company serves over 400,000 customers across 34 branches offering life, health and critical illness products. KB Life Insurance holds large amounts of personal and financial customer information in order to provide its expert service.

Despite employing traditional security tools at the perimeter, KB Life Insurance was concerned about possible risks inherited from third-party vendors with authorized network access. If the organization’s network were to become infected, the company would risk damaging stakeholder trust. KB Life Insurance was also aware of the risk of insider threat, and the rise in unpredictable zero-day attacks and fast-spreading ransomware, and adopted Darktrace to enhance its defenses.

As a growing business with a large distribution channel, we needed a technology that could proactively seek out threats from within. Darktrace’s AI goes above and beyond in solving this challenge,” commented Daejoong Kim, CISO of KB Life Insurance Managing Director. “The Enterprise Immune System empowers us to stop threats in their tracks and eliminate them, before they escalate. It also gives us network visibility that we did not think possible.”

A few weeks after deployment, the power of Darktrace’s self-learning technology was proven when it discovered an authorized network user behaving in a highly anomalous way. It transpired that the user’s desktop was connecting to a malicious website without triggering any legacy security controls. Using Darktrace’s AI, the security team were able to identify the abnormal activity and stop the connection in its very early stages, before damage was done.

Leveraging machine learning and AI algorithms, Darktrace works by learning the ‘pattern of life’ for every user, device and network. Establishing a sense of ‘self’ for the organization, the technology detects subtle abnormalities within the network in real time, allowing the security team to remediate threats quickly, including insider threat and ‘unknown unknowns’.

As the cyber-threat climate intensifies, KB Life Insurance is leading the movement towards AI-based defense,” commented Sanjay Aurora, Managing Director, Darktrace, APAC. “Darktrace’s machine learning is the only technology that is capable of detecting and responding to stealthy attacks and insidious insider threats emerging in any part of the network, enabling KB Life Insurance to proactively safeguard its critical assets.”