Darktrace, the world leader in AI technology for cyber defence, has today announced that Lockyer Valley Regional Council, an Australian local government body, has deployed Darktrace’s disruptive machine learning technology for cyber defence.

Based in Queensland, Australia, Lockyer Valley RC operates in an open environment of collaboration with a diversity of public services and facilities, from road and building maintenance, to café and library services. As more council services digitize, its network has become louder and more complex, making it challenging to spot silent and stealthy attacks, and insider threat. Of particular concern to its lean security team are targeted phishing attacks on unsuspecting employees and malware infections caused by accidental or deliberate misuse of public computers. Taking action, the council deployed Darktrace to autonomously detect emerging threats, wherever they originate, to protect its operations and keep services running smoothly.

Anticipating and pre-empting every security risk is practically impossible in the face of ‘unknown unknowns’ and insider threat,” commented Graham Cray, Information Services Manager, Lockyer Valley RC. “Before Darktrace, we lacked the power to detect if an authorised network-user had gone rogue, or if a novel threat had bypassed our legacy security systems. Armed with the Enterprise Immune System, our security team can now proactively defend against nascent threats in real time.”

Soon after deployment, Darktrace quickly proved its value by swiftly alerting the council’s security team to a number of emerging threats on ‘Free Internet’ machines situated in its libraries. Darktrace instantly identified this activity as abnormal, enabling Lockyer Valley RC to take appropriate action in mitigating the threat to customers.

Leveraging the latest advancements in machine learning and probabilistic mathematics, Darktrace mimics the self-learning intelligence of the human immune system to identify and fight back against in-progress attacks in real time. The AI algorithms learn the ‘pattern of life’ for every user, device and network, establishing a sense of ‘self’ for the health of an organisation, and then use this constantly evolving baseline to detect threatening anomalies within the network in real time.

Today’s attackers target public organisations, such as local councils, to disrupt operations and erode our trust in institutions,” commented Sanjay Aurora, Managing Director, Darktrace, APAC. “Darktrace’s AI technology is the world’s first proven solution that can not only detect but autonomously halt in-progress threats, empowering organisations like Lockyer Valley RC to stay ahead in this arms race.”