Coop Employs Cognito from Vectra to Protect its Retail Operations from Cyber attacks and Augment its Security Operations Team

 Vectra^®, the leader in automating the hunt for in-progress cyber attacks, today announced a multi-year agreement to provide its Cognito™ AI threat hunting platform to Coop Group, one of Switzerland’s largest retail and wholesale companies. Coop selected the Cognito AI platform from Vectra as an innovative approach to increasing cybersecurity operational efficiency and efficacy.

With 2,476 sales outlets and over 85,000 employees, Coop is a large and highly distributed organisation. With the retail industry being a significant target for cybercriminals*, Coop decided that perimeter defences alone are insufficient to safeguard customer information, internal systems and point of sale systems. As a result, Coop set out to find technology that would enable them to detect and respond to cyber attacks in real time and prevent or significantly mitigate the impact of a data breach.

Coop identified significant economic and security gains resulting from the introduction of AI security automation. After evaluating multiple solutions, it turned to Vectra and its Cognito AI platform to help them detect cyber attacks in real time and speed response by augmenting their security operations team.

Cognito detects both known and unknown threats through the analysis of malicious attacker behaviours, rather than simple signature profiling of exiting threats. It will augment the Coop cybersecurity analysts by rapidly detecting, triaging and correlating threats to uncover in-progress cyber attacks before they become critical security incidents. Cognito detects threats created by malware, ransomware, advanced attackers abusing credentials and rogue insiders, regardless of the device or software used, and at a speed and scale humans alone cannot match.

“Enterprises like Coop are under immense pressure to reduce the time to detect and respond to attacks,” said Gerard Bauer, vice president of EMEA at Vectra. “Security teams are overwhelmed with the manual task of triaging and correlating security events and struggle to fill open cybersecurity jobs. The Cognito AI platform automates threat hunting, triage and correlation for the Coop security team, and prioritises threats based on risk level so they can respond immediately. Cognito has reduced the security operations workload for enterprises by 168x**, shortening incident response from days to minutes.”

To learn more about the Cognito platform, and how it combines machine learning and behavioural analytics to hunt ongoing threats, visit https://vectra.ai/cognito.