Darktrace, a global leader in cybersecurity AI, has announced that multi-award-winning Indonesian transport giant, Blue Bird Group, has selected Darktrace AI to autonomously interrupt cyberattacks.
Blue Bird Group, which was established in 1972 and is listed on the Indonesian Stock Exchange, is the largest taxi operator in Indonesia. The company has over 2,000 employees and serves millions of passengers every month throughout Indonesia’s major cities and tourism spots, as well as providing containers, charter buses and logistics services.
As its services have become increasingly digitized through apps and online payment services, Blue Bird sought a technology which could protect its digital estate in the face of a rising level of attacks against the sector.
Darktrace Antigena stood out to Blue Bird when compared to other solutions because of its ability to autonomously stop in-progress attacks while allowing normal business operations. The Artificial Intelligence learns ‘normal operations’ for Blue Bird, and from this not only detects anomalous activity but intelligently makes micro-decisions based on the unusual activity.
The algorithms are outcome-driven and optimized to enforce normal business operations; interrupting emerging cyberthreats while allowing the business to function as normal even while under attack.
The technology uplifts the security team, defending against intellectual property theft and disruptive attacks like ransomware and supply chain attacks, allowing the team to focus on strategic business decisions.
Darktrace saw a 33% increase in attacks across its customer base in APAC in 2021. 12% of incidents detected by Darktrace across the region in 2021 were in Singapore alone. The transport sector was among those most targeted across Darktrace’s customer base in APAC, as were financial services, manufacturing and the information and communications industries.
“Blue Bird is committed to putting safety and security at the heart of our business, from the consumer experience through to our IT ecosystem,” said Sigit Djokosoetono, CEO at PT Blue Bird Tbk, part of the Blue Bird Group.
“By adopting Darktrace’s AI, we have bolstered the ability of our security team to keep pace with the evolving threat landscape and are protecting our customers and employees from cyberthreats with cutting-edge technology.”
“We are proud to protect Blue Bird Group, which provides vital transportation services to people across Indonesia,” said Tony Jarvis, Director of Enterprise Security, Asia Pacific and Japan, Darktrace.
“The transport sector is part of any nation’s critical infrastructure and disruption to the public’s ability to move around not only has knock-on effects for the economy but could threaten individuals’ safety. Blue Bird is a shining example for the transport sector globally, prioritizing defensive technology that is designed to minimize cyber disruption while keeping the lights on.”
We asked Sigit Djokosoetono, CEO at PT Blue Bird Tbk, further questions to find out more.
To what extent were cyberattacks increasing against your sector and what form were these attacks taking?
Cyber disruption poses one of the gravest threats to our industry. Cyberattacks are growing in frequency and complexity across all sectors, particularly those where Digital Transformation projects are advanced.
We embarked on our Digital Transformation journey to ensure the upmost efficiency and value for our customers – but with this opportunity comes more risk. The rapid adoption of new technologies has intensified the pre-existing cybersecurity challenge: how do you secure your infrastructure when it’s constantly in flux? How do you tell the difference between an employee trying to get their job done, and an attacker?
While we’ve pivoted and shown flexibility in the face of change, so too have the attackers. We’ve seen an uptick in attacks targeting cloud and SaaS applications, for example. Phishing emails are becoming more realistic and more frequent. Ransomware remains a great risk and attackers are launching more automated and out-of-hours attacks than ever before.
How important was it for you to stop in-progress attacks while continuing normal business operations?
In the service industry, reliability is paramount. That’s why we have been committed to putting safety and security at the heart of our business, from the consumer experience through to our IT ecosystem, throughout our 50 years in operation.
Threats are constant but we have to keep the lights on at all times for our customers. The real game changer here is Darktrace’s ‘Autonomous Response’ technology, Antigena, which takes targeted action to interrupt cyberattacks in seconds.
This enables the AI to react to cyberthreats without human intervention, while avoiding any disruption to the business. This creates a state of cyber stability for our business, making us confident that we can deliver our services to customers around the clock.
How impressed have you been by Darktrace Antigena’s AI performance?
Antigena augments and uplifts our human security team by taking targeted action to contain breaches wherever they occur.
This aligns with our core goal to maintain business as usual in the event of a breach. Since adopting the technology we’ve seen a significant reduction in time-to-meaning when an incident occurs, because the AI takes on the role of first responder ad allows humans to take on higher level strategic work.
Darktrace’s AI-powered email security solution, Antigena Email, has reduced our email threats – such as spear phishing and spoofing – by 95% because it takes autonomous action to contain malicious emails before they reach a user. We can’t expect humans to spot the difference between a real and a fake anymore – it’s not sustainable.
Can you explain how the deployment of Darktrace Antigena has freed up time for your IT team? How have you been able to benefit from this?
A number of years ago, the day-to-day of a security analyst was manual and laborious. They would try to predict what threat actors could do on their network and then put these rules into their firewalls. They would spend hours trawling through logs and installing patches.
Darktrace’s active, defensive use of AI with Antigena has changed the role of our security team fundamentally, freeing up humans to focus on business communication and remediation plans to make the overall environment more resilient in the future – making sure that the team delivers more value to our internal and external stakeholders.
How has Darktrace’s AI allowed you to provide a better level of protection for (a) your customers and (b) your employees?
Darktrace AI empowers bespoke, comprehensive, always-on and continuously evolving security to keep the lights on. For our customers, this means that we can continue to deliver on our promise of providing the services they entrust us with, even if an attack was occurring on our systems.
For our employees, a weight is lifted from their shoulders. When it comes to something like phishing emails, training on how to spot these is important but simply cannot put the onus on humans to spot these well-researched, targeted email attacks. With AI in place, we’re stopping these threats before humans have to deal with them.
Why did you choose to work with Darktrace?
As we embarked on rapid Digital Transformation we knew that we needed security technology that aligned with our security strategy and is capable of dealing with scale and complexity. Siloed, static security tools were rapidly becoming obsolete in the face of dynamic ways of working. What’s more, we needed a technology that can deal with novelty – attackers think like enterprises and are constantly finding new entry points and methods of attack.
In response to the demands of this new landscape, Darktrace has invented a fundamentally new approach to cyber-defense, powered by AI which detects and autonomously responds to cyberattacks based on what it knows to be ‘normal’ operations. It is constantly learning from new activity and data and builds greater cyber-resilience over time.
Darktrace’s AI-led approach, combined with the technical and advisory support they have offered us, has resulted in a tangible improvement to our business and security operations.
