Accenture, Endgame to offer threat Hunting-as-a-Service

Management consultancy, systems integration, technology and outsourcing services company, Accenture, has extended its partner relationship with Endgame, that develops and provides security intelligence and analytical solutions for enterprises. The collaboration will facilitate threat Hunting-as-a-Service offering for clients, based on Accenture’s managed services and Endgame expertise in cybersecurity threats and its mitigation. Reportedly, Clients can benefit from continuous business operation, free from disruption faced by users of traditional security approaches, who are typically under siege for months as they try to identify and remediate sophisticated adversaries. According to the company website, Endgame offers a cyber operations platform, automates the hunt for adversaries in enterprise critical infrastructure. It is powered by the adversaries’ tools, techniques, and tactics to detect and prevent malicious activity, ensuring that the responders contain intrusions at the earliest phase of the kill chain. With digitization at its growing pace, industries that deal with IoT, Cloud, DevOps and software defined networks (SDN) have become increasingly vulnerable to cyber threats. Accenture, with its cybersecurity hunters, aims to identify and surgically remove adversaries that have evaded traditional security methods.

The managed threat Hunting-as-a-Service promises:

• Continuous endpoint monitoring and reporting for targeted attacks that have bypassed defensive security technologies.
• Ability to expose and eliminate active and dormant adversaries that have infiltrated networks, followed by a precise response without disrupting normal business operations.
• An actionable list of vulnerabilities and procedures to remediate and prevent future attacks, reducing the cost and impact of incident response.

The move can be seen as a strategic step for Accenture and Endgame, which came into an alliance as a part of its cyber defense services portfolio. The alliance included Accenture Cyber Intelligence Platform that claims to help organizations predict, detect and combat cyber attacks in real time. Vikram Desai, Managing Director, Security Lead, Accenture, said:

Today, cyber attackers can circumvent even the most fortified of traditional enterprise defense systems. Rather than building a taller defensive wall, we’re giving our clients the ability to strike first to stop adversaries before they attack.

“Delivering this capability requires two fundamental elements: battle tested experience outmaneuvering enemies and specialized technology that gives you an unfair advantage. With Endgame, this is exactly what our hunting as-a-Service offering delivers. Armed with it, our clients spend less time dealing with threats and more time on innovation and growth,” added Desai. Nate Fick, CEO, Endgame, stated:

Attackers are winning far too often. We need to compress adversary dwell time by vigorously hunting across the enterprise architecture and terminating malicious behavior before it can get too far. Endgame and Accenture’s joint solution combines state-of-the-art technology with top-notch talent in order to deliver an always on, end-to-end hunt solution that simply outsmarts traditional Indicators of Compromise (IOC) and signature-based tools.

Accenture and Endgame also rolled out a Hunter’s Handbook that pledges to guide users through the demanding job of Adversary hunting.