Darkscope has formally launched a channel program for Managed Security Service Providers (MSSPs) to sell its AI-enabled cybersecurity solutions. The program follows successful pilots in the UK and Germany. The target markets are EMEA, North America, and APAC.
Morten Mjels, VP Sales EMEA for Darkscope, said: “The rapidly changing cyber security landscape and the imminence of the EU’s NIS2 directive have made Darkscope’s predictive approach to cybersecurity more relevant and important to organizations than ever before.
“It makes ‘now’ the right time to expand the distribution of Darkscope solutions via the channel. It’s a terrific opportunity for MSSPs: Darkscope’s suite of cyber threat intelligence solutions offers customers what they need to rehabilitate their approach to risk management for cybersecurity and to reconnect their cybersecurity budget with the risks they actually face.”
Who is Darkscope?
Darkscope is a cyber threat intelligence vendor that owns a core technology called Watchtower. It aggregates millions of threat indicators drawn from the web—dark, deep, and public. Using AI, it then analyses that data to identify new attacks and discover breaches.
What is most interesting is AI technology, which it claims is human-like. It says that they are virtual-person instances that it calls Seekers. According to Darkscope, each Seeker has “a name, profile, and personality so it can engage in chats, respond on forums and receive emails. To cover the vast number of darkweb pages that we scan each week, each Seeker is paired with a SearchDrone, effectively like a rider on a horse.”
The company has integrated all its AI components into the Darkscope Artificial Neural Network (DANN). This network assesses indicators of compromise and assigns them a score. It’s an interesting approach.
The problem with IOCs is that IT Security teams are inundated with them, which makes them impossible to track and use effectively. In addition, many vendors use different names for the same IOCs, making it confusing. Customers can now leave DANN to monitor those IOCs and alert them when action is needed.
Perhaps the biggest gain from Darkscope’s solution is that it monitors all alerts and uses its staff to filter out false positives and negatives. This allows users to trust the alerts that they get.
Darkscope also integrates extensively with other vendors’ SIEM platforms. This means that customers do not need to monitor multiple systems when looking for signs of an attack.
Enterprise Times: What does this mean?
Direct selling of enterprise security tools is expensive. Building out those sales, pre-sales and post-sales teams takes time, money, training and experience. Taking advantage of an MSSP channel is a much more cost-effective solution. However, it also means that vendors compete for time with those MSSPs as they become the new VARs for security tools.
The MSSP market is a high-growth market at the moment. An increasing number of businesses, small, medium, and large, are using them to outsource security as they struggle with staffing and skill levels.
However, building out a channel is also not cheap. Darkscope hasn’t given any public details of the commitment it expects from MSSPs. Nor has it published the level of training they will have to undergo, or who will field support calls. These issues can also undermine a channel if they are not thought through properly.
It will be interesting to see how much this MSSP channel increases sales over the next year and how quickly Darkscope can capture channel partners.
