ED&F Man selects Vectra’s Cognito platform to transform its cybersecurity

Vectra announced that ED&F Man has selected the Cognito network detection and response platform to expose attackers hidden inside its network, spot privilege misuse and perform conclusive incident investigations. A $10 billion company, with offices across the globe including two in Dubai, ED&F Man trades sugar, coffee, molasses, and animal feed and helps customers and suppliers hedge commodity pricing risk.

When a non-data loss security incident served as a wake-up call to the ferocity of today’s cyberattacks, ED&F Man undertook a complete security transformation. It created a security operations centre, SOC, triad to gain broad visibility into threat history and significantly reduce the chance that attackers could operate on its network long enough to accomplish their goals. The SOC visibility triad consists of integrated network detection and response, endpoint detection and response, and security information and event management systems.

“Cognito was key in our journey,” says Carmello Gallo, Cybersecurity Manager at ED&F Man. “We started with the network because Cognito is easy to install and we get immediate visibility into attacker behaviours that hide in traffic.”

The Cognito platform collects and stores the right network metadata and enriches it with unique security insights. A cornerstone of the Cognito platform, Cognito Detect uses that security-enriched metadata and sophisticated machine learning techniques to detect and prioritise attacks in real time. ED&F also uses Cognito Recall for AI-assisted threat hunting.

With privileged accounts a common entry point for cyberattackers, ED&F Man uses the Cognito suite of Privileged Access Analytics detection models to monitor the interactions between user accounts, services and hosts.

“Privileged Access Analytics gives me continuous visibility into the accounts, services and hosts that are most valuable to me,” continued Gallo. “We can easily scrutinise the behaviours on each to see if they represent a significant risk to our organisation.”

With the ability to quickly detect threats and protect the global enterprise, the security team has turned the perception of IT security as a business obstacle into that of a business enabler. “The business has faith that we’re delivering against our objectives,” says Gallo.

“ED&F Man have built a highly agile security capability by integrating SIEM, EDR, and NDR technologies into what Gartner term a “SoC Visibility Triad”. This has enabled them to detect and respond in minutes to any attackers attempting to gain a foothold inside their organisation,” added Matt Walmsley, EMEA Director at Vectra.