OXFORD, U.K. — November 4, 2021 —

Sophos, a global leader in next-generation cybersecurity, today announced that SophosAI team members are presenting innovative security machine learning research at three industry events in November, including CAMLIS, the NVIDIA GTC conference and Black Hat Europe.

“At SophosAI, we believe progress in machine learning for information security is as much about transparency and clear communication as it is about experimentation and technology. In short, we progress, and better fulfill our moral mission to protect people, when we share results and ideas across the boundaries of institutions and enterprise. In support of this vision, we are presenting SophosAI’s work at six talks across three different conferences in November,” said Josh Saxe, chief scientist, Sophos. “These talks are all either invited sessions or peer-reviewed conference paper presentations, validating the soundness and merit of our team’s work. We hope that other teams benefit from our openness, address our weaknesses, and build on our strengths, so that we better advance the efficacy of artificial intelligence in defending cybersecurity.”

The SophosAI Session Line-up  

CAMLIS

Thursday, Nov. 4, 2021, at 4:05 pm to 4:55 pm ET

SOREL-20M: A Large Scale Benchmark Dataset for Malicious PE Detection

Richard Harang and Ethan Rudd, former data scientists at Sophos

Harang and Rudd will present work developed while they were research scientists at Sophos, describing Sophos and ReversingLabs’ SOREL-20M benchmark dataset. SOREL-20M is a milestone in the cybersecurity, because for the first time, it provides researchers with an industrial scale malware and benign ware research dataset for prototyping machine learning malware detection and classification technologies.

Friday, Nov. 5, 2021, at 2:20 pm to 2:40 pm ET

Bad Neighborhoods – Learning Malicious Infrastructure at Internet Scale

Tamas Voros and Konstantin Berlin, data scientists, Sophos, Joshua Saxe, chief scientist, Sophos, and Rich Harang, former data scientist, Sophos

Voros, with Saxe, Berlin and Harang, is presenting research on risk-mapping the IPv4 address space. Voros is showing how creative representations of IPv4 addresses and creative neural representations can help neural networks trained on malicious and benign IP addresses to assign risk to previously unseen IP addresses. He is also discussing how IPv4 risk assignment can significantly boost detection accuracy when incorporated into larger cyberattack detection pipelines.

Friday, Nov. 5, 2021, at 2:20 pm to 2:40 pm ET

Using Undocumented Hardware Performance Counters to Detect Spectre-Style Attacks 

Harini Kannan, data scientist, and Nick Gregory, research engineer, Sophos 

Kannan and Gregory’s talk explains how to use undocumented hardware performance counters to detect spectre-style attacks. Exploiting CPU-level bugs is a trend in the security world, and Kannan and Gregory will demonstrate how machine learning can produce generic, implementation independent detectors for these exploits.  

Friday, Nov. 5, 2021, at 3:55 pm to 4:40 pm ET

Improving Analyst Workflow Using Event Clustering

Awalin Sopan, principal software engineer, Sophos

Sopan is presenting her research and development work around data visualization supporting security machine learning operations. Her work powers SophosAI’s ability to monitor dozens of security machine learning models in the field.

More information on SophosAI’s four presentations is available at CAMLIS’ online schedule.

NVIDIA GTC

Wednesday, Nov. 10, 2021, at 9 am to 9:50 am ET

Operationalizing Cybersecurity Machine Learning Models at a Large Data Science-Focused Security Vendor (Sophos)

Joshua Saxe, chief scientist, Sophos

Saxe is a featured speaker alongside industry leaders Nir Zurk, chief technology officer, Palo Alto Networks, and Gera Dorfman, vice president of Network Security, Checkpoint Software Technologies. Saxe is showcasing how SophosAI operates a machine learning portfolio that defends tens of millions of devices from cyberattack. He is also discussing SophosAI’s research, development and operational practices and technologies.

Black Hat Europe

Thursday, Nov. 11, 2021, at 10:20 am to 11 am ET (virtual)

No More Secret Sauce! How we can Power Real Security Machine Learning Progress Through Open Algorithms and Benchmarks

Joshua Saxe, chief scientist, Sophos

In this talk, Saxe is making the case for open science in security machine learning, arguing that for too long security machine learning has lacked public benchmark datasets and open publishing practices. Saxe is proposing a set of steps that the artificial intelligence community needs to take to make progress against the hardest cybersecurity challenges.

For interviews with SophosAI’s experts or more information about the six talks, please contact: sophos@marchcomms.com.

About Sophos

Sophos is a cybersecurity leader defending 600,000 organizations globally with an AI-driven platform and expert-led services. Sophos meets organizations wherever they are in their security maturity and grows with them to defeat cyberattacks. Its solutions combine machine learning, automation, and real-time threat intelligence with frontline human expertise from Sophos X-Ops to deliver advanced, 24/7 threat monitoring, detection, and response.

Sophos offers industry-leading managed detection and response (MDR) alongside a comprehensive portfolio of cybersecurity technologies — including endpoint, network, email, and cloud security, extended detection and response (XDR), identity threat detection and response (ITDR), and next-gen SIEM. Together with expert advisory services, these capabilities help organizations proactively reduce risk and respond faster, with the visibility and scalability needed to stay ahead of evolving threats.

Sophos goes to market with a global partner ecosystem, including Managed Service Providers (MSPs), Managed Security Service Providers (MSSPs), resellers and distributors, marketplace integrations, and cyber risk partners, giving organizations the flexibility to choose trusted relationships when securing their business.  Sophos is headquartered in Oxford, U.K. More information is available at www.sophos.com.