McLaren Group

From stealthy exfiltration of world-leading IP to machine-speed attacks capable of encrypting devices in seconds, a cyber-attack could be the difference between McLaren winning and losing. The protection of sensitive data – often shared with trusted partners and key suppliers – is therefore paramount.

McLaren's workforce has always been incredibly dynamic, with the team accustomed to effectively setting up remote trackside offices in different parts of the world every weekend. The widespread move to remote working further escalated the organization's reliance on cloud and SaaS tools such as Dropbox and Microsoft Teams. Prior to Darktrace, these environments were protected by a disparate collection of siloed point solutions that rely on pre-defining malicious behavior to spot future threats.

The security team therefore required a comprehensive and unified cyber security platform capable of protecting every corner of the business. From cloud and SaaS applications to email, McLaren needed a solution that was capable of stopping novel threats no matter where they appeared.

McLaren turned to Self-Learning AI to detect and investigate threats in real time, without the use of rules, signatures, or prior assumptions.

Darktrace immediately began learning the normal 'patterns of life' for every user and device in the organization's digital ecosystem. By learning what is 'self', Darktrace is able to detect and respond to subtle deviations indicative of a cyber-threat – from SaaS account takeover and data exfiltration to zero-day malware and nation-state attacks.

Darktrace's AI seamlessly integrates with other tools via an open and extensible architecture, enhancing the value of McLaren's existing security stack and extending visibility across the entire digital ecosystem. By having AI autonomously fight back against attacks wherever they are, McLaren's security team can spend more of their valuable time on race weekends innovating rather than responding to every alert. We don't send cars out on the track unless we can see that telemetry so it's a critical piece of infrastructure for us" says Edward Green, Principal Digital Architect, McLaren Racing.

Like every organization, McLaren is faced with a range of email threats, from social engineering to phishing and account takeover. In particular, there was a concern about sophisticated spear phishing attacks targeting C-level executives. With the number of email attacks surging, McLaren decided to extend its AI-based security system to protect its Microsoft 365 environment and safeguard its workforce from malicious emails using Darktrace/Email.

Darktrace/Email understands the patterns of communication between every email user, using the same self-learning, AI-powered approach to detect subtle indicators of an attack. Rather than measuring inbound emails against predefined rules and signatures, Darktrace analyzes emails in context, containing novel and sophisticated attacks while allowing normal business  to continue without disruption.

As Green explains, "We were able to see results in days. The volume of phishing emails reported by users fell substantially, and over time, the regular reviews of Darktrace/Email's actions has led us to discover many phishing campaigns that we were previously unaware of."