CASE
STUDY

Aera Technology Shifts to Proactive Security
Posture with Intelligence from Recorded Future®
Aera Technology eliminates false positives and focuses its security efforts on the mostpressing threats.
Better Visibility Enables Better Decisions

USE CASE• Leverage intelligence to build
proactive security posture

CHALLENGE• Having to vet too many false positives
slowed the team down, and diverted
efforts away from higher-value
security program initiatives

SOLUTION• The Recorded Future Intelligence
Platform, SecOps module

OUTCOMES• Aera's security team cut the time toinvestigate false positives to zero,saving hours a day• Automate specific web application
firewall security rules• Security team can spend more time on
strategic aspects of their security program• Shortened time, and in many cases
automated, time to mitigation• Real-time, trusted threat intelligencekeeps security posture ready for current
and evolving threats.

Security teams everywhere find themselves in a constant battle tostay ahead of the latest threats. Unfortunately, the amount of threatdata generated daily overwhelms internal teams. There's too much datato consume, ingest, and distill down into intelligence that can be put
to immediate use. To solve this challenge, Aera Technology turned toRecorded Future for the trusted intelligence that would help its security
team keep its defenses aligned with threats in near real-time and toeliminate false positives it was being forced to validate constantly.
Aera Technology is bringing the self-driving enterprise to life. Since its
founding in 2014, Aera Technology has dedicated itself to delivering its
cognitive operating system that seamlessly integrates with enterprisebusiness-technology systems so that enterprises can execute better
real-time business decisions. Armed with these AI-driven insights, Aera
Technology's customers can now respond to rapid digital transformation
more effectively.
"We're enabling organizations to be more proactive in doing businessright through better insight," says Cosmin Anghel, security operation
center manager at Aera Technology. Protecting their data, systems, andproprietary information is crucial to Aera Technology's long-term success.
"We are an innovative and forward-thinking company, and we want toinnovate in security, too. We don't want stagnant security controls in place.
We want to be able to stop incidents before they happen. A breach for us
would be significant, whether impact, costs, or potential loss of reputation,"says Anghel.

CASE STUDYWith that need to protect their systems and data, Aera
Technology and its five-member security team built a robust
and mature security practice. "We are covering 360 degrees
of our environment," adds Anghel. The security team at Aera
Technology wanted to grow more efficient and proactive
toward threats and continuously calibrate their systems toan optimal security posture.

By dynamically categorizing, linking, and analyzing
intelligence in real-time, the platform delivers theAera Technology security team easy-to-consume
insights for proactive and persistent risk mitigation.
The Recorded Future Intelligence Platform scours an
unrivaled quantity and variety of open, dark web, andtechnical sources in real-time.

The best way for the Aera security team to get that
efficiency, explains Eduard Ungureanu, security operations
engineer at Aera Technology, was to integrate intelligence
into their processes to improve their visibility into the mostcurrent threats.

That included access to intelligence within the web
portal, integrations, a mobile app, and a browser extension.
"Recorded Future was effortless to work with, and a key
example is our ability to use our current procurement
processes and purchase through AWS Marketplace,making it quick and easy to move forward," says Anghel.

Using Intelligence to Stay Ahead ofPressing Threats
The team was dealing with lots of alerts that were proving
time-consuming to verify. What's more, the team could not
deploy defensive updates and mitigations quickly enough.
"We didn't want to block valid traffic or transactions, so we
had to manually validate everything before we could update
our systems, such as our web application firewall,"explains Ungureanu.
This occurred dozens of times a day, and it also costthe security team hours each day prioritizing follow-up.
"We simply needed to move faster, much faster," says
Ungureanu. "It's all about moving from reacting to security
threats to preventing them, and also being able to correlate
threat information with our environment," says Anghel.

Intelligence Streamlined intoExisting Workflows
That’s why, to get the intelligence the team sought,
Aera Technology turned to Recorded Future. The
Recorded Future Intelligence Platform delivers accurate
and actionable real-time intelligence at scale. The modular
platform combines automated analytics with humanexpertise to unite an unrivaled variety of open source,
dark web, technical sources, and original research.

The implementation went smoothly, and the team foundit straightforward to quickly correlate intelligence with
their current business-technology environment andsecurity posture.
As Ungureanu explains, the team used Recorded Future'sSIEM Integration to bring Recorded Future's intelligence
into their SIEM. The team also integrated Recorded Future
intelligence with their web application firewall from Signal
Sciences so that IP addresses that have a substantial risk
score can be automatically blocked.
"The integration worked flawlessly with our SIEM tool andour web application firewall," Ungureanu says. "When analert comes in, we can look at it and swiftly prioritize ourresponse based on Recorded Future's confidence level,"
adds Anghel.
The trusted intelligence coupled with Recorded Future'sintegrations mean the time previously spent chasing falsepositive alerts (about 15 minutes per alert, with dozens
of alerts daily) is slashed to zero. All of that time is now
invested in much higher value security initiatives.

Recorded Future® | www.recordedfuture.com

CASE STUDY

Automating, Prioritizing Responsewith Intelligence
The security team now responds more rapidly, if not
automatically mitigates, the threats arriving within security
alerts across the board. In addition to the automated web
application firewall responses, the team also uses suchinformation to prioritize their patch management efforts
based on real-time intelligence.

Recorded Future enables us to leverage threat
intelligence within our day-by-day activities and makes
it much easier to identify the right way to protect ourorganization and keep an effective security posture,"
Cosmin Anghel
Security Operation Center Manager, Aera Technology"Recorded Future enables us to leverage threat intelligencewithin our day-by-day activities and makes it much easier
to identify the right way to protect our organization andkeep an effective security posture," Anghel says.
The need for intelligence never stops. Because attackers
are constantly changing what they target and how theytarget enterprises, the stream of up-to-the-minuteintelligence to security teams must be continuous. "Weare always using threat intelligence to tune our security
environment. Recorded Future provides us the visibility weneed to maintain a strong security posture," Anghel says.

ABOUT RECORDED FUTURE
Recorded Future is the world’s largest provider of intelligence for enterprise security. By combining persistent and pervasive automated data collection and analytics with human analysis,Recorded Future delivers intelligence that is timely, accurate, and actionable. In a world of ever-increasing chaos and uncertainty, Recorded Future empowers organizations with the visibility
they need to identify and detect threats faster; take proactive action to disrupt adversaries; and protect their people, systems, and assets, so business can be conducted with confidence.
Recorded Future is trusted by more than 1,000 businesses and government organizations around the world.

www.recordedfuture.com@RecordedFuture© Recorded Future®, Inc. All rights reserved. All trademarks remain property of their respective owners.

Recorded Future® | www.recordedfuture.com