JOHANNESBURG – Trend Micro Incorporated (TYO: 4704; TSE: 4704), a global cybersecurity leader, has announced a new collaboration with Intel ® (NASDAQ:INTC) designed to help joint enterprise customers protect critical systems from stealthy threats, including fileless malware and advanced ransomware.
When Trend’s proactive security platform and Intel’s technology are used together, the integrated solution can better determine if encryption behavior is legitimate—such as a user backing up files or malicious activity—ensuring the appropriate action is taken to protect critical systems.
Carla Rodriguez, Intel VP: “Threat actors are increasingly targeting endpoints with sophisticated attacks that evade traditional software-based security. Trend Micro’s integration of Intel® Threat Detection Technology provides a hardware-accelerated detection layer to uncover stealthy threats. This technology, deployed across a billion PCs, is the only AI-based silicon security solution of its kind. Our mutual customers will benefit from enhanced protection with Trend Micro’s AI-powered Trend Vision One™ – Endpoint solutions on Intel AI PCs.”
Protecting critical assets across endpoints, email, networks, and cloud workloads is increasingly challenging as malicious actors favour covert threats such as fileless malware, which was reportedly present in 40% of attacks in 2023. These can be used to deploy ransomware, steal sensitive data, and cause significant financial and reputational damage.
Fileless attacks are particularly dangerous as they rely on in-memory execution, reside in the registry, or abuse legitimate tools like PowerShell and Windows Management Instrumentation.
That’s why Trend and Intel are teaming up by combining the AI-powered Trend Vision One. This collaboration provides organisations with powerful tools to detect and respond to ransomware and fileless attacks before they can cause damage.
Zaheer Ebrahim, Solutions Architect at Trend Micro Middle East and Africa: “Proactive security has long been desired but just recently feasible. Through our work with Intel, we’re redefining what’s possible in cybersecurity—empowering enterprises to proactively safeguard their systems, data, and operations against an increasingly complex threat landscape.”
How AMS works:
- Intel® TDT offloads advanced memory scanning (AMS) workloads from CPU to GPU
- This enables Trend endpoint security solutions to scan more deeply and more often to uncover fileless attacks before they can launch malicious payloads.
- Using fewer CPU resources enhances threat detection and response without affecting performance, slowing down PCs, or reducing battery life.
Trend Vision One™ – Endpoint Security leverages AMS to improve memory scanning capacity by 7 to 10X[1]. This means that organisations can scan more and detect more threats.
CPU-based threat detection:
Advanced ransomware is increasingly capable of evading EDR detection thanks to packing and obfuscation techniques and VM cloaking. EDR solutions are too often playing catchup with behavior-based approaches, which take time to get up to speed.
Intel® TDT augments Trend’s behavioural analysis, runtime machine learning, and expert rules by providing critical visibility into the hardware layer, increasing ransomware detection efficacy by 24% over software alone.
It does this by:
- Using CPU telemetry and Intel® AI, offloading Intel AI and memory scanning from the CPU to the integrated GPU to provide a detection assist to Trend’s ransomware defenses which won’t disrupt the user experience.
- Integrating Intel TDT source code directly into the Trend Micro agent to deliver deeper insights from CPU telemetry. This enables instant discovery of zero-day attacks and new, fast-moving variants.
