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Partnership with Leading UK University Consortium Deepens Commitment to World-Class Research, Promotes Cybersecurity Resiliency

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Securonix recently started a collaboration with the Network Stochastic Processes and Time Series (NeST), a consortium of UK universities, private companies, and government organizations, to help address cybercrime and increase cybersecurity resiliency by deepening the scientific community’s understanding of network security. Securonix is committed to supporting NeST’s goal of “developing new ways of analyzing network traffic to pinpoint tell-tale changes indicative of cyberattacks, enabling earlier detection and reducing damage caused.”

NeST is comprised of six UK universities, including Bath, Bristol, Imperial College, Oxford, York, and the London School of Economics, along with several industry partners that engage in fundamental scientific research with real-world applications. It serves as a world-class research center that specializes in network dynamics, how interconnected nodes and edges change over time, and its impact on cybersecurity. This collaboration aligns with Securonix’s mission to provide high-quality, robust, and scientifically rigorous analytical methods in protection of our customers. It will also ensure that the science we bring to that end represents the very best the industry has to offer.

NeST investigator Dr. Ed Cohen of Imperial College London said, “The NeST programme is driven by applications, and working with our industry partners is of paramount importance to ensure the programme’s theoretical and methodological advancements are sharply focused on problems that matter. Securonix comes with a wealth of cyber domain knowledge and critically important real-world challenges in network security science. We are extremely excited to be collaborating with them.”

“We are grateful for the opportunity to share our knowledge and industry-leading expertise in cybersecurity with premier research institutions,” said Chief Scientist Joshua Neil. “Many of the people on our team come from the institutions that we are now collaborating with, and they joined Securonix because they love the challenge of developing tools that make businesses safer. Working with NeST enables us to partner with some of the greatest minds on the globe to improve global cybersecurity resiliency. This is an opportunity for which we are incredibly grateful and committed.”

Securonix has always invested in research, committing substantial resources and energy to building one of the best threat research and hunting teams in the world. We have more than 100 people in the company focused on this, and several of them have PhDs. It is a team that brings together the disciplines of mathematics, data science, cybersecurity, and cloud data analytics. For Securonix, the NeST program will be headed by Joshua Neil, Chief Scientist, whose team will consult with researchers at Imperial, mentor students, and possibly bring in interns from the project for Securonix’s summer internship program.

The NeST consortium is funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) and is part of UK Research and Innovation (UKRI). The charter the ground-breaking new program is the development of new theories, methods, and computational techniques for tackling the mathematical and statistical analysis of datasets generated by “dynamic networks” to reduce cybercrime, increase resilience, and promote carbon reduction in the electricity sector.