By ; Mohamed Elkhoy – Wael Elhosany

Acronis, a global leader in cyber protection, announced the enhancement of its security defence against advanced file-less attacks using Intel® Threat Detection Technology (Intel® TDT) leveraging the Intel® integrated GPU to offload memory scanning operations from the CPU. Acronis is the latest cyber protection company to integrate Intel® TDT to enrich its security products.

With cyber threats evolving and growing on a daily basis, Acronis researchers have witnessed new types of malware and attack vectors on enterprises such as polymorphic malware and file-less attacks. Many threats utilize an in-memory-only approach which can be hard to detect. Intel® TDT technology allows Acronis cyber protection solutions to free resources while scanning HDD and memory resulting in improved system performance. Acronis researchers found that while scanning all the processes in system memory on supported CPUs, Intel® TDT reduced the load on the CPU 2.4x times, by offloading the job to the Intel® integrated GPU.

The Acronis solution combines complete single-agent cyber protection with Intel® TDT. This enhancement results in lower CPU utilization which allows more compute capacity for productivity and office software used by Acronis end customers while compute-intensive security operations run in Intel®'s integrated GPU. The innovation of Intel® TDT will be available through Acronis Cyber Protect Cloud, Acronis Cyber Protect, and Acronis Cyber Protect Home Office solutions.

“The integration of Intel® TDT into Acronis cyber protection solutions is a logical step to meet the needs of our users, said Patrick Pulvermueller, CEO at Acronis. “During the last year, we observed that almost 50% of attacks detected were file-less. The use of this Intel technology is a great milestone as we continue to optimize and enhance our anti-malware engine.”

“Through our collaboration with Acronis to integrate Intel® Threat Detection Technology into their cyber protection solutions, customers of all sizes that utilize Intel vPro® can perform frequent and highly performant memory scanning. This is a great benefit for our mutual customers as we help them stay ahead of increasingly sophisticated threats,” said Carla Rodríguez, Vice President and General Manager, Ecosystem Partner Enabling at Intel.

“As the IT world grows in sophistication and continues its migration to the cloud, more stress has fallen on security teams with less-integrated technology, creating complexity and unintentional blind spots in security systems,” said Research Vice President of Security and Trust Michael Suby at IDC. “According to a recent IDC survey of 1,015 security professionals in North America, this is particularly the case for smaller organizations who are less equipped to effectively operate separate products from multiple vendors or benefit from a position of strength in negotiating with multiple vendors. As such, they are more likely to resonate with an integrated hardware and software approach to endpoint security.”