XDR makes cyber a Stroll in the park for Aston Martin F1

The Aston Martin Cognizant Formula One team has selected SentinelOne’s artificial intelligence (AI)-powered Singularity Extended Detection and Response (XDR) platform to manage its cyber security needs and protect its IT estate, from cloud workloads to endpoints and internet-of-things (IoT) devices and sensors, as it prepares for its debut season.

Although officially a new entry to the Formula One paddock in 2021, Aston Martin’s history in the series dates back to the late 1950s, and the team – rebranded by owner Lawrence Stroll from Racing Point – has continuity dating back to the early 1990s, when it was founded as Jordan. For its relaunch this year, former Racing Point driver Lance Stroll remains with the team and is joined by four-time world champion Sebastian Vettel.

SentinelOne also has history with the wider Aston Martin Lagonda firm, which has been using the Singularity platform since 2018.

“I am delighted that SentinelOne will be one of Aston Martin Cognizant Formula One Team’s key partners as we take Aston Martin back where it belongs, the top table of international motorsport, namely Formula One,” said team chairman Lawrence Stroll.

“It is clear that our two companies have much in common. Ours will be a very real partnership, delivering genuine performance enhancements to the safe and smooth running of our team.”

XDR is an evolution of EDR (Endpoint Detection and Response) technology, offering new capabilities to address the diversifying number of vulnerable points that malicious actors may use to effect a successful compromise, such as mobile devices or IoT devices.

For technology-driven Formula One teams that have long relied on the IoT’s capabilities around sensor data to gain that much-needed marginal edge on track – in many cases actively helping power its development – this breadth of protection brought by XDR is potentially highly valuable.

XDR supposedly replaces siloed security to help organisations address their security needs from a more unified standpoint, drawing data from across the estate to enable faster, deeper and more effective threat detection and response capabilities, providing visibility and context around threats, and surfacing events that traditional approaches and solutions might miss.

For example, says SentinelOne, organisations that address a typical ransomware attack – that  traverses the network, arrives in an email inbox and then attacks the endpoint – are at a disadvantage if they look at each of those three events independently. The more integrated approach that XDR brings enables allowing, blocking, removing access and much more to happen automatically, either through custom, user-written rules, or logic built into the engine.

Ultimately, says SentinelOne, users get a single pool of raw data from across their ecosystem, allowing them faster, deeper and more effective threat detection and response, detecting more stealthy attacks, reducing the dwell time of malicious actors if found, and decreasing remediation time.

“The parallels between Aston Martin and SentinelOne are strong, and it is an honour to support Aston Martin Cognizant Formula One Team’s much anticipated return to the top tier of global motorsport,” said Tomer Weingarten, SentinelOne CEO and co-founder.

“We both share a relentless passion for innovation and desire to disrupt the status quo, and an appreciation of the significance of speed. These core principles are at the soul of this partnership and represent the power of Aston Martin Cognizant Formula One Team and SentinelOne.”