Lloyds Banking Group has developed a Global Correlation Engine (GCE), an innovation which supercharges cybersecurity and protects customers.

This addresses a challenge experienced across businesses, especially among larger organisations, where cybersecurity software, designed to identify and alert businesses to potential attacks, can lack precision. This means that alerts can sometimes be triggered by activity that is misidentified as being malicious, which are known as ‘false positives’.

Since Lloyds Banking Group implemented the GCE, investigations of false positives have significantly reduced, whilst minimising the risk of missing genuine attacks.

Lloyds Banking Group is working on developing the GCE further, leveraging multiple layers of algorithms, including artificial intelligence, to enhance its capabilities.

Lloyds has also been awarded its first-ever patent issued by the Intellectual Property Office for a new methodology for the GCE, which uses intelligent algorithms to analyse cybersecurity alerts and determine which alerts could be genuine threats. The patent has been granted in both the UK and the US, and will bring further improvements, allowing the Group to focus its resources on investigating and tackling genuine cyber threats.

The GCE works by storing and analysing alerts from across different cybersecurity technologies to identify common attributes, trends and potential connections between different alerts. By cross-referencing this information against the components and common signs of a cyber-attack, the GCE accurately assesses and identifies cyber threats.

This method offers a dynamic approach that can help to identify both immediate and longer-term threats with a high degree of accuracy.

Although the technology was originally developed to combat traditional cyber-attacks, the potential applications extend far beyond this, including e-crime, supply chain fraud, cyber-enabled fraud and more.

Matt Rowe, Chief Security Officer at Lloyds Banking Group, said: “Our Global Correlation Engine is an exciting innovation that will allow us to identify genuine threats more quickly and efficiently, ensuring customers are protected. We’re working to develop the Engine further, using artificial intelligence to supercharge its capabilities. This innovation, developed by our world-class cyber experts, demonstrates our commitment to advancing cybersecurity and protecting our customers with cutting-edge technology.”