Sophos cuts threat response to 89 seconds with OpenAI Daybreak

Peterson frames the Daybreak rollout against a widening gap: frontier AI helps defenders, but similar capabilities are spreading to open-weight models, giving attackers new ways to find and exploit vulnerabilities. Sophos protects more than 625,000 organisations, so the pressure is on scaling expertise rather than headcount.

At the centre of the work is Sophos Fusion, the company's AI-native cyber defense system that includes Sophos MDR. It pulls sensor data from over 500 third-party integrations and distills trillions of daily events into roughly 1,000 to 2,000 cases for nine security operations centres. Agents built through Daybreak now gather context, detections, indicators of compromise and threat intelligence for each case, then run a plan-execute-review loop that produces a summary and recommended actions for analysts.

Peterson says Sophos will keep expanding what the agents do. His advice to other security leaders is to focus on fundamentals: patching, endpoint protection, multifactor authentication, network segmentation and strong security operations, noting vulnerabilities are being discovered at an alarming rate and exploited at a scale not seen before.