The EU-US Privacy Shield security agreement faces legal fire, as three French advocacy groups-- La Quadrature du Net, non-profit service provider French Data Network and its Federation FDN industry-- challenge the pact at the Luxembourg-based General Court.

The French legal challenge follows a similar suit filed by Irish group Digital Rights Ireland in September 2016.

"We are aware of the application (for annulment)," an EC spokesman tells Reuters. "We don't comment on ongoing court cases. As we have said from the beginning, the Commission is convinced that the Privacy Shield will live up to the requirements set out by the European Court of Justice which has been the basis for the negotiations."

End-point security vendor Cylance makes strides across Europe as it announces a first distribution partnership in mainland Europe with VAD Infinigate covering Germany, Austria, Switzerland and the Nordics.

The company first stepped into EMEA in March with the opening of a UK office and the appointment of ex-FireEye exec Evan Davidson as regional sales VP. Following that it signed a number of reseller partners in N. and W. Europe, as well as distribution agreement covering MEA with Starlink and a deal with UK distie Ignition Technology.

User and entity behaviour analytics specialist Securonix announces a partnership with ThetaPoint, a provider of strategic consulting and managed security services, in the development of enterprise security solutions.

Securonix is the first developer of user and entity behaviour analytics (UEBA) to fight advanced, targeted, cyber and insider threats. It offers products combining machine learning and AI with advanced Deep Learning and behaviour anomaly detection techniques to capture threats in near real-time.

Meanwhile ThetaPoint helps customers plan, build and run SIEM and log management platforms, and works with technology providers to properly align capabilities with client needs.

Through the partnership Securonix will apply analytical capabilities to security management tools to extract actionable security intelligence from the data generated by SIEMs, security logs, non-traditional data sources, industry-specific applications and additional data sources. The result should be a security solution able to detect threats from anywhere with "unprecedented accuracy."

Sophos announces Intercept X-- a next-generation endpoint security product the company claims stop zero-day malware, unknown exploit variants and stealth attacks while offering "advanced" anti-ransomware features.

Intercept X works alongside existing endpoint security software from any vendor, and boosts protection by detecting and stopping malicious code before it executes. As Sophos puts it, the software combines 4 critical security components, namely Signatureless Threat and Exploit Detection (defends against zero-day, unknown and memory resident attacks and threat variants), CryptoGuard (identifies and intercepts malicious encryption activity), Root Cause Analytics (shows where attacks came in, what was affected, where it may have stopped and recommended actions) and Sophos Clean (hunts for and removes all spyware and lingering malware).