How should a company defend itself from the myriad of attacks that are pummeling your business every day? The experts talk about layers of security. Think of these layers in terms of your home: you have a front door that can be closed, it also can be locked at the handset and with a deadbolt. You have items in your house that thieves want so have you electronically tagged or engraved information on these devices. Is your laptop data encrypted? Jewelry, passports in the house? Do you utilize a safe at home or at the bank? Other layers that can enhance your home security include cameras and lights on the outside and inside of your home and motion detectors. Do you place cameras and motion detectors on all levels of your house? Most experts would answer in the positive. Do you want the cameras and motion detectors managed by a 3rd party at all times or do you prefer a DIY approach?
Let’s look at your business in the same way. Teaching the young kids to close the door and lock it may be akin to delivering security training each year for your employees. The front door is your firewall and the two locks on that door could equate to a next-generation firewall. What about the windows and back door? Those could be considered your endpoints and everything with an internal/external IP address. The fact is that business should be looking to protect the inside as much or more than any outside threat.
Company’s engage in vulnerability testing to make them aware of weaknesses and for compliance reasons. How about running that vulnerability test each day of the year, as many times per day as you like at a similar cost as that one test? That daily test also tells you which devices need updating and which ones are the most critical. Studies indicate that malware lives inside at least 80% of business environments without being detected, just reading and waiting for a time to call home. A solution that resides in your environment that discovers such advanced malware would be important, right?
The amount of knowledge required to recognize the weakness in a company’s defenses, deploy and then manage all of these solutions has resulted in a new leadership position being created: Chief Information Security Officer (CISO). The employment market for a CISO does not favor business due to a lack of qualified individuals. Thus companies have relied on their current IT staff to manage things or they have turned to companies that can manage the devices or environments for them.
Vulnerabilities emerge every day within new networks, Web applications and databases. They may occur due to software defects or misconfigurations of information systems. Because they can be exploited by cyber attackers, it is essential to eliminate these. Multipath Data works with SecureWorks to deliver continuous security that protects your IT infrastructure from cyberattack and automates compliance with a dedicated vulnerability management team to provide expert guidance and support.
Threat actors are using increasingly advanced attacks designed to evade traditional security controls. An over-reliance on technology and lack of experience are exposing weaknesses resulting in failure to detect and respond to advanced threats. Multipath Data can deliver a solution that utilizes specialized security analysts combining vast intelligence with advanced technology to help you see, rapidly analyze and accurately diagnose targeted Zero-Day Threats. Suspicious traffic and files are sent to an analytics engine that uses full system emulation to detect the new class of malware designed to evade security controls. Fully managed 24×7.
A firewall, even a next-generation firewall that is managed part time is like having your home security system monitored for 4-6 hours a day at most. You have to ask yourself if these devices are being managed 24×7 – you already know that hackers are working more than 4-6 hours a day AND a large percentage of them are hours ahead of us from a time zone perspective. They are working to hack environments when your admin is eating dinner, playing with the kids, watching a movie or sleeping – this is reality. It is time to move the management of your firewall to professionals that manage your device 24×7.
SecureWorks manages 10’s of thousands of devices around the world. The Firewall Management service provides 24×7 firewall administration, log monitoring, and response to security and device health events. Security and health events are correlated across your environment and analyzed by their certified security analysts, using global threat intelligence and proven expertise to assess threats. When a threat is detected, their experts respond immediately to counter the threat and protect your organization.
Intelligence from their global visibility and Counter Threat Unit™ (CTU) research is fed into the Firewall Management service to strengthen policies and analysis of firewall logs. One aspect of this is their Attacker Database of IP addresses associated with threats. This intelligence is integrated into the service to provide advanced protection. Rely on their Firewall Management service to reduce the cost of managing and monitoring firewalls in-house, while supplementing your security efforts with SecureWorks’ proven expertise.
Here are just some of the attacks that are being launched every minute of every day:
Social engineering attacks: Social engineering attacks are designed to trick legitimate users into providing their access credentials to the attacker. These attacks take a variety of forms. For instance, a hacker might pose as a helpdesk employee and send an email asking for the user’s credentials. At its root, social engineering involves attackers gaining knowledge of personnel. credentials or corporate networks by posing as someone they’re not.
Malware: Hackers also use malware (short for “malicious software”) to gain access to corporate networks. Perhaps the best known malware delivery mechanism is the phishing attack: The attacker sends an email that appears to come from a legitimate source but contains an attachment or hyperlink that activates a malicious executable to steal credentials in the background.
Working inside the network for months, finding the right data to steal and gaining the rights to access it can take time. In fact. according to a recent study conducted by the Ponemon Institute and sponsored by security firm Arbor Networks. attackers lurk in the corporate network for months: the average dwell time is 98 days for financial services firms and a staggering 197 days for retail.
Digital Assets Being Held for Ransom: Ransomware is a type of malicious software that prohibits users from accessing their data or computer systems until a specified online payment is made to regain control of one’s data. Unless the ransom is paid, a data owner faces the risk of losing all of their data or being permanently locked out of their systems. With millions of samples of ransomware identified in 2015, expect to see a spike in the number of ransomware attacks. 2015 also saw ransomware-as-a-service, or RaaS, being offered by cybercriminals, allowing individuals with little technical knowledge to utilize ransomware for a fee. Heralded as the next big cybercrime trend, RaaS is highly profitable for cybercriminals and will likely continue to grow this year.
A recent survey of 300 IT decision makers in the U.S. and U.K. found that more than 84 percent of respondents said a spear phishing attack had penetrated their organization’s security defenses. The survey also found that respondents said approximately 28 percent of spear phishing attacks are getting through their organization’s security defenses. Twenty percent of respondents said spear phishing is the top threat facing their company. Ninety percent of respondents had seen spear phishing attacks delivered by email, while 48 percent said their organization had seen spear phishing attacks delivered via mobile platforms, 40 percent had seem them delivered via social networks, and 30 percent had seen them delivered via social media.