April 23, 2021
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5 minutes

Staying Ahead as Cyberattacks Evolve

Is it possible to outpace and outsmart cyberattackers? It depends on your tech…(Hint: take a page from the attackers).

Technology advancements = New cybersecurity threats.

That’s a given.

The latest advancements just happen to include capabilities that can exponentially speed attacks and the damage they can wreak.

The race to keep ahead – or even keep up – is a perennial budget buster, especially in companies that haven’t yet elevated cybersecurity to the organizational, enterprise, operational, and board level.

But, you must keep up.

And keeping up or getting ahead of cyber attackers now means adopting agile enterprise cybersecurity solutions that include:

·     Deception technology

·     Artificial intelligence/machine learning

·     Asset management

·     Intelligence gathering

Simplify with a single agile breach detection system.

The Silver Lining

Before you plead “no budget!” stop and process: One of the problems that AI, machine learning, and other agile cybersecurity features solve is the lack of skilled IT professionals.

Because moving faster than attackers means moving faster than humans. It means removing human interaction from the cyber-response as much as possible.

So, what does that look like?

Cat and mouse

For one thing, it looks like a thoroughly entertaining game of cat-and-mouse—and you’re the cat, for a change! While an intruder follows the trails of cheese deployed by your deception technology, leading to dead ends and traps, your agile system can watch the attacker’s every maneuver.

At the same time, because you’ve employed AI/machine learning, your system can erect road blocks and cut off traffic to high priority assets, giving you and your team precious time to analyze an attack in-progress and respond accordingly.

Understand the attacker for the realities of current-day cyber warfare.

“We already know that the thing that scares attackers is a honeypot, and deception technology is like a honeypot on steroids,” says Sensato CEO and cybersecurity expert John Gomez. “Everything an intruder does is logged for analysis, so you can erect even better defenses.”

The ultimate map

It also looks like a window into your entire network, showing you every server, router, and device, complete with traffic analysis so you know which systems are mission critical. The first thing an attacker will do after breaching your network is scan it and catalogue all your assets; so that’s the first thing you should do, too.

And you should audit your network on a regular basis, because every Bluetooth-enabled and wireless device that connects to your network—via employees, customers, and even vendors—is a potential attack vector through which your system can be breached.

Superior intelligence

You can’t read every intelligence brief, no matter how dedicated and determined you are. But an agile unified threat management platform (UTM) can follow every feed, integrating that intelligence with your system, and analyzing threat levels.

Your intelligence stream can alert you to new and emerging threats like cryptojacking, swarmbots, and weaponized fuzzing—and your AI-enabled UTM can then be on the lookout for traffic patterns, network speed, random code, and other anomalies that these types of attacks can create.

To take cybersecurity analytics one step further, we partnered with Infragistics to embed their Reveal data analytics platform into our Nightingale Cybersecurity platform. With Reveal, hospitals can now get just-in-time analysis of cybersecurity patterns, trends and attack analysis.

An army

Don’t worry. You don’t have to hire more people for this one. You do need to make sure every last person in your company is trained in recognizing typical social attack methods. By industry estimates, 91 percent of cyberattacks begin with spear-phishing email. Employees trained in how to recognize suspicious emails, interactions, and technology glitches are your first and best line of defense.

Harden your defenses

Most company networks are a collection of the best legacy applications, systems, and hardware the company was able to purchase at a particular time. No matter how well integrated these disparate pieces, they offer attackers a more porous attack surface than a UTM.

By deploying at UTM with deception technology, AI/machine learning capabilities, asset management, continuous threat intelligence, and analytics, you can harden your defense network.

Remember, attackers have their own cost/benefit analysis. If you can make it difficult enough, you can watch as they retreat and go off in search of easier targets.

To get you started with using deception technologies, for a limited time, we are offering 5 Honeypots + training for $4,999 (a 50% discount). You can request a meeting here to discuss your particular needs and take advantage of this savings now to get you started detecting hackers on your network.

Defend. Detect. Disable the attack: Sensato Nightingale

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