Developing a holistic approach to cyber protection

Kevin Reed, CISO, Acronis.
Kevin Reed, CISO, Acronis.
by
3 years ago

Some of the common reasons why end-users could be a target for a cyberattack are: they have money, they have a computing resource that is valuable for DDoS attacks or crypto mining, and they have access to their employer’s network. With remote work becoming commonplace, the risk profile for the third scenario has grown significantly.

Mobile device attacks are also expected to continue growing as more and more people use them for sensitive applications like banking. Finally, attackers could be opportunistic and use current events like Covid-19 alerts, government reliefs and subsidies’ information, etc. to lure users onto malicious sites.

The above-mentioned risks arise from unpatched software and malware attacks. Acronis protects its customers from such threats through an integrated cyber-protection software. It allows to disrupt such attacks at various stages, providing in depth defence.

Patching, using strong authentication, and employing strong malware protection are still the most important measures .

First, it provides patch management helping to ensure software is up to date. Then, if the attack happened nevertheless, it stops the malware from running using both traditional signature-based approach and modern AI-based detection. Finally, if none of the protections worked for some reason and, say, your data was encrypted, it still allows recovery from secure remote backup.

Patching, using strong authentication, and employing strong malware protection are still the most important measures to take. Most attacks are not sophisticated, they start with a phishing email, with an easy to guess or a reused password known to attackers from another compromised source or from an old and forgotten service exposed to the internet.

Acronis has developed a holistic approach to cyber protection composed of five vectors.

Then, attackers enter the lateral movement, privilege escalation cycle until they achieve their objective, either stealing the data or gaining enough access to run ransomware. The easiest is to stop the attack at the initial compromise, but of course in-depth defence is important as well.

Acronis has developed a holistic approach to cyber protection composed of five vectors: safety, accessibility, privacy, authenticity, and security. This allows for a well-rounded comprehensive protection experience going beyond traditional backups or classical Antivirus solutions which only focus on one part of the situation.

Businesses and individuals need to evolve to cyber protection to anticipate and defeat cyberattacks. That is why behavioural anti-malware like the one found in Acronis Cyber Protect Cloud with Active Protection has emerged as an important defence against hackers. Active Protection uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to identify malware by how it behaves, looking for suspicious activities, as opposed to matching it against a known threat database.

The most successful organisations make their decision based on data.

The main challenge in cybersecurity is that too many things are happening at once. In organisations, security operations teams are drowning in the security alerts and even individual users could be overwhelmed with alerts, news, and security notifications. Technologies that will solve the problem either by integrating segregated products under common management and reporting, or by providing AI-based automated incident response or at least better sorting the incoming flow of security alerts and removing false positives will have a significant impact on cyber protection.

The most successful organisations make their decision based on data. In cybersecurity, decision makers have access to lots of data, and they should be comfortable reading and assessing raw data, making deductions, and presenting this data to their peers and leaders to support their points.

In terms of hard skills, it means that security decision makers need to be able to work with whatever data processing platform is employed in their organisation for security data analysis it could be SIEM platform, or something else. They should not rely on their staff to provide them with reports, instead they should be able to generate hypotheses, validate those using data, reject those failed validation.


Businesses and individuals need to evolve to cyber protection to anticipate and defeat cyberattacks

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