In a perfect world, we would have a similar level of awareness and sensitivity when it comes to being cyber-attacked as when we are physically attacked. Our system receptors would fire the moment a hacker successfully breaches our defenses, and we would immediately spring to action. Unfortunately, this is not the case with most enterprises. When it comes to hacks, we — or more specifically the systems that house enterprise data — are sluggish and slow to respond.
The gap
Verizon’s 2016 Data Breach Investigations Report, built around a dataset of more than 100,000 security incidents, contains some grim findings. Among them:
- 93 per cent of security compromises take minutes or less
- 84 per cent of victims take weeks or more to discover a security breach
These results should come as no surprise. Your garden variety phishing attack — an increasingly popular mode of attack — works quickly, with malware piggybacking on attachments. Even out in the physical world of ATMs and gas pumps, compromises can happen in the blink of an eye. If hackers have the right credentials, you can forget about them unlocking your door — they’ll just saunter in and make themselves at home, helping themselves to whatever catches their eye.
Speed is the only thing
To watch a Hollywood movie, you would think hackers are the coolest people in the universe. Often they are depicted as justice warriors, sharp-eyed geniuses working (and almost always succeeding) to hack an un-hackable system — usually a government agency or mega-corporation.
While much of what Hollywood offers is pure fantasy, an escape from the strains of life, there is one element they do seem to get basically right when it comes to hackers: speed. Hackers can and do work fast. They are not generally interested in being elegant; they just want to get into your system, snatch whatever they can, and disappear as quickly as possible.
Advanced protection
Symantec’s Security Platform can keep enterprises safe against a full range of advanced persistent security threats, detect all flavors of malware, and contain and resolve incidents in very short order. Blue Coat was built for speed — an essential weapon in the cloud age of flash-speed hacks.
Symantec’s Advanced Threat Protection solution offers:
- Content Analysis: the ability to detect, analyze and block targeted and otherwise highly effective exploits. This technology is about being prepared through highly effective attack detection and bridging any gap that exists between prevention and containment.
- Malware Analysis & Sandboxing: actionable malware intelligence, combining multiple analysis techniques. This technology offers a highly scalable solution for the detection and analysis of unknown, advanced and targeted malware, and through sandboxing gives enterprises the ability to capture more malicious behavior in a safe, virtual context.
- Mail Threat Defense: extraction of malicious email content before it is delivered, and without disrupting the existing message flow. This technology is designed to keep systems and specifically system end-users safe against malware delivered in email links and attachments.
“Our Advanced Threat Protection solution leaves no stone unturned and takes nothing for granted,” said Ajay Sood, Vice-President and GM of the Symantec Corporation. “A single security ecosystem that detects and analyzes anomalies and potentially lethal content and malware is value enough; but our security solution goes that extra mile to offer enterprises the ability to execute suspected content and malware in a virtual environment.”
“Hackers are agents of speed in that they like to work fast. Our best response to them is through the same thing — speed. Our Advanced Threat Protection, with its sharp and multi-angled detection capabilities, can expose breaches very quickly — hours instead of days or weeks. This can put enterprises on the road to resolution much sooner than would otherwise have been possible.”
To find out more about Symantec’s Advanced Threat Protection solution, click here.
