Sophos Cyber Threat Report: Beat Hackers At Their Own Game

Cyber-attacks used to be a nickel-and-dime crime. They were a nuisance, but your business was never in peril. Now, thanks to malicious malware, zero-day attacks and phishing, that’s no longer the case.

Globally, 83% of IT managers agree that stopping malware threats has become increasingly difficult over the last year and 87% believe that it’s because they’re becoming more complex. That’s according to Sophos’ survey, The State of Endpoint Security Today, an independent study of 2,700 midsized organizations across five continents.

“Times are changing. It’s not just the bad guys programming stuff. They’re using artificial intelligence now. There’s a whole bunch of different things that are going on that we never even imagined,” says Towerwall CEO Michelle Drolet, who has seen the evolution of cybercrime firsthand.

“If you had asked me several years ago if an integrated solution would be the right solution, I would’ve probably said, ‘no,’” says Drolet.

Your customers need layered protection

With more than 400,000 unique malware samples created each day, and thousands of new vulnerabilities discovered each year, the challenge of preventing malicious attacks is daunting. An integrated solution must be part of a layered approach to cyber security to deal with the advanced threats businesses are facing today.

“Attackers are not just attacking on the endpoint, or not just attacking on the network, launching attacks that could come in a multitude of fashions. So, it’s important for partners to be able to work with these organizations on delivering a solution that will have full protection,” says Erin Malone, vice president North American channel sales at Sophos.

Your customers need layered protection against the different and constant attacks they face.

“The IT infrastructure’s really an ecosystem and the ability to have security at multiple points in the ecosystem is important. What’s even more important is having those points actually communicate with one another,” says Dan Schiappa, senior vice president and general manager, products, at Sophos.

Synchronized security is one of Sophos’ next generation approaches to threat protection. It integrates security technologies to deliver protection and visibility across your customers’ entire network.

“We share the information from the endpoint, so the network knows exactly what application’s generating that traffic. Between the protections that we have in Intercept X for exploits and the greater visibility we have in the XG Firewall with synchronized security, we have all the bases covered,” says Schiappa.

Individual endpoint product notifications for every potential break across the network used to take hours. Now, thanks to synchronized security, those alerts happen in real-time.

“It saves our customers hundreds of hours of time. Now they know the root cause of what happened. We have customers call all the time and say, “Thank you,’” says Drolet.

In our next Cyber Threat Report from Sophos, learn why hackers hack and how solution providers can fight back.