Showing posts with label Sophos. Show all posts
Cybersecurity education is an issue, and it starts at the top despite cybersecurity expenditure and self-assessed maturity increasing in Asia Pacific and Japan (APJ) organisations over the past 12 months, only 47 % of Philippines companies surveyed believe their board truly understands cybersecurity. In addition, the top frustration expressed by Philippine cybersecurity professionals is that cybersecurity is frequently relegated in priority.
Eighty-nine per cent of respondents from the Philippines also believe cybersecurity vendors do not provide them with the information they need to help educate executives, and 95 % of Philippine companies agree their biggest security challenge in the next 24 months will be the awareness and
education of employees and leadership. The top two attack vectors of concern for APJ organisations are directly addressable by ongoing education and awareness campaigns: phishing or whaling attacks, and weak or compromised employee credentials.
“With ransomware attacks continuing to become more complex, organisations need a genuine, actionable cybersecurity education program. The current reactionary tendencies we’re seeing have
created an ‘attack, change, attack, change …’ cycle regarding cybersecurity strategies, which is putting cybersecurity teams constantly on the backfoot. Shifting priorities to become more proactive must start at the top and requires direction from executives, including investments in awareness and education across entire organisations,” Aaron Bugal, global solutions engineer, APJ, at Sophos.
The skills shortage continues to wreak havoc
The skills shortage continues to be a key focus area in organizations across the region. Sixty-two percent of Philippines firms surveyed expect to have some problems with recruiting cybersecurity employees over the coming 24 months; 31 % expect to face a major challenge.
With recruiting continuing to pose issues, companies have identified the priority areas they feel skills
and capabilities need to be increased for internal security specialists. These include:
● Cloud security policies and architecture
● ‘Train the trainer’ employee and executive cybersecurity training skills
● Software vulnerability testing
● Staying up to date with the latest threats
● Policy compliance and reporting
Cybersecurity professionals’ top frustrations
The survey also highlights that cybersecurity professionals face a variety of challenges and frustrations in their roles, most of which are related to awareness, perception, messaging, and education. The top three frustrations across the Philippines are:
1. Cybersecurity is frequently relegated in priority
2. Executives assume cybersecurity is easy and cybersecurity professionals over-exaggerate threats and issues
3. Executives assume their company will never get attacked
Additional frustrations experienced by cybersecurity professionals across the region include:
● Executives thinking there is nothing that can be done to stop attacks
● Inability to keep up with pace of security threats
● Not enough investment and time into training general staff
“Cybersecurity professionals continue to face many frustrations in their roles this year, with many feeling their warnings and messages fall on deaf ears. Apart from lacking skilled security specialists, many of the other frustrations are directly addressable through education and awareness programs, starting at the executive and board level. The challenge for cybersecurity professionals faced with low levels of security understanding among company boards is that many are unlikely to invest in the necessary programs to alleviate these frustrations,” said Bugal.
“The issue isn’t technology, it’s education. Increasing spend on cybersecurity won’t help unless organizations understand from the top down the true nature and critical threat that cyberattacks constitute to their organizational capabilities, their customers and their own existence.”
Cybersecurity education must become a focus. The following is a five-step approach to help bring organizations up to speed on cybersecurity education:
1. Boards need help to understand it’s impossible to protect everything, and learn to prioritize the most critical information, data and systems to protect.
2. Education courses on basic principles, genuine likelihood of an attack, attack vectors, threat actors, and other terminology should be available to all staff.
3. Once basics are clearly defined, organizations need to develop strategy and integrate with digital transformation programs.
4. The focus then becomes more operational in nature: applying legislation, breach response protocol, ransom payment policy, gap assessments, and future roles and obligations.
5. Businesses need to clearly understand compliance, the regulatory environment under which the business operates, what’s legally required when breached and what are the appropriate controls around data security and management.
PH Execs Not Worried About Ransomware Attacks
Sophos, a global leader in next-generation cybersecurity, recently announced Sophos ZTNA, the only zero trust network access (ZTNA) offering that fully integrates with an industry-leading, next-generation endpoint solution – Sophos Intercept X – providing advanced endpoint protection and zero trust network access with a single agent. Sophos ZTNA introduces a transparent and scalable security model for connecting users and devices to applications and data, improving and simplifying protection against ransomware and other advanced cybersecurity threats.
Sophos also published new research, “Windows Services lay the groundwork for a Midas Ransomware Attack,” shining light on the importance of ZTNA. The research details how attackers were able to spend nearly two months undetected in a target’s environment, taking advantage of limited access controls and network and application segregation, which would have been better protected with ZTNA. The attackers further leveraged no-longer-used “ghost” remote access tools to move laterally, target and compromise other machines, create new accounts, install back doors, and exfiltrate data, before releasing the Midas ransomware.
Through its unique integration with Sophos Intercept X, including Sophos Extended Detection and Response (XDR), Sophos Managed Threat Response and other solutions using its technology, Sophos ZTNA removes the complexities of managing multiple vendor products and agents, and provides end-to-end protection for endpoints, users, their identities, and the applications and networks that they connect to. As part of the Sophos Adaptive Cybersecurity Ecosystem, Sophos ZTNA shares real-time threat intelligence with other solutions and automatically responds to threats. Working together, the solutions can better identify active threats and assess device health, so compromised and non-compliant devices can be quickly isolated.
“Many traditional remote access solutions, like remote desktops and IPsec and SSL-VPN, provide strong encryption, but very little else in defense against modern threats. We see attackers increasingly exploiting these limitations, stuffing credentials into RDP and VPNs to gain access to victim networks, and then moving freely once inside, all too often culminating in costly data theft and ransomware incidents,” said Joe Levy, chief technology and product officer at Sophos. “People, applications, devices, and data aren’t constrained to offices anymore – they’re everywhere, and we need more modern ways to secure them. Zero trust is a very effective cybersecurity principle, and ZTNA embodies it in a practical, easy to use way, ensuring that users have secure access to only the resources that they need.”
Sophos ZTNA micro-segments networks to protect against intrusions, lateral movement and data theft. It constantly authenticates user identities with multiple factors, and validates device health, delivering tighter access controls for users and fewer footholds for cybercriminals. Unlike VPNs that provide broad network access, Sophos ZTNA eliminates implied trust and only authorizes user access to specific applications and systems on the network. By trusting nothing and verifying everything, Sophos ZTNA improves protection, simplifies security management for IT managers, and creates a smooth experience for remote workers.
“The future of work will be hybrid, making it imperative that organizations are able to protect remote workers, remote data and remote applications,” said Christopher Rodriguez, research director, Network Security Products at IDC. “By integrating ZTNA with endpoint protection, Sophos ZTNA enables risk-appropriate access to resources from any device, at any time and from any location. Trust is a key factor in business today – one that requires critical security controls to protect against business-impacting events, such as ransomware and data compromise.”
Sophos Intercept X and the Adaptive Cybersecurity Ecosystem
Local Area Network (LAN). The new offering adds another component to Sophos’ secure access portfolio, which also includes Sophos Firewall and Sophos Wireless.
“Sophos Switch perfectly complements the existing Sophos portfolio – it was the missing piece in our IT security offering, and now gives our business even more clout. We were already very successful with Sophos Firewall, and thanks to Sophos Switch we are now able to unleash the full power of Sophos’ products and services. Our experience from the early access program proved that Sophos Switch is a game changer for us, and we were very positively surprised at how well the product worked from day one,” said Patrizio Perret, chief technology officer at Avanet. “While a switch is pretty much a commodity these days, Sophos is adding the necessary spice to the hardware with the software capabilities. Sophos’ adaptive cybersecurity ecosystem is the magic ingredient that will make Sophos Switch something really special by enabling companies to integrate it with other Sophos security components in their network.”
Availability
Switches with eight, 24 and 48 ports are available for immediate purchase exclusively through Sophos’ global channel of partners and managed service providers (MSPs). These are ideally suited for small and medium-sized businesses, remote and home offices, retailers, branch offices, and more.
