Businesses are under constant pressure to prevent security breaches by cunning and sophisticated adversaries that are targeting their most sensitive data. These attacks can have devastating consequences for organisations – putting their staff and customers at tremendous risk.
Gerald Naidoo, CEO of Logikal Consulting, says today’s targeted attacks are designed by highly skilled, individuals and groups who know exactly what they are after, and want to maximise their payloads. “Because of this, attackers are continually honing their skills and techniques, developing malicious code that can easily evade traditional security measures.”
He says unfortunately, many businesses are vulnerable, as they have tools and measures in place that cannot effectively detect and prevent these attacks. “Old signature-based tools often miss the latest threats, and anti-virus is hopeless against advanced threats or zero-day attacks.”
According to Naidoo, responding to the advanced persistent threats of today requires an integrated, end-to-end system that can prevent threats at every stage of an attack.
“The IBM Threat Protection System can stop threats at every point on the attack chain, and has been designed to disrupt the lifecycle of advanced attacks with a three-pronged approach that helps prevent, detect and respond to threats.”
Ravi Bhat, Logikal Consulting’s COO, says the system has been designed to proactively and dynamically address even the toughest security challenges, and uses an approach that is integrated and contextually-aware, and build in next-generation prevention, comprehensive detection, and automated response capabilities.
“The IBM solution removes the need to employ many, disparate tools and solutions to address each new security concern,” he says. “Security sprawl comes hand-in-hand with huge complexity, as IT teams battle to make sense of a multitude of solutions, each with their own, isolated view of the security landscape.”
Separate tools and solutions basically cannot offer the visibility that is needed to detect and prevent today’s highly advanced and targeted attacks, and simply do not offer a comprehensive audit trail to get a view of what has occurred, to better remediate vulnerabilities, Bhat says.
“The only hope for organisations is to implement integrated solutions that are designed to help disrupt the entire lifecycle of an attack, from the very first breach, to the final exfiltration of proprietary data. The system must offer pre-emptive defences, powerful analytics and open integrations,” Naidoo explains.
In addition, he says these defences must evolve to be able to mitigate against previously unseen threats, and be able to use real-time analytics to react to the huge volumes of security and incident-related data from across the enterprise.
Bhat says the IBM solution does this, and can identify any attackers or threats that are stealthily lingering on the network, biding their time to go after their payload. “In addition, the solution can predict and prioritise weaknesses before an attack happens, and features incident forensics to help identify root causes and respond to future attacks.”
