Are You Prepared for the Next Attack?

A WAKE-UP CALL

From WannaCry and Petya to the most recent attacks today, #LeakTheAnalyst and HBO—it is now apparent that anyone or any organization is a target for cyber criminals. Attacks continue to grow at an alarming rate – in volume, sophistication and impact. As of May 2017, Check Point products are detecting over 17 million attacks each week, more than half of these attacks include payloads which are unknown at the time of detection and cannot be detected by conventional signature-based technology. These attacks serve as a wake-up call, illustrating how fragile and vulnerable organizations have become in recent years. But falling victim to cyber attacks is a fate which can be avoided in most cases. The next attack can and should be prevented!

PREVENTING THE NEXT ATTACK

The impacts of the WannaCry, Petya and numerous other successful attacks were not inevitable. Indeed, with the correct measures, best practices and technologies in place, many organizations were able to avoid these attacks.

Our vast experience at the forefront of cyber security, protecting some of the most sensitive and highly targeted organizations on the planet, has proven to us time and again that effective defense can be achieved. The ability to prevent sophisticated attacks stems from applying a few core principles – here they are:

MAINTAIN SECURITY HYGIENE

Sustaining solid security hygiene across all IT systems will reduce the attack surface and can help prevent or contain many attacks.

• Apply up-to-date security patches across all systems and software
• Segment your network
• Review security products policies and continuously monitor incident logs and alerts
• Conduct routine audits and penetration testing
• Keep user privileges to a minimum

CHOOSE PREVENTION OVER DETECTION

We often hear companies and other players in the industry claim that attacks will happen anyway, there is no way to avoid them, and therefore the only thing left to do is to invest in technologies that detect the attack once it has already breached the network, and mitigate the damages as soon as possible. This is simply not true!

Don’t settle for detection – attacks, even sophisticated and zero-day ones, can be blocked! Invest in technologies and products that put prevention rather than detection at the forefront, and that do so without disrupting the normal business flow.

LEVERAGE A COMPLETE UNIFIED ARCHITECTURE

Many companies attempt to build their security using a patchwork of point products from multiple vendors. This approach usually has limited success: it results in disjoint technologies that don’t collaborate – creating security gaps, and it introduces a huge overhead of working with multiple systems and vendors. As a result of this inefficient approach many attacks are not prevented, forcing companies to invest more on post-infection and breach mitigation.

In order to achieve excellent security, you should adopt a unified multi-layer approach that protects all IT elements – networks, endpoint, cloud and mobile – all sharing the same prevention architecture and the same threat intelligence.

COVER ALL ATTACK VECTORS

Attackers use many malicious tricks to penetrate – through email, web browsing, mobile apps, exploiting unpatched vulnerabilities in online hosts and more.

Seek a single solution that can cover all bases, one that provides a broad prevention across all surfaces of attack.

IMPLEMENT THE MOST ADVANCED TECHNOLOGIES

Unfortunately there is no silver-bullet single technology that can protect from all threats and all threat vectors.

There are many great technologies and ideas available – machine learning, sandbox, anomaly detection, content disarmament and numerous others. Each of these methods can be highly effective in certain scenarios, covering specific file types or attack vectors.

Strong solutions integrate a wide range of technologies and innovations, in order to effectively combat modern attacks in our IT environments.

FROM THEORY TO PRACTICE

The principles covered above are not just theory. The Check Point Infinity platform and SandBlast Zero-Day Protection products are built around them, empowering our customers to achieve proactive prevention of tomorrow’s attacks.

Learn how to prevent the next cyber attack with Check Point – click here

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