How Can You Protect Your Business Against Malware?

Ransomware, viruses, and malware. No business wants to find themselves the victim of a cyber-attack. Often these malicious pieces of software enter the network via a backdoor attack, allowing cybercriminals to break into the infrastructure without being discovered.

Once inside the network, they can lay quiet for weeks or months before activating, making them even harder to detect. All the while it is moving around your network, seeking to find super-user credentials, elevate its privileges, and access vital data.

So how can you stop something you don’t even know about?

Although you may not be aware of the presence of malware in your network, as it moves around, it is leaving a footprint.

Advanced anti-malware protection, actively looks inside networks for these footprints. The technology used is modelled along the lines of the human immune system, using mathematics and continuous machine learning, to understand what is normal activity for every user and device on a network, the footprints left by malware appear as anomalies. When unusual activity is detected, the system alerts cybersecurity staff.

The software can also trap malware before it reaches vital parts of your network. It does this by setting up a ‘honeypot’; an isolated and monitored area of a network that contains fake, but valuable-looking information. The honeypot acts as a decoy and a lure and is designed to be probed or attacked. The fake information has no value to anyone, and so any interaction with the honeypot, such as a probe or a scan, is automatically suspicious. Once inside, the rogue code is contained, preventing it from accessing and damaging legitimate data and other parts of your network.

Last month the WannaCry ransomware famously attacked organisations of all sizes around the world. It is estimated to have infected more than 230,000 devices in over 150 countries. Many NHS trusts in the UK were hit, with patient records, MRI scanners, blood fridges and operating theatre equipment put out of action. The attack highlighted the serious disruption malware can cause.

Had the affected organisations utilised advanced malware detection technology, the unusual behaviour caused by WannaCry would have been noticed, allowing organisations to react before the breach took hold.

In this new era of cyber-attacks, traditional defensive methods no longer provide adequate protection. This new technology isn’t designed to identify a certain strain of malware, as this would put it on the back foot each time new malware is created and released. Instead, it constantly learns and re-learns what normal looks like in your organisation, so when a new type of malware is launched, it detects it straight away.

Contact us today to learn more about our advanced threat detection solution and protecting your organisation against malicious cyber-attacks.