During the Pandemic, report after report has been coming out talking about how our now remote working peers are successfully being attacked and our companies breached. BlackBerry announced earlier this month the first truly Unified Endpoint Security solution in the market to address this problem. Let’s talk about the need for a Unified Endpoint Security solution and how BlackBerry stepped up to provide it this week.
The Remote Worker Security Problem
On-premise IT generally knows (granted things like rogue access points and phishing attacks remain a problem) what their on-site eco-system looks like and how to secure it. Most companies don’t provide or specify the home network equipment for remote workers and may not provide desktop hardware. This situation makes it incredibly hard for them to support, let alone secure these remote workers. Sadly, there has been a significant increase in all cyberattacks on remote workers during this Pandemic. What is particularly frightening is that a 2,215 IT and information security personnel survey indicated a massive drop is security preparedness down from 71% before the Pandemic to 44% when the survey was taken. Also, most respondents indicate that they lacked the budget relief to deal with the problems and currently lack adequate security funding. 42% of the organizations have no idea how to defend against these threats, and the majority have not implemented multi-factor authentication leaving them too exposed. In comparison, most (60%) indicate they have already been attacked successfully.
The two most common attacks are credential (56%) and phishing (48%), with an average cost to the organization of a successful breach of around $2.4 per occurrence. That is a scarily high number, and multiple attacks would seem to bring a firm to its financial knees.
This situation is an ugly combination of problems. The attacks are up, resources down, a lack of human resources, and a lack of needed training to address what could be a going out of business scenario for many companies. What is needed is a highly automated, highly integrated solution that is affordable and not only addresses these expanding exposures but is both easy to implement and affordable. Oh, and it also needs to be hardware vendor-independent and outside of the governments’ reach that is aggressively trying to find back doors through security solutions.
BlackBerry’s UES (Unified Endpoint Security) offering may be the exact right solution at the exact right time.
BlackBerry UES
John Chen, BlackBerry’s CEO, realized some time back that the market was going to need a unified and automated endpoint security solution because the existing solutions were too complicated, lacked integration, and collectively they were too expensive and labor-intensive. So they developed the concept of the BlackBerry Cyber Security suite. This concept is a highly automated, highly integrated Zero Trust solution with Zero Touch. And they came up with the idea long before we knew about COVID-19.
The solution consists of a prevent-first endpoint security solution that provides visibility across mobile and desktop hardware, apps, and people. This AI-based solution is evolved to prevent rather than respond to threats, a key differentiator in the segment. Using the telemetry gathered across mobile, desktop, and server endpoints and combining that with user behavior analytics, they have created a uniquely comprehensive offering. This offering protects against a broad spectrum of threats, including some thought to be impossible to defend against, like insider threats tied to compromised user credentials. This capability is on top of protections against new classes of threats like crypto-jacking, crypto-mining, malware, ransomware, and phishing attacks. It does this while providing full visibility into all endpoint activity and the related infrastructure.
Its significant advantage is an advanced AI that can detect abnormal behavior patterns in people and systems and respond instantly. It may be the perfect product to protect us in this post Pandemic world.
Wrapping Up:
We are facing an unusual combination of events where cyberattacks are increasing when we cannot mitigate them. These aren’t our usual suspects, as we have Nation-State players capable of getting around, over, or through most of our traditional exposure mitigation solutions. Against this escalated perfect storm threat and remote management problem, BlackBerry appears to have created what may be the perfect storm solution. The BlackBerry Cyber Suite solution may be the only thing capable of mitigating this unique combination of threats and exposures in this post Pandemic world.
