Business + Partners

Girl Scouts and OpenText empower future leaders of tomorrow with cyber resilience

The transition to a digital-first world enables us to connect, work and live in a realm where information is available at our fingertips. The children of today will be working in an environment of tomorrow that is shaped by hyperconnectivity. Operating in this...

World Backup Day reminds us all just how precious our data is

Think of all the important files sitting on your computer right now. If your computer crashed tomorrow, would you be able to retrieve your important files? Would your business suffer as a result? As more and more of our daily activities incorporate digital and online...

3 Reasons We Forget Small & Midsized Businesses are Major Targets for Ransomware

The ransomware attacks that make headlines and steer conversations among cybersecurity professionals usually involve major ransoms, huge corporations and notorious hacking groups. Kia Motors, Accenture, Acer, JBS…these companies were some of the largest to be...

How Ransomware Sneaks In

Ransomware has officially made the mainstream. Dramatic headlines announce the latest attacks and news outlets highlight the staggeringly high ransoms businesses pay to retrieve their stolen data. And it’s no wonder why – ransomware attacks are on the rise and the...

An MSP and SMB guide to disaster preparation, recovery and remediation

Introduction It’s important for a business to be prepared with an exercised business continuity and disaster recovery (BC/DR) plan plan before its hit with ransomware so that it can resume operations as quickly as possible. Key steps and solutions should be followed...

Podcast: Cyber resilience in a remote work world

The global pandemic that began to send us packing from our offices in March of last year upended our established way of working overnight. We’re still feeling the effects. Many office workers have yet to return to the office in the volumes they worked in pre-pandemic....

5 Tips to get Better Efficacy out of Your IT Security Stack

If you’re an admin, service provider, security executive, or are otherwise affiliated with the world of IT solutions, then you know that one of the biggest challenges to overcome is efficacy. Especially in terms of cybersecurity, efficacy is something of an amorphous...

How Cryptocurrency and Cybercrime Trends Influence One Another

Typically, when cryptocurrency values change, one would expect to see changes in crypto-related cybercrime. In particular, trends in Bitcoin values tend to be the bellwether you can use to predict how other currencies’ values will shift, and there are usually...

Webroot Supports Open Network Insight Project

 

On Monday of this week, Webroot joined Cloudera, the leading provider of modern data management and analytics systems built on Apache Hadoop, in announcing Open Network Insight (ONI) Project, a database and tools designed specifically for cyber security incident response. ONI will enable security analysts and responders to manipulate the massive amounts of data generated within an enterprise to isolate and investigate both internal and external threats. And because we have years of endpoint-to-cloud experience here at Webroot, we will participate in the project by helping to design the data models for endpoint data.

ONI matches our own Webroot vision of security being an information problem. If you can apply the right data at the right time to decide if you’re being attacked or infiltrated, you can defend yourself. Our SecureAnywhere products put this vision into action by applying massive threat intelligence in the cloud to defeat potential threats on our customers’ desktops and smartphones. ONI will enable an organization to bring together all the relevant data about their network, their users, and their devices in one massive, but easily manipulated database, so they can find and defeat attacks.

Hadoop has been growing rapidly in popularity within the cyber security community, being used in building very large-scale databases of security intelligence data such as network logs, event data, and other data types needed by security analysts. Hadoop combines power, speed, and flexibility, which are the hallmarks of a good data platform. Cloudera has extended the open source base with Cloudera Enterprise, a portfolio of tools to create, manage and analyze large scale databases.

The initial prototype of ONI was created by data scientists at Intel. They created a database which is updated with more than 20 billion network events per day within the Intel corporate network. Then, using proprietary and open source visualization tools, they created a security workbench which allows them to identify and investigate potential threats.

Webroot is excited to be part of Open Network Insight, and excited to be working with Cloudera and Intel to bring this vision to reality. We will update the Blog with our progress.

Webroot’s 2015 SMB Threat Report: An Analysis

Recently, Webroot published 2015 SMB Threat Report: Are organizations completely ready to stop cyberattacks?, which included the results from a survey of 700 SMB decision makers worldwide about their IT security, their readiness for security response, and use of MSP recourses in their environment.

Many SMBs are outsourcing cybersecurity to managed services providers (MSPs) to make up for the lack of time and in-house expertise. According to the report, 81% of respondents agreed such outsourcing would improve their bandwidth for addressing other tasks. With the majority of SMBs surveyed planning to increase their cybersecurity budget in 2016, VARs across a broad variety of industries are beginning to embrace this service-centric relationship with their clients. For customers, choosing to work with an MSP means they avoid installation and maintenance headaches. They also avoid diverting resources towards laborious IT security support tasks or ad hoc break/fix reseller charges.

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Although SMBs appear more aware of cybersecurity-related risks to their organizations, many are still unsure or under-informed about their own readiness to handle such risks even with heavy investments of time into protecting the environments. Incredibly, even with 56% of respondents reporting over 17 hours spent on cybersecurity, 44% are still feeling they have less time to stay up-to-date on threats.

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Just 37% of IT decision makers surveyed in the US, the UK, and Australia believe their organizations are completely ready to manage IT security and protect against threats. While I am not entirely surprised given the considerable cybersecurity challenges SMBs face, but it’s still an alarmingly low number.

On the flip side, when asked how confident IT decision makers would be that someone on their staff could deal with a cyberattack, a surprising 84% responded confidently. Given the other responses to this survey, this was unexpected and indicates a discrepancy and possible misperception of IT resources, knowledge, and capability to thoroughly address a cyberattack.

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Webroot’s SMB Threat Report makes it clear that the future of security is in need of some change with IT decision makers are stretched thin. In the near future, we should expect a continued movement towards “outsourced IT,” particularly on the cybersecurity front. According to the survey, 81% of respondents believe outsourcing IT solutions would increase their bandwidth to address other areas of their business. In order to reap the full array of benefits, though, IT decision makers must be proactive about identifying MSPs that offer “intelligent cybersecurity” solutions.

Our definition of intelligent? Solutions that are easy to install, can be managed remotely, and provide real-time protection against modern threats. While these are all important qualifications, we expect SMBs to place an increased premium on the “real-time” component.