With all the cyberattacks lately, how can you expect one IT guy to catch up? Cybersecurity threats are growing by the day—a 450 BILLION dollar industry has made it easy to recruit. And many budding criminals are getting on the job training on the most effective attacks.
In fact, there’s little more than ordering a kit nowadays—that include all the steps on how to initiate a successful cyber campaign. That means, criminals don’t have to be the computer wiz to get some really lucrative attacks (attacks that are hitting businesses like yours!).
While having cybersecurity or security conscious IT Support is definitely a necessity to help combat all of the attacks bombarding American businesses, having good IT support and security prevention is only part of the solution. Another very effective component to your business security is having a heuristic firewall that not only recognizes attacks, but evolves as attacks get more sophisticated or when behaviors of attacks or viruses change. Today I wanted to walk through why we use heuristics in protecting client networks (and why you should consider using a smart, heuristics-based firewall for to protect your business’ network!).
First, what does heuristic mean?
It sounds like something your math teacher might use. Your firewall should use heuristic modeling to keep up-to-speed with the types and diversity of attacks confronting businesses. That means your firewall is smart enough to look at what types of attacks have happened to other businesses (or have attempted to strike businesses) and determine a large array of attack types that may be target specific components of your network.
Essentially this smart firewall is kind of like your immune system—it is always learning about new viruses and bugs that are trying to get in and blocks those (and similar kinds of viruses) from getting past your defenses.
Why does your firewall need teaching and training? Doesn’t it have everything perfect the first time?
I’m sure having worked in any Microsoft product, you’ve come across features that don’t work well. Maybe it’s something the software can’t do or maybe it’s something it should do but hasn’t been working properly. If you didn’t have an evolving firewall that sees the latest attacks and is smart enough to identify or predict the next type of attack, it likely wouldn’t be of much value.
Since hackers are always conceiving new ways to break into your networks, having a static firewall that simply provides you with 5-year old methods (rather than learning and evolving as the attacks are evolving), your firewall is likely not doing you much good (if any!).
Learning to Walk
You can think of a smart “learning” firewall like a human learning how to walk. You start out with some innate ability to move around.
When you’re born, you can move your arms and legs, but you’re not strong enough to do anything else. Over time, you continue to go through a process of crawling, standing and walking (none of which is done all at once).
Similarly, your firewall starts out with only so much understanding of the threat landscape. Over time, it learns to identify more sophisticated (or different) methods of attack. As it builds a database of exposures, your business becomes more and more protected against a greater variety of threats than if you were to simply have a static firewall.
Your business benefits from ALL attacks from thousands of businesses—rather than simply learning from attacks your business encounters. Note: the average company is exposed to over 200,000 attacks daily—that means a smart firewall encounters millions more attacks than your business would ever be exposed to in any given day.
To demonstrate how easy it is to succumb to an attack nowadays, here’s a TRUE STORY:
It was Tuesday afternoon at 1 o’clock and all of a sudden one of your team members says he can’t access their documents. A little while later, people across your office are reporting that documents are no longer opening on the network.
Come to find out your receptionist was doing research to find good prices on office supplies and stumbled across a website infected with a virus. But this virus wasn’t just any virus. This virus walked your entire network and locked EVERYTHING down on your network. Now you have to restore from backup—a process that normally takes at least a few hours.
How could this all have been avoided?
Having a smart firewall that (1) looks at where traffic is going and (2) what that traffic is carrying can save you time, headache and a bad reputation of being vulnerable to network hacks and infections.
You see, when your receptionist went to that office supply website, she clicked on a link that had a payload in it. If your firewall was smart, it would have stopped that payload and kept your company from being infected.
And even if it missed the payload, when your receptionist’s computer reached out to get the encryption key—a special key that ransomware like this uses to lock down the data—it would have blocked it because all of a sudden your receptionist’s computer is going to a place it has never been before: maybe Russia, Croatia, or China.
What you need is a smart solution. One like fitSecure. That’s capable of identifying and recognizing dangerous content. Blocking and alerting a team of experts to come in and save the day in case of someone actually getting an infection.
fitSecure:
- Automatically blocks addresses and ports coming from suspicious geographic regions.
- Identifies and locks down network traffic using heuristics and continues to seek out indicators of attacks to identify previously unknown cyberattacks.
- Proactively stops attacks by inspecting code, messages and websites.
fitSecure benefits are obvious:
- Check off your IPS/IDS requirement for HIPAA or PCI compliance because your data is safe.
- Don’t worry about downtime from viruses—ransomware and cryptowall.
- Get to your network from anywhere—safely, with secure Virtual Private Network access for your team.
Our no-hack guarantee is simple: if a hacker figures out a way into your systems, we will recover your data, computers and network for FREE. Why react to infections after they’ve already done their damage and cost your business? Why not get smart business security with fitSecure? Contact Us TODAY to find out how easy it can be to protect your client data, your team and your business from malicious attacks
