By Sundar Balasubramanian, Managing Director, India & SAARC, Check Point Software Technologies
According to a Check Point Research report, global cyberattacks rose by 38% in 2022 compared to the previous year with no sign of activity slowing down in 2023. Infact, here in India, an organization is being attacked on average 2036 times per week in the last 6 months, compared to 1206 attacks per organization globally, whilst 80% of the malicious files in India were delivered via E-mail in the last 30 days.
Such worrying numbers means that cybercriminalsare constantly finding new ways to exploit governments, major corporations and small to medium sized businesses. Motivated by political, financial, or social gain, criminalgroups are taking advantage of both the rising geopolitical tensions and the volatile economic climate.
The threat of multiple attack vectors loomslarge, and hackers are shifting their focus from individuals to organizations as they attempt to cause maximum disruption. With such a complex threat landscape, ensuring your organization has the best security measures in place should be a priority. But what does that look like? With the onslaught of digital transformation, and the continued dominance of remote work and new technology like 5G emerging, it can be hard to decide on the best security stance to adopt to prepare to meet these cyberattacks.
At Check Point Software Technologies, we believe in a prevention-first strategy built on a foundation of the three Cs: Comprehensive, Consolidated, and Collaborative.
Adopting a prevention-first approach
Less mature cyber security vendors often claim that cyberattacks will happen no matter how robust your security is. The best you can do is detect the attack once it has already breached the networkand respond as quickly as possible. However, there is another way.
Check Point Software’s market vision and brand promise, “You Deserve the Best Security”, ensures every organization can conduct their business over the internet with the highest levels of security. To deliver on this promise, we focus on our “prevention-first” market approach by leveraging the power of ThreatCloud data and artificial intelligence. ThreatCloud is powered by 30 years’ worth of data. Whencombined with big data threat intelligence and advanced AI technologies to provide accurate prevention, our technology canpreventadvanced threats across your entire network, endpoints, cloud environment, email, and IoT devices before they happen.In fact, ThreatCloud prevented 2.5 billion attacks in 2022!
In Miercom’s 2023 Next Generation Firewall (NGFW) Security Benchmark report, Check Point’s Quantum Cyber Security platform achieved a near-perfect score, with a 99.7% malware block rate and a 99.9% phishing prevention rate. In comparison, the average malware block rate for tested competitors was just 54.1%, and in phishing prevention tests, some tested competitors’ miss rates were ten times higher than that of Check Point, a weakness no organisation can afford in today’s high cyberattack range.
Furthermore, at a time when security teams are already under intense pressure, the last thing they want to deal with is false positive malware detection. In a 2021 report, it was suggested that 46% of web-application cybersecurity alerts were false positives. The report also found that these false positives took the same amount of time to remediate as real threats. Implementing Check Point’s suite of enterprise solutions will ensure false positives are reduced and security teams can focus on the issues that matter.
Critically, adopting a prevention-first approach could also reduce inflated cyber insurance premiums. As attacks become more sophisticated and increase in frequency, scrutiny of organizations’ defences has intensified. Up until recently, cyber insurance was reasonably priced and easy to obtain. However, between 2019 and 2021, the global cost of premiums soared from $3.3 billion to $6.5 billion. Ensuring your cybersecurity defences are fit for purpose has never been more important.
The Three Cs of Best Security – What are they, and why are they important?
Our prevention-first approach is brought to life through our three Cs of best security, but what are they and why should they be central to your organization’s cybersecurity strategy moving forward?
Comprehensive– The complexity of attack vectors is constantly evolving. Ensuring your organization is protected across everything from email and IoT devices to cloud networks and endpoints should be a priority. If one vector remains open, it could lead to a serious breach of critical infrastructure, akin to the Colonial Pipeline attack. A comprehensive solution that covers all vectors is imperative to prevent an incident occurring in the first place.
Consolidated – The latest generation of sophisticated cyberattacks spread quickly across all vectors and frequently bypass conventional defences. To combat these attacks, businesses deploy multiple point solutions, many of which duplicate efforts and create siloed lines of communication. A study conducted by Dimensional Research and Check Point found that 49% of all organizations use between 6- and 40-point security products, while 98% of organizations manage their security products with multiple consoles, creating visibility blind-spots.
There has been a shift in focus in recent years, with a Gartner study reporting that 75% of organizations were pursuing security vendor consolidation in 2022, up from 29% in 2020. Sixty-five percent of those surveyed said this was to improve their overall risk posture. By embracing a consolidated architecture that enhances security coordination and effectiveness, organizations improve security and save budget by reducing operational overhead to integrate multiple, siloed solutions.
Collaborative –Implementing a strategy with collaboration at its core could be the difference between success and failure. When an attack hits an endpoint for example, all other security technologies across cloud, network and email must act and respond accordingly to prevent the attack from entering through their respective vendor. To achieve that, the consolidated and comprehensive architecture must make sure every security engine is applied to any attack vector. On top of that, real-time threat intelligence information gathered from all enforcement points, research teams and third-party feeds, must be shared across the environment so action can be taken immediately to prevent the attack. Our API-based solutions can be integrated with third-party systems to deliver the most accurate real-time data.
Check Point was founded 30 years ago on the basis that prevention is better than remediation when it comes to cybersecurity. That vision has never been more important than in today’s digital landscape as organizations face sophisticated fifth generation cyberattacks from every threat vector and need to adopt a prevention-first approach to today’s security posture.
The need for cyber resilience has never been greater and I am proud that Check Point isreaffirming how a prevention-first model fits within an organization’s wider business strategy through the three Cs of best security.
These fundamentals are designed to focus the mind on what is important when building a cybersecurity strategy, ensuring that the choices customers make deliver the results they deserve as they build up cyber resilience.
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