Evolving companies face evolving cyber threats. It’s no secret that these organizations can benefit from the help of a third-party MSP when it comes to maintaining cybersecurity services, but just how effective are managed cybersecurity solutions?
During our recent webinar, “Always On: ECI’s Managed XDR and the Top 3 Attacks Thwarted,” we took a look at why more than 250 clients put their trust in ECI’s Managed eXtended Detection and Response (MXDR) platform to protect their infrastructure and operations. ECI CTO Steven Schoener and Security Operations Director Kamyar Kojouri highlighted how ECI’s MXDR has enabled financial services clients to thwart the top three most common cyber threats by flagging more than 20 billion incidents.
Identifying the Top Threats to Financial Firms
As the cybersecurity that continues to spawn new threats and new threat vectors, especially for small and mid-sized financial services firms, limited resources and skillsets place a huge premium on prioritizing the most critical threats to the business. Based ECI’s experience protecting clients, Steve and Kam pinpointed three of the most critical and frequent types of attacks these companies are experiencing:
- Business email compromise – ECI’s MXDR platform has been highly effective at flagging and preventing an increasing number of business email compromise attempts. MXDR’s system-wide monitoring and control capabilities are able to spot even the most sophisticated attacks – such as flagging unauthorized configuration changes when a threat actor hacks Outlook rules to insert fake invoices into an accounts payable account for clients to unwittingly pay to an illicit account.
- Stolen passwords – ECI’s MXDR systems proactively identified and blocked a significant number of attempts by hackers to steal passwords or other credentials from clients. These represent rich targets for malicious actors looking to sell them on the dark web or use them for their own exploits. Some of the most brazen attempts these days may even try to siphon out your entire browser cache credentials.
- Ransomware – While this form of threat is well-established, the striking growth in aggressive tactics has been surprising. In particular, MXDR platforms set up for ECI customers have thwarted a relatively new brand of what that webinar panelists called “human operated ransomware” This involves a double extortion scheme where malicious actors actively exfiltrate data at the same time they’re installing ransomware – so they steal your data anyway, while charging you a ransom to have it back.
ECI’s MXDR Delivers Complete and Cost-Effective Protection Against Top Cyberthreats
Based on ECI’s experience with clients, it’s clear that the top three threats above are often interrelated. For instance, stolen passwords can be used to subsequently stage either a business email compromise or ransomware attack; and such attacks often include sensitive passwords on the target list of valuable assets to compromise or steal.
Against this backdrop, the webinar panelists explained that the MXDR solution must guard against these interrelated threats with an equally interrelated, powerful combination of cyber protections. Ultimately, the webinar showed how ECI’s MXDR is a convenient and cost-effective way to implement comprehensive XDR protections with the help of a trusted partner for ongoing configuration and management of the platforms.
As Gartner defines it, XDR is “a SaaS-based, vendor-specific, security threat detection and incident response tool that natively integrates multiple security products into a cohesive security operations system that unifies all licensed components.” As a leader in Managed XDR, ECI operates as the gold standard for optimally configuring and managing an XDR implementation for advanced threat detection and proactive endpoint protection for clients.
Our MXDR offers holistic protection by ingesting, analyzing and then proactively addressing literally billions of events from workstations, servers, network devices, cloud services, Office 365, Azure, AWS and elsewhere to create enhanced clarity and control of all factors affecting security across the IT estate. It’s this power that not only helped identify the top three threats among clients, but that also fuel the proactive approach to stop these threats in their tracks.
