Shield Against Ransomware and Malware in the Cloud Using Cisco Umbrella

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Published 31-Jan-2017 16:38:19
Prevent ransomware and malware in the cloud with Cisco Umbrella
 

A recent study indicated that nearly half of UK companies were hit by ransomware demands over the previous year, and that nearly one-third of them lost revenue.

The study also suggested 20 per cent of affected businesses had to subsequently close down.

These figures seem alarming and may be excessive, but they do highlight that businesses continue to have ongoing security technology concerns. Hardly a week goes by with out some high profile hacking stories making the news.

Here, we’re going to take a brief look at a new innovation that moves security out into the internet itself, and how it could prevent your organisation becoming a victim.

Cisco Umbrella – a new approach

Cisco Umbrella is a cloud security platform that provides the first line of defence against threats on the internet, wherever users go. Instead of relying on traditional firewalls, Umbrella uses the internet’s infrastructure to block malicious destinations before a connection is ever established.

Umbrella uses DNS to stop threats over all ports and protocols — even direct-to-IP connections. In this way it stops malware before it reaches your endpoints or network. Instead of proxying all requests, Umbrella selectively routes suspicious URLs for deeper inspection, providing protection without delay or performance impact.

Even if devices become infected in other ways, Umbrella prevents connections to the attacker’s servers. This prevents data exfiltration and the execution of ransomware encryption.

Umbrella provides visibility and logging of internet activity across all devices, over all ports, even when users are away from the corporate network.

See attacks before they’re launched

Umbrella learns from internet activity to automatically identify attacker infrastructure staged for current and emergent threats. It captures and understand relationships between malware, domains, IPs, and networks across the internet.

Umbrella resolves over 80 billion internet requests daily from 65 million users across 160 countries. This provides unprecedented insight into staged and launched attacks. Umbrella analyses data to identify patterns, detect anomalies and create models to predict if a domain or IP is likely to be malicious. Its threat intelligence of global DNS requests provides a complete view of the relationships between domains, IPs, and malware to enrich your incident response and SIEM data.

By delivering security from the cloud, not only does Umbrella save you money, but it also also provides more effective and comprehensive security.

Easy to implement

This easy-to-implement Umbrella solution is used by Cisco itself. It deployed Umbrella for its internal global network of users in only two minutes. Umbrella supports over 850 billion daily internet requests for over 65 million users; only Google sees more traffic.

This innovative new approach blocks threats before they reach the perimeter and endpoints. It’s been suggested that Cisco Umbrella has reduced malware activity by 30 per cent.

As well as saving money on other security solutions,Cisco Umbrella does not require the purchase of any new hardware.

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