IBM X-Force has reported a huge increase in COVID-19-related spam. Malicious domains have also rapidly expanded during the first quarter of 2020. 

Focus on Security Fundamentals

One of the key fundamental approaches for security is to ensure your security team can identify, investigate and respond to threats. We recommend mining network data to help identify potential vulnerabilities and understand the nature of the cybersecurity threats that have emerged during the crisis. This can help offset increases in phishing attacks targeting remote workers and users interested in COVID-19.

Network Security Helps Pinpoint Attacks on Remote Users

Enterprises need to gain visibility and control over company assets, including home office devices, so they can detect unusual behavior and take corrective actions. Vital clues exist in network traffic; all attacks utilize the network at some point. Visibility into network traffic allows you to uncover anomalies in normal user activities, which could be symptoms of malware attacks.

Today’s environment has brought in more remote traffic and unusual email communications from government agencies and third parties, so focusing on network traffic can still surface phishing attacks and enable your security operations teams to detect, investigate and respond.

Key actions to defend against these attacks are gaining visibility into the network traffic, monitoring user and network behaviors correlating to known threats across the enterprise. In many cases, security analysts have used different tools independently in order to gather relevant information and confirm there is a high risk threat attack under way. The speed of detection and response can be improved if these tools are integrated together to help guide the security administrator through an analysis.

An Integrated Approach to Securing Networks

The live webinar “Why APTs Can Be So Difficult To Find, Investigate, And Resolve” at 2 pm (EST) July 21, 2020, and at 9 am (EST) July 22, 2020, brings together security industry leaders from IBM, Gigamon and Endace to discuss effective approaches for quickly discovering advanced persistent threats (APTs) and confidently finding unalterable evidence of these complex threats.

The webinar will discuss how you can decrypt network traffic, correlate this traffic with user behavior analysis, gain insights into the attack and provide a fast investigation pivot into EndaceVision to investigate the network packets for detailed analysis.

Together, these technologies can:

• Record network traffic (packet capture).
• Analyze network traffic and flows.
• Decrypt network traffic to make it available for visibility.
• Correlate and prioritize security events.
• Analyze user behavior to find malicious users and identify risk scores.
• Predict outcomes, and recommend next steps with new AI models.
• Speed response and visualize attack stages using MITRE ATT&CK.
• Gain insights from Watson’s 10 billion plus security data points.

Come see how they work together to provide the ability to quickly detect, investigate and respond to these threats.