SBN

It’s Time for Federal Agencies to Stop Malware for Good

Cybersecurity teams at federal agencies all face the same challenge: How do you protect against emerging threats when the agency work environment keeps evolving?

 

The problem would be easy if you could just shut off portions of the internet and prevent users from accessing risky sites. But these restrictive limits may be too aggressive–especially considering that the majority of work today is conducted on the internet. After all, who’s to say that Youtube isn’t really a critical business tool. It could very well be.

 

The other problem is that a site deemed “safe” today could be infected tomorrow, and security vendors that manage your categorization and black lists may not immediately detect the change in status. Given the fast-changing nature of today’s threats, it is virtually impossible to update threat intelligence in real time.

 

Existing Security Solutions Fall Short

On-premise solutions require regular hardware refreshes, which are costly and time consuming. On-premise Secure Web Gateways (SWGs) aren’t designed to support a large remote workforce and cloud-based options are limited. Naturally, the industry says that scaling up most cyber solutions requires more–more servers, more capacity, more management, more maintenance and, of course, more budget. Even cloud-based security solutions are not infinitely scalable–requiring additional bandwidth and licensing fees that continue to grow, grow, grow.

 

It’s clear that all the infrastructure investments in the world can’t change the fact that a detect and respond security approach is inherently flawed. Government agencies and their security providers simply can’t move fast enough to categorize the entire internet in real time, update black and white lists and gain and operationalize current threat intelligence.

 

Instead of Isolating Your Users, Isolate the Threats

Isolation enables true zero-trust security–an approach that assumes all online resources could be compromised. Rather than try to deflect an attack, cloud-based isolation creates a virtual air gap between the website or document and your users’ devices, whether they are on-premises or remote, so there’s no access path for malicious downloads to follow. Instead, isolation forces all websites to open in a virtual browser, strips out all malware and renders only safe content to the end device. To users, the process is transparent. They can navigate the site, click through the pages, watch videos and read documents as usual. But content stays in the cloud, and hidden code can’t download to a user’s device.

 

And that is precisely the point. Bad actors can’t infect your end points and spread laterally through the network if they don’t even have access to users’ machines. No access. No infections. No malware. No worries. A bureaucrat’s dream.

 

It’s time to stop chasing malware. Download Menlo Security’s Stop Malware for Good ebook and learn how you can take a proactive approach to securing work and making federal employees more productive wherever government business takes them.

*** This is a Security Bloggers Network syndicated blog from Menlo Security Blog authored by Menlo Security. Read the original post at: https://www.menlosecurity.com/blog/its-time-for-federal-agencies-to-stop-malware-for-good