​Cloud facilitating necessary ANZ business-security response: BAE

The growing ease with which malicious outsiders are able to launch attacks against online targets means Australian and New Zealand businesses “need to get more proactive about defending themselves”, a BAE security executive has warned.

That ease of development has increased rapidly in recent years as ever more fully-featured toolkits and malware-for-hire services help even amateur cyber-criminals launch attacks against organisations of all sizes, BAE Systems Applied Intelligence (SAI) ANZ director of cyber security Adrian Blount told CSO Australia as the company launched a pair of cloud-based gateway services into the ANZ Market this week.

“Whether you're a bank that's been targeted as a specific campaign, or whether you're a small business that has been opportunistically hit by a CryptoLocker campaign, the attack is basically the same,” Blount said.

“A few years ago this stuff was the domain of very talented developers and programmers. Today, someone with a bit of drive to make some money and isn't worried about how they do it, can buy malware on the market and even have it tailored to suit their purposes.”

Defending against such casual attacks has seen the industry moving towards cloud-based defences that not only streamline the delivery of modern security tools to customers, but positions the cloud-based defences as collaborative gateways that both block outside attacks and support vendors' security-analytics efforts.

BAE SAI's new ANZ offerings target email-borne threats and 0-day attacks, pushing the interception point away from organisations' sensitive data. Yet the firm's role doesn't stop at filtering traffic: by rearchitecting enterprise security with the BAE SAI offerings as an integral point of contact, new attachment-based threats can be shunted to virtualised sandboxes where they can be triggered and monitored as they activate.

The cloud architecture also enables filtering of incoming and outgoing messages according to corporate policies, allowing sensitive data to be stopped before it leaves the organisation.

For BAE SAI, which has already been seeing “double digit growth” in Australia on the back of conventional security offerings that have grown from BAE's heritage of government technology solutions, the promise of cloud-based growth will open up the company's target market significantly and pave the way for further incursions into the local market.

Planned partnerships and channel relationships will help build a network of service providers, for whom delivering cloud-based security services to customers marks a far easier engagement than traditional systems-integration projects.

The coming year would see BAE SAI expanding its focus “from strong government and financial crime businesses to also build up strength and capability around our cybersecurity business,” Blount said. “The old defence in depth in understanding the threats and what's important to your organisation, are going to remain key.”

Blast from the past?

Try our new Space Invaders inspired video game NOW.

What score can you get ?