Our Pulse360 launch experience at Brooklands Museum in Surrey, UK – a truly historic aviation and motorsport innovation venue – was a great opportunity to gather customers and partner vendors under one roof. Together, we shared our latest statistics on cyber threats, cybersecurity, performance assurance and the use of technologies, including AI and machine learning. Our morning at Brooklands covered the many challenges which businesses now face and the solutions to address these which are available from SIRE through our Pulse360 suite of services. 

Welcome from SIRE

From Brooklands Vickers Suite, SIRE’s Russell Cook and John Leah introduced the event with an overview of Pulse360 suites success factors – the balance of products, technologies and skill sets. This set the scene for the launch experience to showcase the people behind the skills and solutions – our enterprise partners from SonicWall, Accedian and Invicti.  

The day’s presentations overviewed Pulse360 capabilities in safeguarding data, infrastructure, websites and digital assets while enabling outstanding performance. In terms of rising threat levels, the event couldn’t be timelier. Common themes – including Cyber Insurance Premiums from Macbeth Insurance, and Incident Response and Penetration Testing for Cyber Essentials ISO 727001 accreditation from RightCue Assurance – highlighted the scale and sophistication of cyber threats. 

Facts and figures echoed the Government’s 2021 Cyber Security Breaches Survey revealing that 39% of UK businesses identified a cyber-attack in the last 12 months. And one in five organisations identified more sophisticated vectors such as a denial of service, malware, or ransomware attack. These are precisely the types of attacks that are addressed by the key components of SIRE’s Pulse360 Secure partnership with SonicWall. 

Pulse360 Secure – SonicWall: security from data centre to distributed networks

James Eggington and Ryan Kahr discussed how SonicWall delivers effective security from the core to the edge of networks. They referred to the ‘war of revenue’, which is underlined by the shocking estimates that revenues from cybercrime could reach $5 trillion by 2025 – that’s compared to a cybersecurity market that could be worth a mere $160 billion.  

Calculations highlight that cyber criminals are set to earn 40x the revenue of an entire industry that’s dedicated to stopping them. And right now, cybercrime is the third largest global economy behind the US and China. 

It highlights that malware is on the rise while ransomware is showing a slight decline (for now). Artificial intelligence (AI) is being used to detect attacks and AI is identifying 45% more threats than the last report. Other trends include the continued exploitation of LOG4SHELL vulnerabilities, a spike in Internet of Things (IoT) malware and the fact that the majority of encrypted attacks are still beating ‘standard’ defences.  

SonicWall’s solutions

James and Ryan gave a walkthrough of their platform which in 2021 alone, recorded 5.4 billion malware attacks across the full range of attack vectors. Included in that figure are a record 623.3 million ransomware attacks (up 105% YoY globally). These numbers stretch across an array of attack surfaces – email, mobile and remote applications, cloud and SaaS, network security, endpoints, IoT and wireless connectivity. 

One of the key SonicWall’s patented technologies is RTDMI™ or Real-Time Deep Memory Inspection. This is used to identify and process known and unknown threats. Over 195 days, ISCA Labs, an independent third party, tested the SonicWall Capture ATP using never-before-seen malware samples, many just hours old. 

Results showed perfect threat detection of 100% (with 99% effectiveness at the first layer). SonicWall also earned the highest overall score among all participants for six consecutive quarters. The presenters focused on real-world effectiveness – in the first half of 2022, RTDMI™ technology discovered 270,228 never-before-seen malware variants. Plus, the presentation gave an overview of the portfolio of products that give organisations multi-layer protection and seamless coverage demanded by today’s changing threat landscape. 

Pulse360 Performance – Accedian: Network and Application performance observability

Paul Taylor from Accedian – partners in SIRE’s Pulse360 Performance solution – set out a compelling case for Network and Application Performance Visibility (NAPM) to tackle IT infrastructure complexity and the difficulties of managing and resolving problems.  

Paul highlighted some of the reasons behind this complexity such as new technologies that require diverse skill sets – for example, migrating to the cloud, other virtualized environments and SaaS applications. Plus, there are new connectivity services from WAN service providers along with the challenges of supporting mobile and hybrid workforces. As a result of this fragmented picture, IT teams need tools that provide the visibility to plan, troubleshoot, report on and the optimise IT performance.  

Paul showed how Accedian’s Skylight Analytics provides complete end-to-end visibility of environments in a single pane. This enables every packet in any environment to provide actionable intelligence with highly accurate testing. This helps assure the performance and availability of critical services – whether on-premises, cloud or SaaS. Skylight also simplifies dashboards and workflows to give stakeholders a shared view from NetOps and AppOps to senior IT and business decision-makers, as well as SecOps teams. 

Pulse360 Secure – Accedian: Network Detection and Response (NDR)

Paul also explained the benefits of network detection and response (NDR). Specifically, the way it helps a security operations centre (SOC) by ingesting network traffic by using machine learning to detect malicious activity and understand security risks and exposure. This underlines how AI is increasing our ability to understand what is ‘normal’ and flag anomalies that can indicate an attack.  

This early warning system of intelligent threat detection, investigation and response is vital for SOCs. That’s why Accedian Interceptor is already proving vital for detecting threats before they penetrate and cause financial or reputational damage. It’s also helping SOC teams prioritise and work more efficiently with a real-time and deeper understanding of threats and complete coverage for network, application and security operations. 

Pulse360 WebProtect – Invicti: closing the AppSec gap

Caroline Deverick advocated for a new approach to application security, by focusing on the time, cost and effort involved in addressing security backlogs. This ‘technical debt’ is due to 1 in 3 security issues making it into production without being caught in test or development stages. The increased focus on ‘shifting left’ – securing code early in the software development lifecycle (SDLC) mirrors Invicti’s approach to securing applications.  

However, a shift to the left isn’t the full story – Invicti puts equal emphasis on closing the security gap in two directions. For Invicti, the shift left to scan applications in development must work in combination with an expansion to the right to scan applications in production. That’s the easiest way to close the AppSec gap and is part of the Pulse360 WebProtect methodology.  

Caroline described Invicti’s approach as continuous application security, where everything possible is automated: 

• All app types: custom, cloud, legacy, third- party, APIs, and open source 
• All vulnerabilities: comprehensive vulnerability database, low false positives 
• All the time: continuously secures the entire application attack surface 
• All stakeholders: fully integrated into SDLC and DevSecOps workflows 
• All environments: development, staging, production. 

Let’s keep talking

SIRE would like to thank everyone for attending and for presenting on the day. If you missed the event, we hope this summary of some of the day’s discussions resonate with you. With today’s rising levels of cyber threats and IT complexity, based on our years of experience we can help you stay protected – so please don’t hesitate to get in touch.  

Get in touch > sales@sire.co.uk
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About our presenters and partners

Invicti, a leader in AppSec, is headquartered in Austin, Texas, and has employees in over 11 countries serving more than 4,000 organizations around the world. 

Accedian is a leader in performance analytics, cybersecurity threat detection and end user experience solutions, dedicated to providing our customers with the ability to assure their digital infrastructure, while helping them to unlock the full productivity of their users. 

SonicWall delivers Boundless Cybersecurity for the hyper-distributed era in a work reality where everyone is remote, mobile and unsecure. 

RightCue Assurance provides cyber insurance services across many sectors including technology, legal, defence, public sector, finance, education, manufacturing, pharmaceutical, charity and marketing. 

Macbeth provide professional advice with a personal touch and is a leading cyber insurance provider offering specialist protection that’s often missing from general liability policies.