Summary Bullets:

• Palo Alto Networks’ acquisition of The Crypsis Group will enable the company to successfully build and strengthen detection and prevention capability in its Cortex XDR platform and drive market growth.
• Palo Alto will acquire a highly experienced team consisting of 150 security consultants with strong capabilities in incident response and risk mitigation.

Palo Alto Networks continues with its investment strategy with the latest acquisition of The Crypsis Group, an incident response, risk management, and digital forensics company, for $265 million. With this acquisition, Palo Alto Networks plans to strengthen its Cortex XDR platform to successfully eliminate and address cyber threats. In particular, Palo Alto will enhance functionality in its Cortex XDR platform in collecting rich security telemetry data, managing breaches, and initiating rapid response actions. The platform already has strong detection and response capabilities that natively integrate network, endpoint, and cloud data to stop sophisticated cyberattacks. It does this by continually identifying evasive threats with increased accuracy and by profiling user and endpoint behavior with analytics capabilities. The Cortex XDR also has strong machine learning (ML) capabilities to analyze data from Palo Alto’s networks as well as third parties to identify highly engineered threats targeting devices and systems. Building further enhancements on its Cortex XDR offering around prediction, prevention, and mitigation of cyberattacks – and at speed – will enable Palo Alto to differentiate in the marketplace as it moves forward with a highly effective detection and response platform that integrates endpoint, network, and cloud data. Continue reading “Palo Alto Networks Completes Acquisition of The Crypsis Group to Strengthen Its Cortex XDR Offering” →

Summary Bullets:

• IBM is mapping its COVID-19 support efforts around seven major technology and business concerns relevant to clients during the outbreak, with business continuity and IT security being two key areas.

• Company executives think the move by so many organizations to remote work will accelerate major post-pandemic transformation projects.

The rapid shift of brick and mortar operations by enterprises and governments to a remote work model has placed technology companies front and center in the fight for business to survive. IT vendors and service providers are helping clients with everything from standing up new collaboration systems and providing critical connectivity to delivering AI-based tools to support customer communications with fewer call center resources. As one of the world’s largest providers of technology and professional and managed services, IBM has been leading a massive effort to help clients transition to and manage remote operations. Continue reading “COVID-19: IBM Helps Clients Protect their Digital Assets and Keep Newly Remote Operations Online During the Pandemic” →

Summary Bullets:

• Security heads must consider the right options when addressing security gaps in an organization’s IT, with a particular focus on email phishing, ransomware, DDoS, and network breaches.

• Assess vendors that have strong threat management capabilities, wide portfolio coverage encompassing cloud and endpoint security through a platform-centric approach, and flexible commercial pricing arrangements.

The global healthcare sector is being subjected to an array of cyberattacks as it deals with the COVID-19 pandemic. Criminals are attempting to cash in through ransomware and compromise the integrity of IT systems. Recent examples where GlobalData has seen cyberattacks include i) Bruno University Hospital in Czech Republic, one of the country’s COVID-19 testing centers, was struck by ransomware resulting in the postponement of surgeries, ii) the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services suffered a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack intended to disrupt the organization’s responses to the COVID-19 pandemic, and iii) increased phishing website hacking attempts on the World Health Organization (WHO) and its partners. Continue reading “COVID-19: Considerations for Cybersecurity in Healthcare” →

Summary Bullets:

• Vendors are prioritizing portfolio and marketing effort on the most common types of COVID-19 related cyber events, covering phishing and identity attacks.

• Cybersecurity vendors are reconfiguring their service and support functions encompassing remote working. Vendors face internal operational challenges in scaling up quickly with the right level of security posture.

The COVID-19 pandemic is having a huge impact globally across families and communities. In turn, this is having a massive impact on businesses of all sizes, including global multinationals. Almost all Fortune 100 and 500 companies have experienced major disruptions to their operations and markets, resulting in some economists predicting losses of more than $1.1 trillion worldwide. COVID-19 has created shutdowns and major disruptions in employee working styles and supply chains in all sectors, and in particular across government, finance, manufacturing, IT, and media. As these sectors reconfigure their operations, one of the most critical issues arising are increased cyber-attack threats as organizations become more dependent on technology. Continue reading “COVID-19: Impact on Cybersecurity” →