The company WALLIX, who work with clients like McDonalds and Gulf Air to protect their most critical assets against data breaches, has recently announced their new BestSafe solution. The technology is designed to allow organizations to protect user workstations and application servers against new cyber threats like ransomware, in a more streamlined way that won’t negatively impact productivity.
To learn more, Digital Journal spoke with WALLIX’s Chad Carter.
Digital Journal: What are the main data processing challenges that businesses face?
Chad Carter: All businesses must strike a balance between accessibility of data and IT infrastructure – to employees and contractors trying to do their jobs – and security of those resources. When individuals have elevated rights to access sensitive or critical data assets, whether accessing them remotely or from within the organization’s corporate network, ensuring that the data is only accessed when and by those explicitly authorized is a complex task, when also trying to ensure work efficiency and productivity and not slowing teams down with burdensome security processes.
DJ: What are the main cybersecurity risks?
Carter: The main cybersecurity risks can be varied depending on the nature of the organization, but every organization that has digital data as its most important asset considers losing or compromising it as the biggest risk there is, as this normally leads to a reputation impact on the business in addition to financial and productivity costs. These losses or compromises are often caused by a malware attack of some sort, and even if they are not successful in stealing data, they might still shut down the production of the company for a couple of hours or days.
Put simply, all businesses face risks including data breach (stolen or held for ransom), loss of business, loss of productivity, loss of consumer trust, and more.
DJ: How many of these are insider as opposed to outsider threats?
Carter: Contrary to common ideas, a majority of data breaches aren’t carried out by criminal hacker organizations. And those that do come from outside the organization ultimately have one goal in mind: to become an insider. Malware, ransomware, and other cyberattacks aim to steal or otherwise gain access to high-level IT infrastructure, elevating their own privileges from within to access more and more sensitive assets.
Insider threats can easily be end users, they aren’t necessarily experts in cybersecurity. Many social engineering methods have been created to trick them into doing something that they shouldn’t do without even knowing (think: phishing, ransomware). And if management has allowed end users to be able to something they shouldn’t, like downloading programs without approval, odds are that at some point they will end up doing it. In this case, it would be the organization’s fault and it’d still be considered an insider threat.
DJ: Why do many enterprises lack endpoint management and security?
Carter: Many companies are still unaware of the fact that endpoints like employee workstations can be the main entry target for attackers, and this makes every user and every endpoint a potential insider threat. Even if the users’ endpoints are not critical assets, at some point they need to be granted access to critical assets. And this is precisely why endpoints are so targeted: end users are not trained to be knowledgeable about security and can easily fall prey to attack.
DJ: What is the BestSafe solution?
Carter: WALLIX BestSafe is a powerful endpoint protection solution (EPM) eliminating the risks associated with overprivileged users and preventing the spread of malware, cryptoviruses, and ransomware attacks. Unlike other endpoint solutions, BestSafe offers security at the application level, not at the user level, making it possible to eliminate local administrators on workstations by granting specific rights to each user and distributing privileges to the applications and processes instead of the users themselves. WALLIX BestSafe is the compromise between security and productivity: a local non-administrator user can still execute tasks requiring privileges, like running applications or downloading software tools, without the help of IT teams and without jeopardizing the organization’s security. The result? Unmatched endpoint security.
DJ: How did you develop the technology?
Carter: The BestSafe technology was engineered taking into consideration all the problems derived from managing a large infrastructure. With hundreds or thousands of endpoints, corporate security is paramount, yet the impact on user efficiency and burden on IT teams when users do not have administrative privileges is significant. This experience is reflected across a vast majority cases of large IT environments. Developing the software to solve them, with an innovative, application-based approach, was a logical solution to the critical challenges these organizations face.
DJ: What makes your technology different to your competitors?
Carter: With rapid implementation, WALLIX BestSafe’s ease of use allows for a faster return on investment. Simple yet powerful solutions are key to cybersecurity success. With WALLIX BestSafe, a company can be secure and productive at the same time, whereas our competitors assume that it’s necessary to compromise one to achieve the other. Furthermore, it’s as scalable as the organization without any additional cost.
Technologically, the BestSafe solution takes a new, unparalleled approach to endpoint security by addressing privileges at the application and process level, not at the user level. This results in unmatched security and granularity of control. Grey-listing, in addition to white and black-listing, enables organizations to implement precise privilege management allowing or blocking specific actions even within approved applications, or restricting application privileges for users who themselves have elevated rights.
