F-Secure Countercept combines teams of highly skilled threat hunters and incident responders with cutting-edge technology to deliver a comprehensive, real-time managed detection and response (MDR) service.  

The solution recently won the Excellence accolade at the SC Awards Europe 2019 in the Best Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) Protection category. It aims to raise the bar for defending organizations against even the most skilled human adversaries conducting live, hands-on keyboard attacks.

These adversaries include nation states, organized crime groups, and even hacktivists. Organizations from highly targeted industries like finance, energy, and critical infrastructure currently use F-Secure Countercept to defend themselves from targeted cyber attacks.

F-Secure is showcasing Countercept at booth #547 at the Gartner Security & Risk Management Summit 2019 from June 17-20 at National Harbor in Maryland, U.S.A. Visitors will also be able to sign up to get more details about Countercept, as well as see a traveling hacking circus.

Tim Orchard, F-Secure Countercept managing director, will be talking about continuous response. F-Secure managing director, Americas, Rebecca Rathbun will be demonstrating the true financial impact that APT style attacks have on an organization and why these risks should play a stronger factor in defining an organization’s security posture.

Threat hunting and continuous response in one

“The evolving threat landscape makes it highly likely that almost any organization will be the target of a cyber attack. The increasing sophistication of these attacks now poses a new question: rather than asking ‘when will an attack occur?’ we should be asking ‘how will I effectively respond?’” Rebecca Rathbunpoints out.

Moreover, on-call IT Sec Ops Admins are increasingly trying to rely on automated tooling to provide 24/7 detection and response. This exposes both mature and less mature businesses at a time when attacker activity is more likely to occur.

Many solutions offer the ability to detect attacks, but provide limited means to quickly slow down or stop the attackers from achieving their objective while the attack is happening. To actually stop attacks takes more than just good – or even great – detection combined with an advanced technology and a team of skilled threat hunters to respond to a live attack as it is happening.

An attacker will aim to emulate the behaviors of legitimate system users in order to avoid detection once they have established an initial foothold on a target network. They will also use legitimate tools and credentials to evade traditional detection methods.

“The speed with which a business feels the financial impact of an attack is accelerating,” says Rathbun. “This is expected to continue as organizations move further into high availability and a digitized business model.”

Proactive, skilled threat hunters, who understand and constantly monitor your estate, collaborate with forensically-trained incident first responders with extensive experience engaging with tier 1 threats and overcoming them.

The solution, which uses a method of continuous response, has a 24/7 skill-uptime through collaboration between global offices. This ensures that a consistently high level of competency is applied to protecting clients, resulting in the best possible defense.

Tailor-made and versatile

Gartner states that “organizations are looking to address a lack of 24/7 threat detection and response — especially where there is lower maturity, and little to no investment in detection technologies and the experts needed to use those tools and perform incident response activities. Thus, MDR services are filling the demand.”

“Midsize enterprises are gravitating to MDR when looking for a turnkey service that fits their needs. More mature organizations with defined security operations teams look to MDR to fill gaps in their coverage, e.g., through services like managed EDR or threat hunting.”*

Rathbun emphasizes the importance of taking a long-termed approach to cyber security, citing many organizations can focus too much on the initial damage an attack can bring, like the incident response costs, fines, and negative press.

“However, these pains are often a drop in the bucket to the overall damage the attack can create,” she  concludes.