Johannesburg, 15 May 2023
Small and medium-sized businesses/enterprises (SMEs) face the same cyber risks as large enterprises do, but have fewer resources to protect against attacks and recover from them.
This is according to Alex Williamson, sales engineer at Acronis, who was addressing a recent webinar on cyber security for SMEs.
Williamson noted: “SMEs are vulnerable and they are a target. Threat actors casting a wide net to target SMEs have a good chance of catching some, because SMEs may not have the resources they need to properly protect themselves. Things like supply chain attacks might also present vulnerabilities SMEs aren’t looking at.”
He said: “It has become harder for all businesses to stay ahead of cyber risk and many SMEs don’t have the funds and resources to maintain a robust security environment.”
He said most exploits still occur via e-mail, with 94% of malware delivered through e-mail. “It’s a common vulnerability in every organisation, because e-mail is used by people and people remain the biggest weakness. As more people work from home, there has been massive adoption of Microsoft 365, which has made this platform a prime target. Even though Microsoft 365 has built-in protection, 80% of breaches are new or unknown ’zero day’ attacks that can bypass traditional defences,” he said.
Williamson said that in addition to ransomware and malware risks, numerous other threats face workloads, including accidental deletion, stolen devices, hardware failure, file corruption and unmanaged devices. Using multiple solutions from a variety of vendors to mitigate these risks could mean that SMEs end up without full coverage.
“Acronis has seen this gap in the market to provide a full set of tools within a single platform to give SMEs a ‘protection shield’ against all vulnerabilities. Acronis has been providing backup for over 20 years, but has added threat identification, protection, detection, response, recovery and learning to protect against the full stack of threats. Acronis Cyber Protect Cloud integrates what have traditionally been multiple product sets into a single product and platform for ease of use and peace of mind.”
He outlined how Acronis multi-layered e-mail security offers seven layers of protection against modern e-mail borne threats, with threat intelligence, an anti-spam engine, anti-evasion, anti-phishing, anti-spoofing, static detection against known malware and next-generation dynamic detection to protect against APTs, zero days and unknown or highly evasive malware.
The Acronis Cyber Protect Cloud with advanced e-mail security powered by Perception Point scans e-mail traffic in real-time, minimising risks across Microsoft 365, Google Workspace or any e-mail client.
“The e-mail security is set up to intercept incoming mails, scan them, detect threats and block them before they reach the inbox. This does not delay mails by more than a few seconds. It also inspects links and URLs and uses unique CPU level technology to see what happens when you open an attachment,” he explained.
Acronis also makes EDR functionality, previously the preserve of large enterprises, accessible to SMEs. They can easily view incidents, understand the cyber kill chain and respond using the appropriate tools at the click of a button. “Even people without a cyber security degree can understand what has happened in an attack and perform the necessary actions,” he said.
“An important aspect is disaster recovery. In the event of failures, our solution allows you to perform a failover to the Acronis cloud infrastructure without disrupting business processes. Acronis has a local data centre in South Africa and meets all compliance standards,” Williamson said.