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Saicom partners with Thinkst Canary

Regina Pazvakavambwa
By Regina Pazvakavambwa, ITWeb portals journalist.
Johannesburg, 31 Jan 2017
The industry will see an important move back to host security and honeypots, says Saicom.
The industry will see an important move back to host security and honeypots, says Saicom.

Saicom Voice Services has entered into a strategic partnership with Thinkst Canary to offer organisations a fully-managed honeypot network security service.

According to Saicom, the service, which complements the company's existing network security solution, benefits businesses that want to consolidate their security services due to the growing complexity of securing the trusted and untrusted network.

"Our honeypot managed service includes the detection of network breaches and extends to forensic investigations to determine the origin of the threat and whether internal devices or systems have been compromised," says Greg de Chasteauneuf, chief technology officer at Saicom.

Cyber attackers are often present on networks for lengthy periods of time before they carry out an attack, says Saicom. Detection and mitigation are becoming important aspects of cyber security due to the increasingly large and permeable attack surface, it adds.

De Chasteauneuf says the cyber security industry as a whole needs to ask itself what the most significant development over the past 20 years has been, because the reality is that companies are being compromised and held to ransom more frequently.

The current mindset is very much that of perimeter security - a firewall boarding the trusted and untrusted networks, he notes. "Most companies believe this is enough, but the reality is it is not." Today's threats come from everywhere, not just the untrusted networks, and many of these attacks render the traditional perimeter firewall useless, says De Chasteauneuf.

Human beings are often the weakest link and it is a company's own employees who can punch holes in its network, he notes. "The point is, if an attacker is on a company's network, it needs to know about it. This is where deception technology steps in. The industry will see an important move back to host security and honeypots to detect and mitigate lateral movement within the trusted local-area network."

Next generation tools like Thinkst Canary reliably set off an alarm when an active attack is discovered. They are simple, effective and alert a company when it needs it most, says De Chasteauneuf.

"Companies have spent millions of rands on security tools that have achieved almost nothing, except for giving them a false sense of security, says Haroon Meer, founder and researcher at Thinkst.

"A quick look at recent headlines shows that those companies are now paying the price for it. Thinkst Canary forces attackers to reveal themselves, allowing companies to quickly discover an attack when their other security controls have failed."

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