Johannesburg, 30 Sep 2021
Organisations around the world are increasingly unable to mitigate cyber risk, and are seeking more staff and security operations centres (SOCs) to help them cope.
This is according to Dima Dabbour, Senior Channel Account Executive MSP at Sophos, who was speaking at a webinar on the Sophos Managed Threat Response (MTR) value proposition for local managed service providers (MSPs) and managed security service providers (MSSPs).
“We have seen a big evolution of threats over the past year,” she said. “Last year hackers were living off the land, using normal tools to get inside. More recently, they have started using ransomware as a service and automated ‘active adversaries’ steered by humans. We are also increasingly seeing that the attackers are continuously modifying security controls to evade detection, and an explosion of third party or supply chain attacks. There has been a shift from only asking for a ransom to decrypt files, to threatening to publish stolen data on the Internet.”
Dabbour highlighted the State of Ransomware Survey 2021, which polled decision makers around the world, and found that 24% of South African respondents were hit by ransomware last year – lower than the global average of 37%. In South Africa, 44% of the attacks succeeded in encrypting the data – lower than the global average of 54%. With an average overall ransomware recovery cost of $450 000, many targeted organisations do not get their data back even after paying the ransom, she said. Only 8% get all of the data back after paying the ransom, with 29% recovering less than half of their data.
Furthermore, 58% said they had experienced an increase in cyber attacks over 2020, 40% said attacks were now too advanced for their IT teams to manage alone, and 75% said they planned to increase their in-house IT security staff by 2023.
The changing environment presents significant opportunities for managed security services providers, Dabbour said.
“Cyber security is crucial for the survival of digitised enterprises, and 50% of businesses plan to use managed detection and response services, with nearly 100% of organisations planning to implement human-led threat hunting or a Security Operations Centre (SOC) within a year,” she said. “Customer awareness and demand for cyber security is increasing, and they are pushing their MSPs to become MSSPs offering full cyber security and a SOC to deliver threat hunting, extended detection and response and rapid response 24/7.”
A poll of webinar participants aligned with global trends: when asked whether their customers were interested in SOC services, 40% said yes, 50% said the topic was gaining traction and 10% said customers had not expressed interest yet. 14% said they were already MSSPs, 33% were transitioning to become one, and 52% said they were not offering managed security services.
Dabbour noted that Sophos helped MSPs transform into MSSPs with Sophos Managed Threat Response and Sophos MSP Connect supporting efficiency and scale, and the advantages of one strong security vendor, one management dashboard and one flexible programme.
For information on the Sophos complete cyber security system for MSPs, go to https://www.sophos.com/en-us/partners/managed-service-providers.aspx
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