Protecting Data, Emerging Threats Hot Topics at Channel Partners Virtual

Protecting data was a big topic at this week’s Channel Partners Virtual, with numerous sessions focusing on the latest threats and solutions.

Among the highlights were our latest Cybersecurity Thunderdome, as well as sessions focusing on protecting data in motion and 2021 predictions.

Webroot’s Joe Cerrone

In his session, Joe Cerrone, MSP account manager at Webroot, highlighted the many challenges to protecting data in 2021. The predictions were chilling, but also good news for MSPs.

“The cybersecurity skills gap is going to continue to widen, meaning businesses will continue to struggle to stay resilient against cyberattacks,” he said. “This will force them to increase their cybersecurity spend. They’re going to reallocate budget to secure the new hybrid workforce, creating a massive opportunity for MSPs to sell their services.”

To manage the skills gap, managed endpoint detection and response (EDR) supported by artificial intelligence (AI) will replace the traditional security operations center (SOC), Cerrone said.

Regarding the threat landscape, Emotet is very prevalent and Webroot expects it will remain the most active botnet, he said. It will continue to serve as a malware distribution service.

“And business email compromise will have yet another record year,” Cerrone said. “It accounted for over $2 billion [in losses] in the United States alone in 2020.”

Deepfakes will be increasingly easier to create, making misinformation a leading threat that companies must defend against, he said. In addition, phishing pages will primarily use HTTPS. It’s not as secure as originally thought.

And the most unsettling stat?

“We’re going to see a single ransomware victim may over $50 million to restore their data,” Cerrone said. “And as we know for a lot of businesses, that is a death sentence. And we’re also going to see cybercriminals expanding their ransomware targeting from government, education and health care organizations to manufacturing and supply chains.”

Tech Data’s Chris DeRosiers

Privafy’s Kumar Vishwanathan

Another session focused on securing data in motion. Kumar Vishwanathan, Privafy’s executive vice president and CTO, and Chris DesRosiers, Tech Data’s director of security solutions business development, addressed the issue.

Data in motion is when computers talk to each other and transmit data across a network to get it from a user to a system, or between systems.

Examples of threats associated with data in motion include identity hijacking and distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, Vishwanathan said.

Another attack type is USB thumb drives and USB plug-in drives, DesRosiers said.

“There’s also something a little more exotic, like a man in the middle attack,” So if you think about taking your laptop
to Starbucks Wi-Fi, you see a guy over in the corner, he’s got a backpack [that] runs an access point off a battery.
And that access point says Starbucks Wi-Fi. In that sense, he becomes the man in the middle intercepting data in the air as you are transmitting back to the office.”

If you don’t have a VPN encrypting that data, that man in the middle can potentially intercept those transmissions and
record them to a hard drive, DesRosiers said.

Vishwanathan and DesRosiers also provided steps for protecting data in motion.

“The first thing to look at is to really drive some data hygiene into your workforce,” Vishwanathan said. “And what I mean by that is who is accessing what.”

Many times, Organizations lose data hygiene as they grow, he said.

“So start putting some data hygiene in place and then build up the rest of your security stack,” Vishwanathan said. “Make sure you have effective firewalls in place and effective remote access solutions in place. “

And if budget permits, start investing in anomaly detection, he said.

For partners, risk assessment is the beginning of the conversation, DesRosiers said.

“And risk assessments cover a lot of different areas, from multifactor authentication (MFA) to perimeter security, etc.,” he said. “But as it comes to the data itself, this is about the assessments that identify the data location, classify it, categorize it and figure out who has access. But to take it a step further, you want to be able to offer other elements. Some basic steps are encrypting that data, and that can include encryption at rest or in transit. And you might want to consider as you evolve your data in motion security posture the idea of data obfuscation or data masking. This…