Securing Advanced Threats for Customers: A Learn, Segment, Protect Approach

Jon Bove

It’s no secret that today’s cyberthreats are complex — malware developers are rapidly expanding their attack capabilities to bypass modern security measures. However, as organizations across industries and of varying sizes continue to expand their digital transformation efforts, there’s a consistent obstacle that limits IT teams’ ability to effectively evolve alongside these new threats — network visibility.

Cybersecurity professionals are now tasked with maintaining their traditional security initiatives while simultaneously facilitating their organization’s adoption of new technologies, services and platforms. While these efforts are necessary to meet the demand for modern connectivity, convenience and efficiency, it also results in a weakened security posture. As organizations redesign their network infrastructures, visibility into new and old network elements can become inadvertently restricted as the security controls used to maintain security efforts grow increasingly fragmented.

This trend hasn’t gone unnoticed by cybercriminals. Today, modern threats are capitalizing on this diminishing visibility and control to the fullest, leveraging a wide breadth of sophisticated attacks to breach network defenses. To properly defend against these attacks, partners need to understand the evolving threats facing their customers, as well as the security solutions and strategies needed to actively combat them.

Threat Trends Capitalize on Poor Visibility and Control

Based on threat data taken from millions of Fortinet devices across the world, the latest Global Threat Landscape Report for Q3 indicates that cyberthreats not only continue to target network vulnerabilities, but also seek to exploit the poor visibility and control resulting from the expansion of networks into the cloud and the rapid adoption of mobility and IoT. This quarterly report serves as an analysis of the current threat landscape facing organizations and their network security, while aiming to help network security teams identify key trends and shifts across the threat landscape.

With this in mind, one of the predominant themes we documented in Q3 is the evolving threats and strategies cybercriminals are using to capitalize on current network vulnerabilities. Most notably, many of these vulnerabilities are being introduced as organizations of all sizes continue their digital transformation initiatives.

As customers continue to widen the scope of their network infrastructures with a range of IoT, mobile and cloud-based solutions, the resulting decrease in visibility and control of those solutions opens threat vectors for cybercriminals to leverage.

There are several important threat trends partners need to …