An escalating proportion of threats come from insider-led breaches. One recent survey reveals that 40% of organizations sampled are expecting an insider-led attack within the next 12 months. Another study suggests that such breaches cost companies an average of $3.79 million per breach, with an average cost per lost or stolen record of $154.
Hackers recently encrypted a Los Angeles hospital system’s patient data, demanding a $3.4 million bitcoin ransom before data access would be restored. More than the monetary losses, victims often cite the irreparable damage to brand and loss of trust their top concerns.
The Anatomy of an Attack
Insider-led breaches typically begin with current or former employees, contractors or other trusted insiders, either maliciously or unknowingly compromising their workspace. The breach then becomes a launch pad for malware. The attack often spreads laterally throughout the enterprise, seeking out low-priority, relatively undefended systems, such as databases or file servers sitting behind the corporate firewall. Attackers can then either encrypt data and demand payment for the key or quietly siphon sensitive data outside the firewall, often weeks or months before being detected.
If and when a user detects an anomaly and notifies IT, appropriate measures are often too late to be effective against malware that already penetrated multiple back-end systems.
As organizations embrace bring-your-own-device (BYOD) trends, anywhere work and virtual desktops (VDI), IT needs a security architecture that:
- Protects customer and patient data;
- Secures intellectual property from rising security breaches; and
- Delivers a better end-user experience.
VMware Horizon, powered by the software-defined datacenter, offers a multilayered, defense-in-depth platform that extends and enforces security policy from user to device to datacenter. This platform yields outcomes for IT that improves security posture and benefits both businesses and employees.
In our upcoming webcast, we’ll explore how the combination of VMware NSX and VMware Horizon offers a comprehensive approach to securing the modern end-user computing (EUC) environment.
Benefits of the Secure Digital Workspace with Horizon & NSX
With new security technology woven into the EUC ecosystem, enterprises can now define and enforce intelligent, automated and easy-to-manage security policies. This architecture, built on Horizon with NSX, not only helps mitigate scenarios like the one described above, it also improves the overall security posture from end-to-end, yielding these benefits:
- Protect against insider-led breaches initiated through client computing assets.
- Streamline and simplify the user access experience without compromising security.
- Lock down and set policies to selectively enable client-side features that could be exploited to exfiltrate sensitive data.
- Improve the protection of data at rest through centralization, no longer housing sensitive data on locally-attached storage, which is prone to loss, damage or theft.
- Reduce the attack surface presented to malware and ransomware.
- Slow the lateral movement of threats behind the firewall, thereby increasing the available window within which IT can take action.
- Strengthen workspace security posture and compliancy through dynamic application of operating system (OS) and application patches without maintenance windows.
- Improve first-line defenses with in-guest anti-virus and malware technologies to defend against email and application-borne threats.
