FirstWave bolsters advanced persistent threat defence with umbrella security services approach

FirstWave Cloud Technology (ASX:FCT) bolsters its broad spectrum protection solutions for business, enterprise & government customers with Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) Defence umbrella services across Email, Web & Next Gen Firewall technologies in its cloud content security gateway (CCSG) platform. 

Advanced persistent threats (APTs) continue to expand in sophistication, frequency and impact mainly through attack vectors such as Email (Phishing), Web (‘drive-by’ downloads) & SaaS (malware) applications with the result that most , if not all, businesses & enterprises face rising business risk from malicious stealthy malware penetrating traditional or existing security defences and compromising their business users, systems or data. 

These APTs often exploit known or unknown, zero-day vulnerabilities in networking devices, computers or hosts within the business or enterprise , taking advantage of social engineered ‘blended threat’ vectors such as sending Phishing emails to employees inducing them to click on malicious URL links contained within the email message, awaiting employees to connect to compromised Web sites and download infected Web content , or simply distributing  malicious file attachments on emails , any of which can deliver stealthy malware onto user computers or hosts which then run and attempt to steal user credentials, login into systems or applications and exfiltrate sensitive corporate data , IP or customer information or encrypt and lock user data or files as part of a Ransomware malware attack. 

Many traditional vendor security solutions used by business and enterprises today, such as on-premise enterprise firewalls, secure email gateways or secure web gateways, use reputation or signature -based approaches to detect and block email spam, phishing emails with malicious or suspect URLs and access to compromised or infected web sites and web content as well as executable files and email attachments. However, these do not detect or protect against an increasing number of previously unknown or zero-day APTs, including those employing files or attachments without any reputation score.  ‘Blunt’ content security settings and rules such as blocking certain file or attachment types are impractical as these block many legitimate documents attached to emails with a resulting detrimental impact to business users and productivity.

Furthermore, businesses & enterprise are increasingly migrating business apps into the cloud - through solutions such as Office365 & Google Apps Mail - whose integrated email anti-virus and anti-spam solutions cannot sufficiently protect users against the latest APTs. 

Defending businesses and enterprises moving to or already in the cloud against the latest APTs require a far more intelligent, powerful & enterprise-specific solution that defends across the attack continuum - before, during and after the attack – and operates across all of the major threat vectors   - Email, Web, Saas – in the cloud. 

FirstWave now offers a comprehensive, integrated cloud -based APT Defence services umbrella that provides exactly this solution for any customer using any or all of FirstWave’s core cloud gateway- based security services – ESP™ Mail, ESP™ Web or ESP™ NGFW. 

APT Defence offers outstanding protection & security efficacy against APTs - including the latest Ransomware malware families - whilst maintaining choice & flexibility of deployment, cost-effectiveness, and convenient & simple centralised visibility, management & control.  

Customers can ‘mix & match’ services in the FirstWave solution suite -  ESP™ Mail, Web and NGFW   - to suit their budget and needs, safe in the knowledge that APT Defence is relevant on any solution deployed.  

FirstWave has augmented its existing cloud content security gateway (CCSG) platform to incorporate advanced file signature analysis & blocking, sandboxing and retrospective analysis technologies, delivering broad spectrum protection across the full attack continuum along with visibility, control & analytics/ reporting through a single portal.

FirstWave’s Portfolio and Marketing Director, Roger Carvosso commented: “FirstWave has further enhanced its Enterprise Specific Protection (ESP™) cloud software-based classification, analytics & portal APPS to integrate policy control security visibility & management for APT Defence umbrella services. This means that, for our existing customers, they will enjoy the same simple, convenient and powerful IT security administrator portal user interface and experience for APT Defence-enabled services as they already do today.”

“We have accredited and integrated multiple, best-of breed security technologies from industry leaders: Cisco (AMP Threat Grid) and Palo Alto Networks (WildFire™) into its ESP™ - powered cloud content security gateway (CCSG) platforms, which can be adaptively deployed as private cloud gateways for large enterprise or government organisations or in Telco/SP cloud environments to enable new enterprise cloud security service offerings.”

This announcement continues FirstWave's continued investment and development of it’s own unique ESP™ cloud content security and analytics technology and capabilities in its multi-cloud enabled CCSG platform to deliver broad spectrum protection to enterprise & government customers increasingly taking a ‘cloud-first’ stance in a rising cybersecurity threat landscape.

For further information please contact: 

Roger Carvosso, Portfolio and Marketing Director, roger.carvosso@firstwave.com.au