Cybersecurity Awareness Month Starts Today, #BECYBERSMART

Welcome to National Cybersecurity Awareness Month (NCSAM)! The meaning of the month has been obscured from its original purpose, somewhat, due to it having been hijacked by marketing and PR teams. It is worth pointing out that it remains a worthy cause.

NCSAM is a collaboration between the United States Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Agency (CISA) and National Cyber Security Alliance (NCSA). It is designed to influence government, business, and consumers to consider the cybersecurity implications that are inherent in their connected activities and lives.

This year’s theme is “Do Your Part. #BECYBERSMART.” “This theme encourages individuals and organizations to own their role in protecting their part of cyberspace, stressing personal accountability and the importance of taking proactive steps to enhance cybersecurity,” according to CISA and the NCSA.

At Anomali, the purpose of NCSAM is, of course, our daily focus. We constantly deliver on customer-centric product improvements. We provide the security community with gratis threat research and analysis used broadly to reduce risk. We strive to ensure that public and private sector organizations can leverage intelligence that helps them to know and detect their adversaries.

Over the past several months, we have accomplished many achievements we believe are worth noting in light of the month. By naming these, are we guilty of doing a bit of hijacking ourselves? Yes. However, some of what’s listed are also critical security resources available to any organization that is interested in reducing its risk to cyberattacks and learning more about how it can operationalize intelligence. Here’s a look at our record since March:

October 1 – The State of Oklahoma’s Office of Management and Enterprise Services (OMES) activated its new Information Sharing and Analysis Center (ISAC). Powered by Anomali ThreatStream Community Edition, it’s providing the state’s government and corporate-partner entities with immediate access to intelligence about the most serious threats targeting their operations. All agencies are under constant assault from massive waves of cyberattacks that impact citizens, police departments, municipalities, election precincts, and remote workers. With the ability to share information about adversaries, essential state services can reduce their risk of falling victim to disruptive and costly attackers.

September 24 – With threat intelligence now recognized as critical to security and risk, global analyst firm Frost & Sullivan produced the Frost Radar: Global Threat Intelligence Platform Market, 2020, a report highlighting eight key players in the market as well as its overall size. Anomali was recognized as the leader, with 40 percent market share and as such, named the Frost Radar: 2020 Innovation Excellence Award winner in the space.

September 21 –Anomali was recognized as part of the Gartner Market Guide for Security Orchestration, Automation and Response Solutions (SOAR). SOAR is described as a market made up of solutions that combine incident response, orchestration, and automation, and threat intelligence (TI) management capabilities in a single platform. Anomali ThreatStream, our leading Threat Intelligence Platform (TIP) solution, was recognized for its recently added SOAR capabilities.

August 25 – With an ear wide open to customers, our product team delivered on the next phase of what’s needed in the market. With our 2020 Summer Release, we prioritized threat analysts to ease their workloads. New features provided more automated and efficient workflows, expanded threat detection capabilities via telemetry integration into Anomali Match, and custom dashboards and reports that deliver strategic, actionable intelligence to a wider set of IT and security team members, CISOs, and other organizational stakeholders.

July 30 – As the threat intelligence market matures, Anomali has recognized that demand for specific ROI is rising. In response, we commissioned an ROI paper through Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG). Analyzing the Economic Benefits of the Anomali Threat Intelligence Platform revealed that Anomali customers received a return on investment of 233 percent over a payback period of 11 months, along with a $93,000 per month savings, earned through improved productivity, avoidance of risk, and value gained.

June 10 – We released detailed analysis about threat actors using fake COVID-19 contact tracing apps to infiltrate Android devices. After being downloaded, the apps install malware that can be used to steal data and conduct device surveillance. Governments around the world are working with app developers to provide legitimate contact tracing apps as part of their efforts to reduce the spread of the virus that is causing the global pandemic. Because contact tracing app programs are in widespread use and highly publicized, the likelihood that threat actors will try and capitalize on government programs will continue to increase.

March 24 - In response to the growing threat of coronavirus (COVID-19)-themed cyberattacks, Anomali, publicly released more than 6,000 open source Indicators of Compromise (IOCs) that were collected, curated, and validated by Anomali researchers. In addition, we also released a related threat bulletin providing a narrative description of the attacks being seen. This actionable threat intelligence, which identifies COVID-19-related threats and the malicious actors looking to capitalize on the pandemic, remains available for organizations to immediately feed into their cybersecurity technologies to rapidly and proactively block the identified threats.

While we certainly have made a few self-promoting plugs here, were sincerely hope you find this information useful and that we’ve now played at least a small part in raising your awareness for cybersecurity. Remember, to help the world become more cyber aware, you don’t need to engage in a huge marketing effort, just do what you can to spread the word to #BECYBERSMART.