Intelligent CIO Africa Issue 56 | Page 74

FINAL WORD

Why EDR should be a key component of your overall cybersecurity strategy

Today ’ s sophisticated cyberthreats require new , advanced approaches to prevention and defence . Endpoint Detection and Response ( EDR ) is one such tool which is helping to keep organisations secure . Here , Bogdan Carlescu , Acting Cybersecurity Professional and Product Marketing Director at Bitdefender , highlights how CISOs can make EDR a key component of their overall cybersecurity strategy , as well as why they should prioritise this .

tTell us about the level of sophistication we see in today ’ s threat landscape , particularly when it comes to the endpoint ?

If we look at the early reports of 2021 , or review the key incidents , there are a few key words that will quickly surface : ransomware , phishing attacks , Business Email Compromise ( BEC ), supply chain attacks , data breaches or data exfiltration .
We can group these attacks into two key categories : fast-evolving attacks and slow and stealthy attacks . Both can be very aggressive , both can be targeted and both can cause massive impact for any organisation in the world .
Without minimising the importance of fighting off ransomware and other aggressive fast-evolving attacks , I will focus on the slow and stealthy type of attacks . Here we include the likes of supply chain attacks , phishing for company or state secrets and exfiltration of entire databases during months of undetected malicious activity .
The prevalence of these complex threats increased dramatically over the last few years and a question worth asking at this point is – who is affected by this class of attacks ? You might think that it only applies to large organisations . These are the notorious cases that make it to the media . But this couldn ’ t be further from the truth .
Smaller organisations are increasingly facing advanced cyberthreats , either to become a gateway towards a larger target during a supply chain attack or by being a
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