Over the past 9 months, the world has grappled with the COVID-19 pandemic. With closing of borders, curfews and lockdowns, technology has become essential especially in the area of security. As we all have been spending more time at home, we are grateful for reliable energy as it provides our lights, air and heating. It is imperative during these critical times that businesses run smoothly without any interruptions from cyberthreats.
A leading North American oil and gas company was already bombarded daily by cyberthreats before Covid-19, but the onset of the pandemic and the transition to thousands of employees working from home only made it a bigger target. From the onset of the remote work environment (and ever since), the company has experienced a much higher volume of campaigns by sophisticated threat actors.
Don’t want your home life disrupted? To ensure that wouldn’t happen, a vaccine was needed to resolve this issue to prevent any interruption to its business. the company’s security team purchased McAfee’s MVISION EDR after a proof-of-concept bakeoff against two competing products. The McAfee solution’s integration capabilities, attractive pricing, and lack of dependency upon a complex and costly infrastructure placed it far ahead of its endpoint threat detection and response (EDR) competitors. The need to accelerate threat response increased the company’s sense of urgency to implement MVISION EDR.
With help from McAfee technical support experts, the company’s security team completed its roll out of MVISION EDR across 16,000 endpoints within just two weeks. Now that MVISION EDR is deployed, the IT security manager and his team have much greater visibility into threats across all endpoints, including those belonging to employees working from home. This increase in visibility and understanding has helped them quickly identify patient zero and follow the trajectory of an attack to understand its potential impact. With MVISION EDR, they were able to determine every lateral movement that took place and analyze endpoints to determine if they were affected.
With McAfee MVISION EDR, the company’s security team can easily prioritize alerts, quickly grasping which ones need immediate attention and which can wait. In the future they hope to leverage the solution’s artificial intelligence-guided investigations and automate tasks to keep improving threat analysis and threat hunting, all of which will shrink the time-to-response gap even more.
Another benefit for the security team is the ability to use MVISION EDR for inventory tracking and can easily check registry settings to monitor system licensing as well as ensure proper configurations. When they roll out new tools in the environment, for example, they use MVISION EDR to make sure that the systems are working properly and communicating the way they should.
As you find yourself spending all your time at home, remember the critical role your energy company plays to provide you comfort in a not so comfortable time. Cybersecurity is complex but to find out how we are simplifying handling potential threats to our customers read the case study. Get your questions answered by tweeting @McAfee_Business.
