Congratulations to professional golfer and University of Georgia alum Sepp Straka on his first PGA Tour win at the 2022 Honda Classic. While we can’t take credit for his victory, we are proud to be part of his team as one of Sepp’s sponsors.
What do we have in common? We both have proud Georgia roots and are forging our way toward success. Winning at this high level takes integrity, determination, and innovation. Like Sepp, we feel that NetAbstraction demonstrates these same qualities. Let us explain …
The surefire way to defeat ransomware in business
If you’re involved in business, you’re going to be involved in cybercrime, like it or not. You’ve probably read in more than one place that it’s not a question of IF you’ll be attacked, but WHEN. Two recent surveys indicate that ransomware attacks, one of the most devastating cybercrimes out there, have doubled in the last year. Your company could be next.
Protecting data, applications and employees from attack can be a very expensive proposition, and the defenses required to successfully repel attacks need constant updates, which makes them even more expensive. Luckily, there’s a new approach to security that doesn’t attempt to spot and defeat every attack as it happens. Instead, it makes it very unlikely that you’ll be attacked in the first place. It’s called obfuscation.
To understand how this works, we’ll compare the situation that hackers face in their daily “jobs” to one that golfers face every time they walk onto a course. Comparing cybercrime to golf is admittedly a stretch, but we’ll give it a shot.
You’re about to pitch onto the green of the seventh hole on a course that’s new to you. That doesn’t matter, because you’ve played lots of courses and you’re familiar with the challenges they present. You’re in good shape and you’ve got a premium set of clubs at your disposal. There’s only one problem. You can’t see the green. Nor the pin. They’re invisible.
That’s what obfuscation does in the world of cybercrime. It makes you an invisible target.
We should abandon the golf analogy now because the details of cybercrime are pretty complicated, but invisibility is the main point. If they can’t find you, they can’t attack you.™
Security through obscurity
Every time anybody in your organization engages in any activity on the internet, they leave a digital “footprint” that cybercriminals may be able to trace back to your network, where they can infect it with ransomware or even malware that will actually steal your data. NetAbstraction creates an internet path that hops between commercial clouds, changing identities along the way and churning the infrastructure, so it’s extremely difficult — if not impossible — for cybercriminals to find your network, much less attack it.
NetAbstraction also offers the digital equivalent of a burner phone so that it appears to the world that an employee’s internet activity never happened. And if this burner (the technical term is virtual machine or VM) does get infected with malware, it can’t transmit it back to the network.
Burner VMs have important practical benefits. Executives involved in sensitive negotiations or engineers collaborating on a secret project can be confident that their exchanges will not be intercepted — or detected after the fact. Researchers can disguise their identity and location, enabling them to obtain material from companies that would otherwise block them. Any employee can freely surf the web — even the dark web — with no fear of ransomware or other malware infecting their network.
Winning in the Age of the Internet
Our obfuscation technology gives companies the tools to win in the cyber security arena, and in general, we like to associate with winners. That’s why we’re a sponsor of Straka. Our other connection to golf is an office that’s proudly located in Augusta, Georgia, the home of The Masters tournament.
Business, like golf, is a competitive sport. In the age of the Internet, however, you not only have to worry about competitors. You also worry about criminals and thieves who can attack your business more easily than any time in the history of capitalism, and spies who are constantly watching for flaws in your security. Sometimes, the best way to make these worries disappear is to make yourself disappear. If you’ve got data or people to protect, you should look into obfuscation.
To learn more about NetAbstraction and how we can help your business, click here.
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