Critical Line of Defense
Understanding your layers of defense to protect against malware and breaches is mission critical for the entire organization today. Each layer has a function and purpose, and is meant to stop malware before it strikes. (To simplfy this discussion let’s leave out detection and remediation since that is really after a breach occurs, and is not really a ‘defense’.)
Over the last couple decades, the most common tool used in malware defense strategies is blacklisting. A list of known bad signatures or bad behaviors, which may seem effective until a new piece of malware comes along, because this technology allows the unknown through by default. With over one million NEW Malware being created every day, that hardly seems like a reasonable defense.
White Cloud Security provides a much better defense, and this is how: We start by only allowing your approved apps to run, and by default stop everything else, which includes ALL NEW malware! It doesn’t matter if it’s known, unknown, new, or old. If it’s unwanted, or not approved, it’s stopped.
Putting Defense Into Perspective
Let’s consider the ‘First Line of Defense’ for IT or ICS (industrial Control Systems) using a simple castle defense scenario. The archers are the ‘outer perimeter defense’. The moat is the ‘intermediate perimeter defense’. The castle wall would be the ‘immediate layer of defense’. Simple Castle Defense Scenario
After some evaluation, it is clear that the ‘immediate layer of defense’, the castle wall, is the real first line of defense:
- It’s the first thing you put in place when building your ‘castle’
- Must be the most effective element in your total defense
- Is the single element you cannot do without
When you prioritize your layers in order of importance, you start with your immediate area and make that secure first. Then you build your next outer layer, and so on.
The point is that you must use the most effective malware defense as your castle wall, your immediate layer of malware defense to protect computers, data and networks.
Using a blacklist technology for this layer will only result in a breach. Because anything getting through the outer layers MUST be stopped at the wall.
Your total defense still needs the outer layers. You don’t want the battering ram to just walk up to the wall and start banging away. You need to whittle down the enemy before they get to the wall, because that gives you the best possible defense.
So add your layers, but start with White Cloud Security. Use Trust Lockdown as your First Line of Defense for your castle wall.