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Capture Client 3.7: Rapid Threat Hunting with Deep Visibility and Storylines

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As a threat hunter, your main mission is to understand the behavior of your endpoints and to capture abnormal behavior with rapid mitigation actions. You need the ability to, with a single click, search your fleet for indicators such as those mapped by the MITRE ATT&CK framework. You also need the ability to automate threat hunts for known attacks according to your own criteria.

With SonicWall Capture Client’s new Storylines capability, you can do all this and more, faster than ever before. Let’s take a look.

What is a Storyline?

Capture Client’s Deep Visibility offers rapid threat hunting capabilities thanks to SentinelOne’s patented Storylines technology. Each autonomous agent builds a model of its endpoint infrastructure and real-time running behavior.

The Storyline ID is an ID given to a group of related events in this model. When you find an abnormal event that seems relevant, use the Storyline ID to quickly find all related processes, files, threads, events and other data with a single query.

With Storylines, Deep Visibility returns full, contextualized data — including context, relationships and activities — allowing you to swiftly understand the root cause behind a threat with one search.

Image describing a query

The Storylines are continuously updated in real time as new telemetry data is ingested, providing a full picture of activity on an endpoint over time. This allows greater visibility, enables easy threat hunting and saves time.

Deep Visibility Comes with Ease of Use

Threat hunting in the Management console’s graphical user interface is powerful and intuitive. The Deep Visibility query language is based on a user-friendly SQL subset common on many other tools.

The interface assists in building the correct syntax by providing completion suggestions and a one-click command palette. This saves time and spares threat hunters — even those unfamiliar with the syntax — the pain of remembering how to construct queries.

A visual indicator shows whether the syntax is valid or not, eliminating time spent waiting for a bad query to return an error.

For example, users can search for a common “Living off the Land” technique by running a query across a 12-month period to return every process that added a net user:

Image describing common technique

(We also provide a great cheatsheet to rapidly power up your team’s threat hunting capabilities here.)

Use Case: Responding to Incidents

Suppose you’ve seen a report of a new Indicator of Compromise (IOC) in your threat intel feeds. Has your organization been exposed to it? With Storylines, you can quickly find out with a simple query across your environment. Here’s how:

In the Console’s Forensics view, copy the hash of the detection. In the Visibility view, begin typing in the query search field and select the appropriate hash algorithm from the command palette. Select or type =, then paste the hash to complete the query.

Image describing visibility view

The results will show all endpoints that ever had the file installed. Constructing powerful, threat hunting queries is that simple, even for members of your team with little to no experience with SQL-style syntax.

Deep Visibility = Fast Results

Forget about using query time to grab a cup of coffee: Deep Visibility returns results lightning fast. And thanks to its Streaming mode, you can preview the results of subqueries before the complete query is done.

Deep Visibility query results show detailed information from all your endpoints, displaying attributes like path, Process ID, True Context ID and much more.

With Deep Visibility, you can consume the data earlier, filter the data more easily, pivot for new drill-down queries, and understand the overall story much more quickly than with other EDR products.

Quicker Query of MITRE Behavioral Indicators

Deep Visibility makes hunting for MITRE ATT&CK TTPs fast and painless. It’s as easy as entering the MITRE ID.

For example, you could search your entire fleet for any process or event with behavioral characteristics of process injection with one simple query:

IndicatorDescription Contains “T1055”

There’s no need to form separate queries for different platforms. With Deep Visibility, a single query will return results from all your endpoints regardless of whether they are running Windows, Linux or macOS.

Image describing all results

Stay Ahead with Automated Hunts

Deep Visibility is designed to lighten the load on your team in every way, including giving you tools such as Watchlist, which allows you to set up and run custom threat hunting searches on your own schedule.

Creating a Watchlist is simplicity itself. In the Visibility view of the Management console, run your query. Then, click “Save new set,” choose a name for the Watchlist, and choose who should be notified. That’s it. The threat hunt will run across your environment at the specified timing interval and the recipients will receive alerts of all results.

With Storyline Automated Response (STAR) Custom Rules, you can save Deep Visibility queries or define new ones, let the queries run periodically and get notifications when a query returns results. This helps ensure your organization is secure regardless of whether you or your team are on duty.

Deep Insight at Every Level

Deep Visibility is built for granularity, allowing you to drill down on any piece of information from a query result.

Each column shows an alphabetical, filterable list of the matching items. Expanding the cell displays details; for most of these details, you can open a submenu and drill down even further. Or just use the selected details to run a new query.

Conclusion

As detailed in the 2022 SonicWall Cyber Threat Report, attacks of all types are on the rise. So it’s never been more important to proactively hunt for threats and find suspicious behaviors in its early stages — or to ensure your SOC has the tools to be as agile and efficient as possible.

SentinelOne’s Deep Visibility capabilities are available with Capture Client Premier. Click here for a free trial of Capture Client to see how Deep Visibility’s ease of use, speed and context can greatly improve your mean-time-to-detection and free up your analysts’ time.

How to Protect Your Business During a Global Health Crisis

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While governments and healthcare organizations work to contain and stop the spread of the novel coronavirus pandemic (COVID-19), businesses are working to keep employees safe and operations running. Consider these best practices when challenged by disaster or unforeseen circumstances.

Expand your remote workforce, securely

Organizations, businesses and enterprises are protecting their workforce and allowing employees to work remotely. Increasingly, this is becoming a mandated policy and potentially the sign of a new remote future.

Precautions like these, however, are causing unexpected increases in mobile and ‘work-from-home’ employees; many organizations don’t have enough virtual private network (VPN) licenses to accommodate the increase of users. This is a serious risk as employees will either not have access to business resources or, worse, they will do so via non-secure connections.

For this reason, security-conscious organizations should have scalable secure mobile or remote access solution in place (e.g., VPN) that can accommodate an influx of users (and the respective license requirements).

Review your business continuity plan

Disaster strikes in all forms. Whether malicious cyberattacks, inclement weather, power outages or pandemic, organizations should have built-in scenarios that help ensure business continuity in the face of uncertainty.

Organizations, SMBs and enterprises are encouraged to review their business continuity plans on a yearly basis. This should account for everything for communication channels, leadership, infrastructure, technology and more. Reference SonicWall’s ‘5 Core Practices to Ensure Business Continuity” as a helpful primer.

Defend against fear-based cyberattacks

Cybercriminals know how to successfully capitalize on trends, fears and human behavior. And the coronavirus outbreak is a prime opportunity for them to launch fear-based phishing campaigns, mobile malware, social-engineering attacks and more.

A range of phishing attacks were launched to take advantage of coronavirus fears, including phishing emails appearing to come from the World Health Organization. Organizations should ensure they have strong secure email security in place to mitigate aggressive phishing attacks.

In cases where phishing links are clicked by employees, staff, partners and contractors, cloud application security, Office 365 security and advanced endpoint protection solutions are required to mitigate malware from compromising networks or stealing credentials.

Protect your many endpoints

The new normal has waves of remote employees roaming outside the safety of the network perimeter. In some cases, this is a new experience and they may behave in the same manner as if they were protected by network security controls.

Organizations need to be prepared for an influx of attacks impacting endpoints. A single employee — either working remotely or bored from mandated quarantine — could click a phishing link that could lock data via ransomware, steal credentials or gain access to the corporate network.

A sound security strategy for remote workforces always includes proactive endpoint protection (or next-generation antivirus) that mitigates attacks before, during and after they execute. More advanced approaches include automated rollback to return infected Windows PCs to a previously clean state.

Work-from-Home VPN Solutions for Remote Workforces

To help organizations cost-effectively implement VPN technology for their rapidly expanding work-from-home employees, SonicWall is making its remote access products and services available to both new and existing customers via deeply discounted rates. We’re also bundling critical security solutions for new enterprise and SMB customers.

This special offer provides free Secure Mobile Access (SMA) virtual appliances sized for enterprises and SMBs, and also includes aggressive discounts on Cloud App Security and Capture Client endpoint protection when paired with SMA.

These packages were bundled to include everything needed to protect employees outside the network:

  • Free Secure Mobile Access (SMA) virtual appliance
  • Aggressive discounts on Capture Client endpoint protection
  • Aggressive discounts on Cloud App Security
  • Aggressive discounts on support contracts and Remote Implementation Services when you bundle a virtual appliance
  • New 30- and 60-day VPN spike licenses for existing SMA 100 and 1000 series customers

New PDF Fraud Campaign Spotlights Shifting Cybercriminal Phishing Tactics

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PDF cyberattacks are nothing new. They are, however, growing in volume, deception, sophistication and are now used as vehicles to modernize phishing campaigns.

SonicWall Capture Labs Threat Researchers announced a substantial increase of malicious or fraudulent PDF files. These fraud campaigns take advantage of recipients’ trust in PDF files as a “safe” file format that is widely used and relied upon for business operations.

In March 2019 alone, SonicWall Real-Time Deep Memory Inspection (RTDMI™) discovered more than 73,000 new PDF-based attacks. In comparison, we found 47,000 new attack variants in PDF files in all of 2018.

“Increasingly, email, Office documents and PDFs are the vehicle of choice for malware and fraud in the cyber landscape,” said SonicWall President and CEO Bill Conner in the official announcement. “SonicWall Capture ATP with its RTDMI technology is at the forefront of catching new cyberattacks that elude traditional security sandbox technology.”

Last year, RTDMI identified over 74,000 never-before-seen cyberattacks, a number that has already been surpassed in the first quarter of 2019 with more than 173,000 new variants detected.

In March, the patent-pending technology identified over 83,000 unique, never-before-seen malicious events, of which over 67,000 were PDFs linked to scammers and more than 5,500 were PDFs with direct links to other malware.

Since 2017, Capture ATP with RTDMI has discovered increasing volumes of new threats leveraging PDFs and Office files.

Most traditional security controls cannot identify and mitigate malware hidden in PDF file types, greatly increasing the success of the payload. This increase implies a growing, widespread and effective strategy against small- and medium-sized businesses, enterprises and government agencies.

That’s where SonicWall RTDMI is unique. The technology analyzes documents dynamically via proprietary exploit detection technology, along with static inspection, to detect many malicious document categories, including PDFs, Office files, and a wide range of scripts and executables.

PDF malware attacks: A technical autopsy

SonicWall Capture Labs threat researchers dissected specific paths these fraudulent PDF campaigns take victims to infect them with malware.

In one example (see image below), Capture Labs cross-referenced a malicious file, at the time of detection, with popular collaboration tools from VirusTotal and ReversingLabs. No results were found, indicating the effectiveness of the RTDMI engine.

Targets of the scam email campaigns receive malicious documents from businesses luring victims with PDF files that are made to look deceivingly realistic with misleading links to fraudulent pages. The proposed “business offer” within the PDF is enticing to recipients, often promising free and profitable opportunities with just the click of a link.

Pictured below, the victim is sent to a fraudulent landing page masquerading as a legitimate money-making offer.

SonicWall hypothesizes that by using PDFs as delivery vehicles within their phishing campaigns, attackers are attempting to circumvent email security spam filters and next-generation firewalls — a core reason RTDMI is finding so many new malicious PDFs.

What does this PDF fraud campaign mean?

PDFs are becoming a very attractive tool for cybercriminals. Whether or not these are new attacks — or we are just developing the ability to detect them with RTDMI — the volume indicates that they are a serious problem for SMBs, enterprises, governments and organizations across a wide range of industries.

What’s the motive?

While SonicWall data doesn’t help us understand motivation, it does show that the amount of malicious, PDF-related activity is on the rise. We believe that this is happening for a variety of reasons, including:

  • Better awareness. Users have learned that executables sent to them are potential dangerous and could contain viruses, so they are more hesitant to click .exe files, forcing attackers to try new techniques.
  • Deprecation of Flash. Adobe Flash was a key attack vector in the past, but has been deprecated and will be completely end of life in 2020. So, attackers’ ability to use Flash exploits have been greatly reduced, forcing them to change tactics.
  • Must-trust files. Businesses move fast. Users are under constant pressure and don’t have the time, experience or know-how to vet every file type that hits their inbox. As such, users make assumptions that trusted file types (e.g., PDFs, Office files) used daily are, for the most part, safe. So, users are more likely to read and click links within them without considering the source or ramifications.

What is the impact of the PDF fraud campaigns?

This is very difficult to determine. In the 2019 SonicWall Cyber Threat Report, Capture Labs reported that 34% of the new attack variants found by Capture ATP were either PDF or Office files — a figure that had grown from 13% since the last half of 2017. This data implies that this attack vector is growing, is widespread and is an effective strategy.

Who is behind this?

While attribution is difficult, SonicWall believes the latest spike in malicious PDF activity is Russian-based because of the use of many .ru top-level domains leveraged across analyzed campaigns.

How to stop cyberattacks that use PDF and Office files

  • Force attacks to reveal intentions. SonicWall RTDMI operates in parallel with the SonicWall Capture ATP sandbox service to quickly get a verdict on any suspicious piece of code as it operates in memory, including malicious PDFs and Office files.
  • Protect the most common attack vectors. Another important layer of defense against malicious PDFs is email security. SonicWall offers cloud, hosted and on-premises email security solutions. SonicWall leverages advanced security controls to examine files, senders, domains and URLs to look for malicious activity.
  • Make training a policy. Improve awareness by implementing employee training protocols to ensure users know how to examine PDF and Office file attachments carefully before opening or clicking unknown links.
  • Use endpoint protection. SonicWall recommends using advanced endpoint security, such as Capture Client powered by SentinelOne, to constantly monitor the behavior of a system to scout for malicious behavior, including PDF attacks.

Stopping PDF Attacks: 5 Ways Users & Organizations Can Work Together

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Leveraging malicious PDFs is a great tactic for threat actors because the file format and file readers have a long history of exposed and, later, patched flaws.

Because of the useful, dynamic features included in the document format, it’s reasonable to assume further flaws will be exposed and exploited by adversaries; these attacks may not go away for some time. Furthermore, there’s no way for the average user to diagnose a benign or malicious PDF as it opens.

Since the average SonicWall customer will see nearly 5,500 phishing and social engineering attacks targeting their users each year, it’s vital to remain vigilant about the dangers of PDFs and deploy advanced security to prevent attacks.

Why are malicious PDFs being used in cyberattacks?

In many kinds of malicious PDF attacks, the PDF reader itself contains a vulnerability or flaw that allows a file to execute malicious code. Remember, PDF readers aren’t just applications like Adobe Reader and Adobe Acrobat. Most web browsers contain a built-in PDF reader engine that can also be targeted.

In other cases, attackers might leverage AcroForms or XFA Forms, which are scripting technologies used in PDF creation that were intended to add useful, interactive features to a standard PDF document. To the average person, a malicious PDF looks like another innocent document and they have no idea that it is executing code. According to Adobe, “One of the easiest and most powerful ways to customize PDF files is by using JavaScript.”

If you are a threat actor reading this, you are well versed in the above. And your victims are not. If you are an administrator responsible for keeping threats out and their damage to a minimum, it’s time to take some necessary precautions.

Stop PDF attacks with user-side prevention

First, there are a couple of things users can do to help reduce exposure to PDF-based attacks. Most readers and browsers will have some form of JavaScript control that will require adjustment.

  • Change you preferences. In Adobe Acrobat Reader DC, for example, you can disable Acrobat JavaScript in the preferences to help manage access to URLs.
  • Customize controls. Similarly, with a bit of effort, users can also customize how Windows handles NTLM authentication.

While these mitigations are “nice to have” and certainly worth considering, these features were added, just like Microsoft Office Macros, to improve usability and productivity. Therefore, be sure that you’re not disabling functionality that is an important part of your own or your organization’s workflow.

Stop PDF attacks with company-wide protections

Thankfully, SonicWall technology can quickly decode PDFs to see what the malware wants to really do, such as contact malicious domains or steal credentials. Here are three key ways organizations can limit exposure to PDF-based attacks.

  • Implement advanced email security. The first line of defense against malicious PDFs is email security. SonicWall offers cloud, hosted and on-premises email security solutions. SonicWall leverages advanced security controls to examine files, senders, domains and URLs to look for malicious activity.
  • Use endpoint protection. SonicWall recommends using advanced endpoint security, such as Capture Client powered by SentinelOne, to constantly monitor the behavior of a system to scout for malicious behavior. Capture Client stops threats before they execute and has great EDR capabilities to stop them as they do, see where they came from, and remediation steps, such as rollback in case they fully do.
  • Identify new threats. One thing that separates SonicWall from the rest is our patent-pending Real-Time Deep Memory InspectionTM (RTDMI). RTDMI operates in parallel with the SonicWall Capture Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) sandbox service. This is just one of our parallel engines in the sandboxing environment that gives us the ability to quickly get a verdict on any suspicious piece of code as it operates in memory, including malicious PDFs and Office files.

Malicious PDFs will be around for the foreseeable future, but through advanced security and good end-user awareness, your company will be better suited to prevent attacks.

For a more technical view on this, I recommend reading Philip Stokes’ blog from SentinelOne that inspired and supplied part of the content for this story. I also recommend watching our on-demand webinar, “Best Practices for Protecting Against Phishing, Ransomware and Email Fraud.”

New Spoiler Side-Channel Attack Threatens Processors, Mitigated by SonicWall RTDMI

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Spoiler is the latest side-channel attack threatening Intel processors.

Research from the Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Worcester, Mass., and the University of Lübeck in Germany, identifies a new Spectre-like attack. The group’s paper, “SPOILER: Speculative Load Hazards Boost Rowhammer and Cache Attacks,” proposes the new side-channel Spoiler attack, which could exploit a “previously unknown microarchitectural leakage stemming from the false dependency hazards during speculative load operations.”

As a result, Spoiler also enhances the effectiveness of other side-channel attacks, namely Rowhammer, and other cache-based attacks. The report notes that Spoiler only affects Intel Core processors and not current AMD and ARM processors.

“Intel received notice of this research, and we expect that software can be protected against such issues by employing side channel safe software development practices,” an Intel spokesperson told TechRadar. “This includes avoiding control flows that are dependent on the data of interest.”

The research group was quick to point out that while Spoiler is similar to Spectre, they aren’t the same and have very different ramifications, namely with how previous attacks take advantage of vulnerabilities in the speculative branch prediction unit and memory leaks in protected environments.

“Spoiler is not a Spectre attack,” the researchers published in their 17-page report. “The root cause for Spoiler is a weakness in the address speculation of Intel’s proprietary implementation of the memory subsystem, which directly leaks timing behavior due to physical address conflicts. Existing Spectre mitigations would therefore not interfere with Spoiler.”

SonicWall customers with active Capture Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) cloud sandbox subscriptions are protected from Spoiler exploits by SonicWall Real-Time Deep Memory Inspection.

Stop Spoiler Side-Channel Attacks with RTDMI

But SonicWall Real-Time Deep Memory InspectionTM isn’t a common mitigation solution. Like it does with Spectre, Meltdown, Foreshadow and PortSmash, SonicWall RTDMI can mitigate Spoiler attacks.

RTDMI provides CPU-level instruction detection granularity (unlike typical behavior-based systems, which have only API/system call-level granularity) to detect malware variants that contain exploit code targeting processor vulnerabilities, including Spoiler.

To discover packed malware code that has been compressed to avoid detection, the RTDMI engine allows the malware to reveal itself by unpacking its compressed code in memory in a secure sandbox environment. It sees what code sequences are found within and compares it to what it has already seen.

Identifying malicious code in memory is more precise than trying to differentiate between malware system behavior and clean program system behavior, which is an approach used by some other analysis techniques.

Besides being highly accurate, RTDMI also improves sample analysis time. Since it can detect malicious code or data in memory in real-time during execution, no malicious system behavior is necessary for detection. The presence of malicious code can be identified prior to any malicious behavior taking place, thereby rendering a quicker verdict.

RTDMI protection from Spoiler and other processor and side-channels attacks is included as a part of the SonicWall Capture Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) sandbox service. Current Capture ATP customers are protected from Spoiler exploits.

SonicWall RTDMI™ vs. Side-Channel Attacks

SonicWall President and CEO Bill Conner hosts CTO John Gmuender as they walk you through how SonicWall Real-Time Deep Memory Inspection (RTDMITM) technology mitigates today’s most dangerous chip-based and side-channel cyberattacks.

Bill Conner: How the UK Is Taking Malware Seriously

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Bill Conner sat down with Information Age editor Nick Ismail to discuss global malware attack statistics, cross-border cybersecurity collaboration, the increasing need to inspect PDFs and Microsoft Office documents, and how all impact the dynamic U.K. political landscape.

Though malware attack data shows an increase in global attacks, the U.K. has experienced a decrease in these attacks following the WannaCry ransomware strain in previous years.

Conner sees this as a positive change for the U.K. and stated via Information Age, “you guys were all over it” following the WannaCry attack and “most of the vendors in the U.K. and their customers put solutions in place to protect against multiple family variants of ransomware.”

While this is a positive change for the U.K., there is still work to be done globally and Conner says regardless of the often divided political climate, “there’s a good foundation for cyber collaboration across borders.”

“Right now, we need to focus on those PDFs and Office (files), the things you run in your business every day, because they can be exploited for IP and monetary gain. And you can’t even see it.”

Bill Conner
SonicWall President & CEO

In addition to urging governments to look toward political collaboration to tighten cybersecurity globally, Conner explained the majority of this change will come through the dedication of law enforcement.

“Law enforcement sharing is better than political sharing at the moment,” Conner told Information Age. “Public institutions, private organizations and different governments have got to collaborate. But, above all, we’ve got to have dedicated cyber law enforcement.”

While a global cybersecurity strategy may be down the road, Conner says there are places to focus on now to best secure governments, enterprises and SMBs.

What does Conner recommend an organization focus their cybersecurity strategy on?

“What I’m telling governments and enterprises is to forget side-channel exploits for the moment,” he said. “Right now, we need to focus on those PDFs and Office (files), the things you run in your business every day.”

One of the ways to mitigate these specific malware threats requires advanced technology, like SonicWall Capture Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) with SonicWall Real-Time Deep Memory Inspection (RTDMI™), to inspect and mitigate attacks in memory.

Read the rest of Conner’s recommendations and predictions in his interview with Information Age.

Cloud Security: Making the Invisible … Visible

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Living in Colorado and having 14,000-foot mountains in my backyard, there are times I end up driving into the clouds. One minute I can be traveling in sunshine and great weather and the next, a cloud surrounds my car.

Entering a cloud, things begin to lose visibility. Soon, you can barely make out anything around you. This is a good time to slow down and get clarity on your surroundings.

As the business market continues to drive into the cloud, it too comes with risk of diminished visibility. The major cloud providers give you tools to secure platforms in the cloud, but they don’t provide you the means of monitoring those solutions to know what is happening in the platform or within a cloud datacenter.

Besides a bill for your monthly traffic, compute and storage usage, you don’t have visibility of what the traffic is within the cloud.

For many, cloud security can be a challenging prospect as each provider has slightly different ways of implementing their security stack. You may have secured your cloud devices, but how do you know what traffic goes in and out of them? And just because you identify the appropriate ports and protocols that are allowed, that doesn’t mean your application can’t be compromised and data exfiltrated through those ports and protocols.

How to Gain Better Cloud Visibility

The challenge when working within the cloud is making the invisible, visible. Cloud providers do not rely upon layer 2 connections, but rather route all the traffic based upon their own algorithms/methods.

In most cloud systems, depending upon how well you’ve defined your security rules, when you launch a new device within a cloud environment, all the other devices within that environment can send traffic to and from each other. This is why micro-segmentation has become one of the cloud buzzwords; we needed the ability to restrict traffic at the host or interface level.

While micro-segmentation will allow you to restrict traffic, how do you inspect the traffic?

How Virtual Firewalls Secure Cloud Environments

SonicWall provides two products to help with this problem of visibility within the cloud: Network Security Virtual Firewall (NSv) and Web Application Firewall (WAF). These products each have their own purposes, but when implemented correctly, they will provide you visibility within the cloud.

Every cloud provider allows you to modify the default route paths and direct traffic within their infrastructure. With these routes, you can direct traffic in and out of NSv or WAF in order to provide additional visibility and inspection of the traffic within your cloud.

You can further improve cloud security by adding Deep Packet Inspection (DPI), Capture Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) multi-engine cloud sandboxing, which includes Real-Time Deep Memory Inspection (RTDMITM), and traffic reporting and analysis.

Setting up the custom route tables to direct traffic within a cloud provider can be a daunting task. SonicWall’s Remote Implementation Service for the NSv Firewalls can help.

Whether you use the SonicWall NSv or the WAF within the cloud, you will have the ability to shed light upon the traffic within the cloud and know that it’s appropriate for your environment. Take back control of your traffic by bringing it to a higher level — above the clouds.

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Cybersecurity for SMBs: Bundled Network Security Delivers Cost-Effective Protection

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If you’re a small- or medium-sized business (SMB), don’t bury your head in the digital sand. Cybercriminals don’t discriminate. Your data, credentials or access could be valuable to them in ways not immediately apparent. SMB cybersecurity is critical.

Unfortunately, SMBs also haven’t received the necessary guidance in terms of government support. That’s alarming since in September 2018 alone, the average SonicWall customer faced 1,662 malware attacks. For the year, SonicWall recorded 8.5 billion malware attacks globally — a 54 percent increase over 2017.

There is good news, however. In August 2018, President Trump signed into law the new NIST Small Business Cybersecurity Act. New legislation in Canada and the UK bring hope for similar protections.

But in many cases, cybersecurity guidance isn’t immediately available. In the U.S., for example, NIST has a year to deliver the guidance (read our eBook to learn more). Regardless of geographic location, a year is a long time for SMBs to wait to either enhance or begin their cybersecurity strategy. For this reason, SonicWall has created cost-effective cybersecurity bundles tailored specifically for SMBs.

Bundled Security for SMBs

The SonicWall TotalSecure SMB Bundle* provides robust cybersecurity technology and services that defend growing SMBs from the volume and sophistication of modern cyberattacks.

The tailored package includes high-performance network security, endpoint protection, cloud sandbox, content filtering, online management and more. Admins can also use powerful reporting functions to easily check the health of the network and endpoints and remediate threats if ever needed.

What’s included What you get
  • Perimeter firewall protection, including SSL traffic inspection
  • Intrusion prevention
  • Content filtering
  • Zero-day defense via Capture ATP with RTDMI
  • Behavior-based endpoint security
  • Endpoint rollback (Windows only)
  • Advanced reporting and attack visualization

Bundled Security for Small Offices

The SonicWall TotalSecure SMB Bundle* also is available for small or home offices. It provides foundational cybersecurity tools that help smaller organizations mitigate cyberattacks from the perimeter to the endpoint.

It’s a comprehensive, out-of-the-box solution to stop cyberattacks, help remediate issues, protect endpoints and manage security — easily and efficiently.

What’s included What you get
  • Perimeter firewall protection, including SSL/TLS traffic inspection
  • Intrusion prevention
  • Content Filtering Service
  • Behavior-based endpoint security
  • Endpoint rollback (Windows only)
  • Advanced reporting and attack visualization

SonicWall has been protecting SMBs for more than 27 years. SonicWall is the No. 2 cybersecurity vendor in the SMB space, according to Gartner’s Market Share: Unified Threat Management (SMB Multifunction Firewalls), Worldwide, 2017 report.

Contact SonicWall to build or enhance your cybersecurity posture for true end-to-end protection from today’s most malicious cyberattacks, including never-before-seen threats.

Lock In Your SMB Bundle

It’s time to use real-time cybersecurity to protect your business from cyberattacks. Contact a SonicWall security expert today. We’re ready to help you build a sound, cost-effective security strategy that’s just right for your business.

CONNECT WITH AN EXPERT

* Please contact SonicWall or your SonicWall SecureFirst partner for regional availability.

How to Secure Your Website & Protect Your Brand Online

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A study by the SMB Group in 2017 showed that more than 85 percent of small- and medium-sized (SMB) businesses and mid-tier enterprises are adopting digital transformation. This is changing the role of the traditional website from a “static set of HTML pages” to a highly dynamic online experience platform. The website is now the custodian of the organization’s digital brand.

But, as once said by Ben Parker (yes, Spiderman’s late uncle), “With great power comes great responsibility.”

IT executives now have to protect users — and their data used by the website — from a larger spectrum of web application threats. The recent Whitehat Security’s 2018 Application Security Report highlighted these concerns:

  • About 50 percent of vulnerabilities discovered on a website are Serious; remediation rates are less than 50 percent
  • The average time to fix a vulnerability ranges from 139 to 216 days
  • More than 30 percent of websites are still showing poor developer cybersecurity skills (e.g., information leakage, cross-site scripting and SQL injection)
  • SSL/TLS is not adopted well enough; 23 percent of those are weak and riddled with vulnerabilities

SonicWall WAF 2.0 was launched in April 2018 as a standalone virtual appliance deployable in public and private cloud environments. SonicWall WAF delivers an award-winning web application firewall technology that works alongside SonicWall next-generational firewalls (NGFW) to protect businesses and their digital brands.

The SonicWall WAF is backed by threat research from SonicWall Capture Labs for virtual patching of exploits, reducing the window of exposure significantly.

In fact, when the attacks associated with British Airways and Drupalgeddon came out, the SonicWall WAF was able to protect customers without any updates. With the SonicWall WAF, administrators can protect their websites from the wide spectrum of web threats including those targeting the vulnerabilities called out in the OWASP Top 10.

Five New Enhancements to SonicWall WAF 2.2

The next evolution of the product, SonicWall WAF 2.2 gains five significant new features and enhancements, including a new licensing model.

Real-Time Website Malware Prevention with Capture ATP Integration

With the increasing threat of malware, many websites are also at risk of advanced malware attacks like cryptojacking and the famous CTB-locker malware that targeted WordPress websites.

Malware is injected into websites through the use of vulnerable plugins or by using file-upload facilities available with many websites. SonicWall WAF now integrates with the Capture Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) sandbox service. It detects malware embedded in traffic streams by leveraging the industry-leading, multi-engine malware analysis platform, including Real-Time Deep Memory Inspection (RTDMI). Any attempts to inject or upload malicious files to a website would be inspected in-line (as opposed to after the fact) while maintaining an optimal user experience.

Simplifying Transport Layer Security, SSL Certificate Management with ‘Let’s Encrypt’

The biggest challenge for securing website communication is the need for legitimate SSL/TLS certificates for encryption and decryption. Legitimate certificates are expensive to purchase, manager, monitor and renew.

But with SonicWall WAF 2.2, organizations can take advantage of the Let’s Encrypt service through a built-in integration that not only offers free certificates, but will also automatically monitor and renew digital certificates.

This eliminates the administrative effort to enable SSL/TLS required on the website to turn on support for SSL/TLS.

By combining Let’s Encrypt integration, Perfect Forward Secrecy (PFS) and HTTP Strict Transport Security (HSTS), the SonicWall WAF ensures that websites are only accessible via a secured and encrypted channel, which also improves search engine visibility and ranking.

Seamless Multifactor Authentication Controls Access to Sensitive Content, Workflows

The most common cause of information leakage from websites stems from improper access control on websites, sometimes via unauthenticated pages and others because of the lack of strong authentication controls (remember the Equifax attack?).

With SonicWall WAF 2.2, administrators can redirect users to an authentication page for any part of the web application by leveraging an existing authentication page or with a WAF-delivered login page.

Administrators can also enforce second-factor authentication using client certificates or one-time passwords (OTPs) to validate users trying to log in to the web application are, indeed, genuine users.

API Support for Managed Cloud Service Providers

Cloud service providers often manage and host websites for their customers. In many cases, they leverage DevOps and programmable infrastructure using APIs to launch hosting environments, web application platforms and ready-to-use infrastructure. But if security is not embedded into these DevOps workflows, they leave gaping holes and become liable for website security.

With SonicWall WAF 2.2, administrators can automatically launch WAF virtual appliances and programmatically provision security for websites using scripts in DevOps workflows. This includes creating a web application to be protected, enabling exploit prevention, enabling Let’s Encrypt Integration for free SSL/TLS support and enabling Capture ATP integration for malware prevention.

New Utility-based Licensing Model, An innovation for WAF Virtual Appliances

With SonicWall WAF 2.2, organizations may purchase protection on a per-website basis. This helps reduce the total cost of ownership (TCO) by purchasing only what they need. Four types of websites are currently supported based on the amount of data that is transferred to/from the website per month.

Size Data Volume
Pro Website 10 GB per Month
Small Website 50 GB per Month
Medium Website 200 GB per Month
Large Website 500 GB per Month

A sizing calculator will recommend the compute requirements for the WAF virtual appliance and will provide guidance to website administrators on what type of license they need to buy based on a variety of metrics like sustained/peak throughput, average visits per day etc.

SonicWall WAF helps administrators secure their websites and their digital environment, thereby establishing trust in their digital brand.

Get to Know SonicWall WAF

The SonicWall Web Application Firewall (WAF) now integrates with the award-wining SonicWall Capture Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) sandbox service and Real-Time Deep Memory Inspection (RTDMI) technology. Explore how this innovative product can defend your websites and applications from both known and unknown cyber threats.

LEARN ABOUT WAF

SonicWall Extends Next-Generation Firewalls to Public Cloud Deployments, Including AWS and Azure

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Attacks on public cloud infrastructures increase every day.

“We are in the third era of computing — the cloud and mobile era — but security considerations on cloud are still not widely understood,” said Mark Russinovich, CTO of Microsoft Azure. “It is important to address the public cloud security concerns to facilitate its adoption.”

In this third era, securing the public cloud is critical. According to IDC, 83 percent of workloads are virtualized today, and 60 percent of large enterprises run virtual machines (VM) in the public cloud. With the rapid pace of cloud transformation, securing workloads in the cloud becomes challenging.

SonicWall takes on this challenge and extends the security of the private cloud to public clouds with SonicWall Network Security virtual (NSv) firewall series. In addition to public and private cloud security, NSv can also provide end-to-end security for multi-cloud deployments.

Cloud technology provides greater agility, scalability and infrastructure consistency, improving business efficiency. Public cloud environments supported by SonicWall NSv includes Amazon Web Services (AWS)* and Microsoft Azure.

True Next-Generation Virtual Firewall Series

SonicWall NSv series brings industry-leading next-generation firewall (NGFW) capabilities, such as application intelligence and control, real-time monitoring, IPS, TLS/SSL decryption and inspection, advanced threat protection, VPN and network segmentation capabilities, to protect your AWS and Azure environments.

NSv supports all security and networking features similar to SonicWall next-gen hardware firewall appliances, including our patented Reassembly-Free Deep Packet Inspection (RFDPI) technology and award-winning Capture Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) sandbox with Real-Time Deep Memory Inspection (RTDMI) to stop both known and unknown (e.g., zero day) cyberattacks.

You can gain complete visibility and control of your traffic across multiple virtual private cloud (VPC) and virtual networks (VN), plus provide seamless security and management capabilities with a single-pane-of-glass experience. With NSv, you can take advantage of agility, scalability, high-performance, lower operational cost, quick time-to-deployment and drive innovation.

The public platform support is available across multiple NSv models, such as NSv 200/400/800/1600. Based on the fully-featured SonicOS 6.5.0, NSv makes the move to the cloud easier and safer.

Protect Public Cloud Data, Applications with SonicWall NSv

NSv addresses some of the critical needs of public cloud security. Below are some of the key benefits of leveraging NSv to protect your public cloud infrastructure and resources.

  • Gain complete visibility into virtual environment for threat prevention
  • Implement proper security zoning and ensure appropriate placement of policies
  • Defend against zero-day vulnerabilities with SonicWall Capture ATP
  • Prevent service disruptions in the virtual ecosystem
  • Gain centralized control and visibility with single-pane-of-glass management via Capture Security Center
  • Leverage agility and scalability without performance impact
  • Maintain security governance, compliance and risk management

SonicWall NSv can be deployed in a variety of use cases including the ones below:

  • Internet gateway for ingress/egress traffic protection
  • Lateral protection of east-west traffic
  • Site-to-site VPN deployment
  • Secure end-to-end remote access
  • Multi-cloud secure connectivity

Why Choose SonicWall NSv?

In addition to the various key benefits in leveraging NSv, below are some additional reasons why you should choose NSv as the security of choice in the public cloud.

  • Patented technologies like RTDMI, RFDPI and more
  • Robust products with over 26 years of award-winning technological innovation
  • Powerful security, powered by SonicWall next-generation firewall capabilities, now extending to the cloud

* AWS availability date pending.

Try SonicWall NSv for Azure

SonicWall NSv is currently available for Azure public cloud environments. Visit the Azure Marketplace to gain next-generation security for your most sensitive Azure workloads.

TRY NSv FOR AZURE