Mobile Response to Security Alerts Allows Immediate Action Anywhere, Anytime
6.12.2017 securityweek  Mobil

Mobile Alerts Improve Incident Response

Cybersecurity is 24/7; cybersecurity staff are not. While larger corporations can arrange for 24/7 cover, most smaller organizations cannot do this. This means that senior security staff are effectively permanently 'on call' whether they are in the office, between offices, or at home.

A recent small survey by Barkly queried 95 IT and security professionals from companies with between 50 and 1,000 endpoints, "to learn more about how they're currently receiving and managing security alerts." Nearly half of the respondents (46%) said they had missed alerts while out of the office, while about 20% said that it had been necessary to return to the office to handle an alert that could not be managed remotely.

Given these figures, it is not surprising that 76% said that their ability to respond to alerts efficiently and speedily would improve if they could both receive and respond via a mobile device.

"The ability to react quickly can be crucial," commented Barkly's Jonathan Crowe, "especially with a resurgence of worming capabilities [think WannaCry and NotPetya] making it possible for malware to spread throughout and across organizations faster than ever."

Barkly has now released a mobile version of the complete Barkly Management Portal, allowing security staff to actively respond to new alerts at any time.

"With mobile incident response Barkly empowers security leaders to view and respond to blocked attacks wherever they are, from the convenience of their phone or tablet," said Mike Duffy, CEO of Barkly, calling it a 'game-changer'.

Josh Holmes, IT Director of Pennington Law agrees: "When an alert comes in, I need to quickly understand what Barkly blocked and what next actions to take. The ability to receive and immediately respond to alerts from my phone is invaluable."

Barkly's endpoint protection SaaS technology combines both supervised and unsupervised machine learning to continuously 'disambiguate' good and bad behavior -- rapidly detecting old-style malware file attacks and newer fileless attacks. "You cannot claim to do endpoint protection unless you can stop both file-based and fileless attacks before they get through and harm the client," Barkly CTO Jack Danahy told SecurityWeek. "A fileless attack is ten times more likely to succeed than a file-based attack."

The new mobile portal isn't simply the ability to access a cloud-based control panel via a mobile browser. "With this release, we completely re-architected and redesigned our cloud-portal for mobile responsiveness," Barkly's senior product marketing manager Allison Averill told SecurityWeek. "That means when customers log in to our portal on a mobile device, they see a mobile-specific design that makes it easier to accomplish their key workflows on mobile."