Actu
Sophos Launches Rapid Response Service to Identify and Neutralize Active Cybersecurity Attacks
November 2020 by Marc Jacob
Sophos announced the availability of Sophos Rapid Response, an industry-first, fixed-fee remote incident response service that identifies and neutralizes active cybersecurity attacks throughout its entire 45-day term of engagement. Sophos Rapid Response provides organizations with a dedicated 24/7 team of incident responders, threat hunters and threat analysts to quickly stop advanced attacks and remove adversaries from their networks, minimizing damage and costs, and reducing recovery time.
Sophos Rapid Response has identified the first known use of the Buer malware dropper to deliver ransomware. In new research published today from Sophos Rapid Response and SophosLabs, “Hacks for sale: Inside the Buer Loader Malware-as-a-Service,” Sophos details how Buer compromises Windows PCs, and enables attackers to deliver a payload. Sophos Rapid Response made the discovery while mitigating a recent Ryuk ransomware attack, which was detected and stopped as part of a wave of Ryuk attacks using new tools, techniques and procedures. In this incident, the relentless attackers used a new variant of Buer in an attempt to launch Ryuk ransomware, before expanding their efforts to mix the use of Buer with other types of loader malware.
Sophos Rapid Response neutralizes a wide range of security incidents, including ransomware, network breaches, hands-on keyboard adversaries, and more. The Sophos Rapid Response team can be onboarded and activated within hours, and the majority of attacks triaged within 48 hours.
Sophos Rapid Response is part of Sophos Managed Threat Response (MTR), a global team that provides proactive, fully-managed threat hunting, detection and response services. As one of the industry’s most widely used managed detection and response (MDR) services with more than 1,400 customers, Sophos MTR stands apart with its ability to proactively take action on an organization’s behalf to mitigate threats in real time.
Once immediate threats are neutralized during a Rapid Response engagement, the Sophos Rapid Response program shifts to continuous monitoring with around-the-clock proactive threat hunting, investigation, detection, and response from the Sophos MTR team. A threat investigation report details discoveries made, actions taken and other remediation recommendations, helping organizations understand attack origination as well as what assets were compromised, and data accessed and exfiltrated.
Sophos Rapid Response is available now to both existing and non-Sophos customers. Unlike traditional incident response and forensic services that require complex and protracted deployments with hourly pricing structures, Sophos Rapid Response is a remote offering with a fixed pricing model based on an organization’s number of users and servers. Sophos Rapid Response is also structured to accommodate businesses of all sizes, including smaller organizations, which until now have not been able to easily leverage a service such as this without requiring a retainer.
What analysts say:
“Cyberattacks are getting worse and more sophisticated. As we’ve seen this year, no one is off limits, even in a time of crisis. Organizations need to ready themselves as more than 85 percent of security professional survey respondents typically tell IDC that they have experienced at least one security breach in the past two years that involved the spending of significant extra resources to rectify,” said Frank Dickson, program vice president at IDC. “Sophos Rapid Response is an offering that no one wants until they need it. Many organizations are simply either not prepared to fight an active attack or want to respond more quickly and aggressively than internal resources alone allow. With predictable, fixed-fee pricing and the ability for same-day activation, Sophos Rapid Response provides certainty when customers want it most.”
