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If you decide not to issue devices to staff,
then firms need to reduce the risk associated
with BYOD through a clear policy that
employees are trained on regularly. As part
of this policy, employee-owned devices
should always connect to guest WiFi and PIN
passwords on their phones that are regularly
changed. Better yet, you should consider
providing the user with easy access to a
mobile security solution for their device (and
paying for it).
Christopher Green, Vice President, Middle
East, Africa and Turkey at Malwarebytes
Whose responsibility is
the endpoint security strategy
within an organisation?
This will depend on the structure of the
organisation, but a CIO or CISO is usually
responsible for the cyber-strategy. However,
cyber is not ‘just’ IT’s problem; the
whole C-Suite needs to be championing
cybersecurity awareness so that every
employee is thinking twice about whether to
click on that suspicious email or click on an
unknown URL. A cyber savvy workforce is one
of the best defences companies can have.
What responsibility do employees
have to ensure the safety of their
devices when it comes to accessing
the corporate network?
This is something of a grey area. Through
a well thought out, active BYOD policy
companies can place the onus on employees
to ensure that their devices are clean, but
ultimately it is the business’s responsibility.
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That links back to my earlier point. Each
company needs to assess the risk of a BYOD
policy versus the cost of issuing company-
owned devices.
What is the benefit of having a
multi-layered defence model?
Every layer is designed to make it as difficult
as possible for an attacker to get through. It
can be similar to your personal house, where
you have a fence, a lock at every door and
window, cameras for the yard and garden
and maybe even a gated community with
security personnel.
This means an attacker has to get through
all these defensive layers until they can
finally get and steal the jewellery in the
safe of the house. And what you need is
something that can work online as well
as offline. Therefore signature-based and
signature-less layers in a single agent is the
best approach here, to keep it manageable.
Also, an artificial intelligence layer is
nowadays standard and needed. In our case
we have this integrated into our Endpoint
Protection product that has seven layers
and on top of this we have the proprietary
patented Linking Engine technology
that ensures thorough clean up, even if
something gets through.
How important is an immediate
response when an infection
does occur?
How long do you want to have a thief in
your house before you call the police? As
we have seen through our statistics (www.
malwarebytes.com/remediationmap/), no
solution is 100% secure 100% of the time.
In fact, we see that the average rate at
which other security vendors are failing is
around 30% on critical issues like trojans,
ransomware, rootkits and other similar
bad malware. Also, Ponemon Institute’s
2017 Cost of a Data Breach study tells
us that the average dwell time for an
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