A growing issue for retailers.
Global plumbing supplies company Reece Group has installed BlackBerry Cylance technology to protect thousands of endpoints across its retail stores and offices in Australia. CylancePROTECT is an integrated threat prevention solution that combines artificial intelligence (AI) to block malware infections with additional security controls that safeguard against script-based, fileless, memory, and external device-based attacks.
This patent-protected AI model claims to predict, prevent, contain and respond to advanced cyber threats before they cause harm.
The Australian company, which provides plumbing, bathroom and waterworks products to residential and commercial customers, has developed a more sophisticated approach to build cyber-resiliency. This included a move from a traditional signature-based antivirus (AV) model to a proactive and preventative AI and machine learning (ML) model to augment its growing cybersecurity operations team.
Reece Group head of cybersecurity, Shane Laffin said, “We take data integrity and cybersecurity very seriously. After setting out our needs for a more sophisticated, proactive cyber strategy, BlackBerry Cylance proved it could address Reece Group’s requirements from a security, operations and design perspective. Cylance was uniquely able to automatically deal with attack sequences without requiring constant human intervention, allowing our team to scale and support our growing global business.”
Rather than rely on signature-based antivirus solutions or passive detection tools, the company required a more sophisticated, automated and flexible architecture for both End Point Protection (EPP) and End-Point Detection and Response (EDR) that would accelerate capability to detect and contain threats.
BlackBerry Cylance regional director, Jason Duerden said the tactics used by adversaries today are no different to 10 years ago. “Phishing, social engineering, new malware mutation all occur daily, even hourly, making signature-based tools obsolete. It only takes one click on a malicious attachment or one unsecured connected device to leave a network open to attack.”
The lightweight solution is deployed across a diverse range of endpoints, such as workstations, servers, point-of-sale and selected employee home machines, using AI and ML algorithms to detect, prevent and contain existing and new malware, exploits and scripts, even when systems are offline.
Reece further extended its threat prevention capability by rolling out CyclanceOPTICS, pushing all detections and response decisions down to the endpoint, eliminating the requirement for constant cloud connection and human intervention.