Security consultant Cyber Risk has signed a deal with Australian plumbing and bathroom supplies distributor Reece Group, centred around Reece’s adoption of BlackBerry Cylance’s platform, with Cyber Risk advising on tuning in best operational practices, developing the zones and policies before deployment, and contributing to the development of a proof of concept.
Cyber Risk director Leong Wang said that the company took the opportunity to introduce Reece to Cylance after the distributor put up an expression of interest (EOI) after its existing antivirus solution was up for renewal.
“The legacy [antivirus] was up for renewal and leading up to that, Reece ran the EOI, a proof of concept and proof of value leading up to that point, and made a decision with another month up Reece’s sleeve to actually start deploying before the other products expired,” Wang said.
BlackBerry Cylance solutions uses a patent-protected artificial intelligence (AI) model to predict, prevent, contain and respond to advanced cyber threats before they can cause harm.
The company may be nearly one hundred years old, but forward-thinking Reece Group constantly innovates to stay competitive – including its approach to next-generation cybersecurity practices. As management pursued rapid digital transformation plans and an international growth strategy in the USA, including its $1.9b acquisition of MORSCO, the company also 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. To minimise complexity and ensure ease-of-management, Reece Group undertook some intense testing to find one vendor to do it all.
Shane Laffin, Head of Cybersecurity at Reece Group says,
“Our customers are at the centre of everything we do, which means 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. With its mathematical AI models for both static prevention and dynamic detection and response, BlackBerry 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, Reece Group 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.
For example, Reece has been able to orchestrate workflows that take automatic actions on triggers by leveraging behavioural ML models, custom detection options and align their threat hunting program to the pre-built MITRE ATT&CK framework, all done via the BlackBerry Cylance platform.
Jason Duerden, Regional Director, BlackBerry Cylance in Australia and New Zealand says,
“The tactics used by adversaries today are no different to 10 years ago – however, 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. Together with our channel partner, CyberRisk, BlackBerry Cylance is proud to help Reece Group move successfully from a traditional AV model to an AI-driven, preventative approach to threat management– ensuring the company is prepared for emerging and current threats.”
The lightweight CylancePROTECT solution is deployed by Reece Group across a diverse range of end-points, such as workstations, servers, point-of-sale (P.O.S) and select 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.
The company chose CylancePROTECT because it was easy to deploy, consumed minimal resources on systems and consistently detected malware and threats that other AV solutions missed. Reece Group further extended its threat prevention capability by rolling out CylanceOPTICS, pushing all detection and response decisions down to the endpoint, eliminating the requirement for constant cloud connection, and human intervention.
Leong Wang, Director and Co-founder at Cyber Risk says,
“We are seeing attacks in Australia on an unforeseen scale, such as the current EMOTET malware campaign, driving organisations to move away from traditional, signature-based antivirus measures. That’s why we were early adopters of BlackBerry Cylance and since, have been a long-term partner. As a customer, we know first-hand the proven effectiveness of its next-generation AI-driven solutions at mitigating risk years in advance. As a partner, we are confident in helping our customers use AI to address the sheer scale of threats we are facing.”
CylancePROTECT is an integrated threat prevention solution that combines the power of AI to block malware infections with additional security controls that safeguard against script-based, fileless, memory, and external device-based attacks. Customers like Reece Group leverage the pre-execution Predictive Advantage (PA) of CylancePROTECT to prevent advanced threats, including zero-day attacks, on average 25 months before they are first detected in the wild.
The power of prevention is coupled with the highly scalable endpoint detection and response (EDR) capabilities of CylanceOPTICS for threat hunting and root cause analysis, using AI to identify and prevent widespread security incidents.
