Proactive security with Fortitude<\/strong><\/h3>\nSecurity is a hot topic. The number of attacks has risen sharply, and the implications of a breach range from high costs to reputational damage \u2013 even business closure.<\/p>\n
Abdul Moosa, Chief Technology Officer of CoCre8, says most companies protect their environment using either offensive or defensive security.<\/p>\n
Defensive security typically includes technologies like anti-virus, anti-malware or firewalls, he explains.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf you were to compare that to the analogy of a physical building or house, you would put burglar bars on your house and you would lock the doors. Basically, defensive security is to delay someone who is potentially breaking into your property. If they really wanted to get in, they probably could \u2013 so it\u2019s more of a delaying tactic.\u201d<\/p>\n
Adding intelligence to secure your property brings it into the realm of offensive security. \u201cIn your home this would be where add things like alarm systems which, if someone tripped a beam, would dispatch someone from the security company,\u201d Moosa says.<\/p>\n
\u201cSo now you\u2019ve got defensive and offensive solutions working together.”<\/p>\n
\u201cNow imagine you had a camera system deployed across your entire neighborhood and it had some sort of artificial intelligence built into it.”<\/p>\n
“Now I could pick up suspicious activity in the area, and the AI could determine if this is a threat \u2013 maybe people are looking into windows, or a car is displaying false plates \u2013 and dispatch the security company to avert the threat.”<\/p>\n
\u201cIn this case, you are addressing potential vulnerabilities. Instead of waiting for somebody to attack you, you are proactively looking for the holes that could potentially cause issues.\u201d<\/p>\n
This is how Fortitude works with an organisation\u2019s IT systems, Moosa says. \u201cIt addresses the gap between defensive and offensive security, to identify vulnerabilities and figure out the unknown. And it uses intelligence to predict if something could happen.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Fortitude platform is a cloud service which can examine a company’s infrastructure or systems, using artificial general intelligence (AGI) to learn about the system and what vulnerabilities it potentially has.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat an ethical hacker or penetration tester can do in a month, this platform can do within minutes or even hours,\u201d Moosa adds.<\/p>\n
Because the engine deals with facts and figures, it’s not biased in terms of having a human opinion, but will uncover potential vulnerabilities and then exploit those vulnerabilities to determine what the potential damage could be.<\/p>\n
\u201cAnd then the AGI engine writes a report in simple English to tell you exactly how to fix the issues. And it does this 24\/7.”<\/p>\n
\u201cIt’s almost like having your own Dark Web, monitoring your infrastructure with a bunch of hackers at scale,\u201d Moosa says. \u201cAll the time.”<\/p>\n
\u201cI will put my head on a block and say there’s no-one in the industry that’s got anything like this technology.\u201d<\/p>\n
Stephan Gilliland, head of the edge computing and security at CoCre8, believes that Fortitude is a unique value proposition.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe decided to onboard Fortitude because we recognised there was a gap in the cybersecurity market.”<\/p>\n
\u201cSome customers are lucky enough to have the resources that allow them to do penetration testing – but even they simply can\u2019t do them 24\/7.”<\/p>\n
\u201cWith Fortitude, every company \u2013 from the smallest to the largest \u2013 can be protected around the clock.\u201d<\/p>\n
Gilliland explains that AGI is at the heart of the Fortitude solution. \u201cIt is not just normal AI, which typically allows a machine to perform a single task extremely well \u2013 but it is still just a single task.”<\/p>\n
\u201cAGI, on the other hand, can be made to think and function like a human mind, with the cognitive ability to self-learn and adapt.”<\/p>\n
\u201cAnd this is crucial for cybersecurity – it means it\u2019s not testing just a single point of reference, but everything around it, including IOT devices as well.\u201d<\/p>\n
Perhaps the biggest advantage, however, is that Fortitude doesn\u2019t get tired, take a break or make mistakes. \u201cAGI runs 24\/7 and ensures the organisation is secure all the time and not just when an audit is running,\u201d Gilliland says.<\/p>\n
Fortitude not only picks up vulnerabilities, it can also offer remediation and recommend how to fix those vulnerabilities.<\/p>\n
The system can supply reports at any time and also populates a dashboard so CIOs can examine the organisation\u2019s security stance whenever they want to.<\/p>\n
As a cloud-based offering, Fortitude can be set up to point to any external IP address or domain, after which it constantly tests and reports.<\/p>\n
These reports can be used for an organisation\u2019s ISO 27001 security audit or PCI-DSS audit.<\/p>\n
Gilliland says companies are quickly seeing the value of vulnerability testing in an environment where cyberattacks are on the rise.<\/p>\n
\u201cRecent statistics show that ransomware attacks have increased by 148%, with one attack every 11 seconds \u2013 and 70% of them are successful.”<\/p>\n
\u201cOnce hit, the cost of recovery is extortionate and, even if they pay the ransom, companies often find that 70% of their data is still corrupt.”<\/p>\n
\u201cThey also experience lose in terms of reputation and \u00a0significant downtime. Some companies are down for as much as three weeks,\u201d he adds.<\/p>\n
\u201cAs soon as organisations see the results of a Fortitude proof of value, they realise how vulnerable they are.\u201d<\/p>\n
Because it is a cloud service, customers get the benefit of an extremely powerful tool as a managed service. Once it\u2019s set up, it\u2019s self-service so customers can access or schedule their own reports.<\/p>\n
The local cloud runs on multiple data centres, in Johannesburg, Durban and Bloemfontein, which ensures full redundancy, as well as data sovereignty.<\/p>\n
Click here for more information about CoCre8 Technology Solutions<\/strong><\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Organisations are all different, with different needs \u2013 and often standard, out-of-the-box solutions simply don\u2019t give them everything they need.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":57,"featured_media":574232,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10459],"tags":[16021],"class_list":["post-574226","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-industry-news","tag-cocre8-technology-solutions"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/574226","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/57"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=574226"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/574226\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":576268,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/574226\/revisions\/576268"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/574232"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=574226"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=574226"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=574226"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}