Advanced 
Threat Protection 101: 
A Cybersecurity Guide 
for SMBs

As a small business owner, you may be reading headlines about cybersecurity breaches at big companies and thinking – Thank God it’s Not Us. Hackers are after the massive storehouses of customer data or proprietary information held by these big companies, right?

Think again!

Cybercriminals do not discriminate by the size of the organization! In fact, some of the biggest breaches have started at small business levels. SMBs account for 43% of cyber-attacks annually and 46% of cyber-attacks were small businesses with 1,000 or fewer employees. No organization is off radar! SMBs must be conscious of the dangers they may face and take precautionary measures – whether adopting cloud or just using email and maintaining a website, cybersecurity should necessarily be a part of the plan.

One such precautionary measure is advanced threat protection or ATP for small businesses. This security solution proactively identifies, addresses, and neutralizes even the most elusive threats. Which is what we will cover in this article – more about security for SMBs, nature of advanced threat protection, key components and more.

What Makes SMBs Such a Target?

There are a few solid reasons why despite the limited resources cybercriminals target SMBs.

• All The Valuable Data: Although on a smaller scale, SMBs still store sensitive data that can be offloaded for a profit on the Dark Web—medical records, credit card information, bank account credentials, and even proprietary information.
• Computing Power: Cybercriminals may also just be interested in using the company’s computers, turning them into bots that perpetrate massive DDoS attacks. DDoS works by artificially generating huge amounts of web traffic to disrupt the service of a company or group of companies.
• Connection to Larger Companies: Today, most businesses are connected digitally with each other. Be it to complete transactions, manage supply chains, or share information. Since larger companies may be tougher to hack into, criminals target smaller partners as a way to get into their systems.
• Generated Cashflow: Cybercriminals target small businesses—or any other company for that matter—primarily for profit. Needless to mention, modern SMBs are growing fast, raking in more revenue and attracting lumpsum investments. Most attacks are initiated with the motive to make money. This explains why ransomware is such a popular method of attack.
• IT Vulnerability: Most importantly, SMBs haven't always followed through with robust or even sufficient cybersecurity strategy. Some even after expanding workloads to cloud, with AI integration and more - creating new vulnerabilities for cyber threats.

But these threats can be avoided. Enter Advanced Threat Protection to protect SMBs from and prevent both known and unknown threats. How? Let us get to know better!

Understanding Advanced Threat Protection: More Than Just Antivirus

The idea of complicated or advanced threats emerged in the early 2000s, with large, state funded, and private cyber attackers increasingly setting goals of destabilizing businesses by introducing infected, downloadable files. At the same time, the growth of cloud solutions was making network endpoints more vulnerable. Both trends left organizations open to high-impact cyberattacks. Today’s most destructive advanced persistent threats (APTs) also were emerging around that time.

Traditional security solutions were not up for the challenge, giving rise to advanced security solutions like threat protection.

So, What is Advanced Threat Protection?

ATP or Advanced threat protection is a type of cybersecurity solution dedicated to preventing pre-planned and complex cyberattacks, such as malware or phishing. Most ATPs include a mix of network devices, endpoint agents, malware protection systems, cloud security, email gateways, and a centralized management console that gives security teams a unified view of threats and defenses.

Advanced threat protection leverages real-time monitoring with contextual intelligence, ensuring greater visibility across an organization. ATP scans for threats successfully and provides accurate alerts, so IT teams can prioritize responses. It’s also fully integrated to monitor multiple systems that store enterprise data.

ATP solutions may be offered as standalone software or even managed services – it will vary as the approach and component of ATP are based on the organization being protected and the technology that it uses.

10 Key Components and Features of Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) for SMBs

1. File Analytics

Cybercriminals, in the recent years have targeted mobile devices for malware attacks, posing a significant threat to all endpoints of an organization. ATP, before allowing files to be executed, implements strong security protocols that analyze all the files (regardless of origin or delivery mechanism) and determines whether they contain malicious functionality.

2. Attack Surface Management

Firms may have a vulnerable attack surface, leaving attackers with plenty of opportunities to exploit endpoints. ATP solutions include sandboxed file analysis and execution, application control, etc. to manage an organization's attack surfacing.

3. Threat Intelligence Technology

ATP solutions must have access to robust cyber threat intelligence that provides up-to-date info on the latest cyberattacks. With cyber threats evolving so quick, having access to the right information can make really make a difference between successfully preventing new threats and letting them slip through cracks—automated contextualization and understanding of threats and events using rich threat intelligence are a must.

4. Real-time Threat Detection

ATP solutions perform continuous monitoring of an environment and analyze the data that they collect using various techniques. This data and the results of this analysis are available to security analysts, for a quicker understanding and response to identified threats. ATP solutions also reduce the cost and impact of potential threats to an organization.

5. Machine Learning and AI Integration

It is commonly known that security teams sometimes struggle to manage large volumes of alert data and accurately differentiate between actual threats and false positives. ATP solutions leverage AI and ML to extract anomalies and patterns from these large datasets and translate these into identifiable and potential threats.

6. Cloud-based Protection

ATP solutions commonly rely on cloud for data processing – to ensure that they are able to perform in-depth analytics while maintaining their real-time performance. This reliance on the cloud also offers better support as corporate IT infrastructures grow more distributed.

7. Zero-Day Threat Detection

ATP solutions specialize in identifying zero-day threats. These are attack campaigns using novel malware or by exploiting unknown vulnerabilities. Leveraging behavioral analysis and anomaly detection, ATP solutions identify potential attacks based on any deviations from the normal rather than just looking for known threats.

8. Identity and Access Management

Identity and access management is an important part of ATP. IAM solutions control access to data and applications based on user identity and permissions. ATP can set up systems designed to detect when authorized users engage in malicious activities. It can also recognize when there is unauthorized access or when a user may be accessing a system in a suspicious manner – be it connecting from a foreign country, using a new device, or connecting with a dormant account. These solutions may include multi-factor authentication, single sign-on (SSO), and access management solutions.

9. Email and Web Security

Amongst the most common attack vectors are email and web sources. ATP solutions offer advanced threat detection capabilities for web and email security, including the ability to inspect attachments in email, webpages directed to by URLs embedded in emails and also user own attempts to visit webpages. By doing so, they can identify and block phishing attacks and browsing of malicious webpages, before they place the organization at risk.

10. Endpoint Protection

ATP solutions offer connected security for an organization’s endpoints, including desktops, laptops, and mobile devices. ATP solutions build on traditional endpoint security capabilities — such as firewalls and antivirus — to provide a more cohesive protection against advanced and subtle cyberattacks.

Types of Threats SMBs Should be Concerned About

Big organizations have entire teams devoted to handling cybersecurity. In most SMBs, these efforts may be undertaken by someone wearing multiple hats in the day-to-day operations. Small business owners need to have a solid security strategy, taken care of by experts like MSSPs to particularly avoid the vulnerabilities below.

Phishing: Phishing has become more and more sophisticated. Often providing a gateway for ransomware or other infections, phishing typically works by provoking users into clicking an email attachment or URL containing a virus. Phishing can be incredibly difficult to spot.

Ransomware: Hackers use a range of methodologies to target businesses, ransomware is among the most common. Ransomware blocks access to the victim's computers and encrypts data unless a "ransom" is paid, holding it hostage.

Malvertising: It is short for “malware advertising,”. Malvertising consists of delivering malware to a network after a user clicks on a “legitimate ad”. Identifying malvertising can be difficult, but some advanced malware detection systems are getting better at it.

Clickjacking: Similar to malvertising, it involves hiding hyperlinks to compromised webpages in legitimate website, tricking users into clicking an element which is invisible or disguised. Users are then asked to reveal personal data that hackers can steal.

Drive-by downloads: This cyber trick downloads malicious code into networks, often without users realizing what is happening. Users may have responded to a pop-up window, or the user has unwittingly visited a compromised website.

Remember, a cybercriminal only needs to be right once. MSSPs like Cloud4C can deploy advanced threat protection solutions to combat the above threats.

How to Select the Right Advanced Threat Protection Provider

While selecting the right ATP provider, SMBs should evaluate features like:

Threat coverage and Scalability	AI and ML capabilities	Cloud And On-premise Integration	Compliance and Cost Effectiveness
24/7 Security Operations	History In Operational Disruption	Hybrid Environments Support	Multi-layered Security Approach

360-degree Approach to Cybersecurity: Cloud4C's Advanced Threat Protection Solutions for SMBs

The need of the hour for SMBs is to safeguard themselves from such advancing threats and if caught in one, recover quickly. This is where an MSSP like Cloud4C steps in!

As the world’s leading application-focused Cloud Managed Services Provider, Cloud4C has also been famed for our globally advanced cybersecurity practices, cloud-native security expertise, and competency with in-depth cyber protection solutions. Amongst which, include Advanced Threat Protection solutions.

With our ATP solutions, SMBs can shield their sensitive databases, IPs and hosted assets, accounts, networks, platforms, and apps from deep targeted hacks, intrusions not conforming to existing patterns, advanced malware and ransomware, and sophisticated phishing attacks. We help build a unique cyber defense structure aided with advanced threat intelligence, AI-powered security solutions and an expert SOC team acting as a 24/7 extended partner to your cybersecurity needs.

In addition, Cloud4C’s suite of MDR, Security Automation, and Managed Compliance-as-a-Service offerings powered by cloud along with our multiple award-winning Self Healing Operations Platform (SHOP™) helps businesses secure their entire IT stack, end-to-end, in a single SLA.

Contact us to know more about our security services.

Frequently Asked Questions: