Kaspersky Lab Unveils Latest Cybersecurity Platform

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Kaspersky Lab Thursday rolled out its new Threat Management and Defense offering, which combines Kaspersky Anti Targeted Attack, Cybersecurity Services and the company’s latest EDR service within a single platform for enterprises.

The platform is now available in North America. It provides businesses the “visibility and threat-hunting capabilities they need” to reduce overall response times of their corporate networks, the company said.

Kaspersky Lab’s Rob Cataldo

Rob Cataldo, vice president of enterprise sales at Kaspersky Lab North America, tells Channel Partners as more organizations “come to the realization that targeted and advanced threats cannot be quickly detected with today’s slew of cumbersome cybersecurity options,” partners will be able to offer a comprehensive, full-circle protection that reduces dwell time and minimizes business impact without requiring an “advanced degree in cyber forensics.”

“As an example, there have been recent instances where banking organizations have been targeted by cybercriminals to cash out ATMs,” he said. “Oftentimes, what’s happening on the surface is designed to be a distraction that allows cybercriminals to go much deeper into the bank’s networks to confiscate money directly from customer accounts. The combination of advanced threat discovery and protection from Kaspersky Anti Targeted Attack platform and managed threat hunting from Kaspersky Managed Protection, would detect the complicated criminal operation happening well below the surface by correlating and analyzing malicious patterns behind the more obvious, easily detected activities going on in the network.”

Kaspersky Threat Management and Defense provides partners who are new to security an opportunity to “deliver on the business value of mitigating risk associated with sophisticated cyberattacks to any of their customers concerned with being breached,” Cataldo said. Additionally, partners do not have to possess threat discovery and response skills to help their customers because Kaspersky can deliver this on an outsourced basis, he said.

The most common challenges partners face when discussing cybersecurity with their customers are around the effectiveness and operational complexity of their security environments, Cataldo said.

“Kaspersky Lab has a 20-year proven track record of delivering the most accurate detection in the industry,” he said. “Kaspersky Threat Management and Defense allows partners to confidently position the world’s most powerful advanced threat-detection technologies with the complementary benefit of Kaspersky’s threat hunting and incident response services for organizations looking to augment, or create their own threat intelligence resources.”

Larry Walsh, CEO and chief analyst of The 2112 Group, said the new offering appears as a bundling of existing Kaspersky Lab products and technologies to bring security functionality under a single pane of glass.

“Such bundling strategies are often effective in attracting customers with what appears as a simplified approach to complex security threats,” he said.

In December, President Donald Trump signed legislation that bans the use of Kaspersky Lab products within the U.S. government, ending a months-long effort to purge the Moscow-based company from federal agencies amid concerns it was vulnerable to Kremlin influence.

“The current climate of suspicions that the Russian government interfered with the 2016 U.S. elections is having a collateral impact on Russian companies trying to do business in the United States,” Walsh said. “Americans have a bias against non-Western companies — particularly from companies in the former Warsaw Pact region. Kaspersky Lab is probably most vulnerable to this negative perception given the founder and many members of the management team’s former association with Russian intelligence agencies. Suspicions about Kaspersky Lab’s trustworthiness among American consumers and commercial security buyers is not likely to improve so long as the investigations into Russian meddling continue in Washington, D.C.”