The Gately Report: Acronis CISO Says MSPs Need to Focus Defense on Supply Chain Attacks

Supply chain attacks pose the biggest threat to MSPs, but Acronis CISO Kevin Reed said MSPs can protect themselves by adopting a small number of security measures.

We spoke with Reed as part of this week’s Acronis CyberFit Summit 2022 in Miami. Acronis is working with over 20,000 partners and 750,000 businesses in over 150 countries and 26 languages.

During CyberFit, Acronis unveiled a new, simplified endpoint detection and response (EDR) solution for MSPs. It also unveiled strategic updates to its Acronis Cyber Protect Cloud platform with a new product, Advanced Automation, and developments including the addition of machine intelligence (MI) to its Advanced Management solution.

More and Worse

In a Q&A, Reed talks about Acronis’ cybersecurity strategy and what MSP partners can expect in the month ahead.

Channel Futures: What’s your take on the current threat landscape? What do you find most dangerous?

 Acronis’ Kevin Reed

Kevin Reed: Journalists always ask me every year what is going to happen the next year. And I usually answer that it’s going to be the same, but more and worse. And what I mean is that at a very high level, the attack landscape did not change. Initial access technologies especially did not change significantly over the last few years. Business email compromise (BEC) existed five years ago. Phishing as an initial access did exist five years ago. Exploiting vulnerabilities that have not been patched in time, that problem did not change in 30-40 years. The only real, somewhat new trend was the attacks on the supply chain, which is especially important for MSPs because MSPs are really the primary target. They almost always have collateral damage or they are a gateway into customer systems. So we actually have seen situations when MSPs are hacked, not because they were particularly important, but because their customers were important to attackers. So I think this is a new trend somewhat, and I think it is a very dangerous one. But on a technology level, it is just more and worse.

Scroll through our slideshow above for more from Reed and more cybersecurity news.