Zero Trust World: ThreatLocker Providing an Action Plan for Preventing Attacks

THREATLOCKER ZERO TRUST WORLD — On day one of Zero Trust World, ThreatLocker CEO Danny Jenkins said he hopes attendees gain an action plan for preventing cyberattacks.

The conference in Orlando has attracted attendees globally, including the United States, Australia, Belgium, the United Kingdom, the Philippines and more.

Master of ceremonies Adam Reid told attendees they recognize cybersecurity is a “serious topic and you’re serious about getting the solutions you need.”

Attendees still have a lot of progress to be made in their zero-trust journeys. When asked if any have completed their zero-trust journeys, no one raised a hand.

Zero Trust World Theme

The theme of Zero Trust World is about risk, diving deep into the threat landscape to learn about attacks so you can defend against them, Reid said.

The global average cost of a data breach has reached $4.5 million, while attacks and data breaches are occurring and going undetected more and more, Reid said. Last year, it took an average of 49 days to detect and discover breaches. That means hackers were able to operate in an environment for over a month without getting caught.

“This is why we’re here, to stop cyberattacks before they happen,” he said.

During his keynote, Jenkins talked about his experience with helping an insurance company in Australia that was hit with ransomware in 2014.

“Essentially a user downloaded what they thought was an antivirus," he said. "A virus allowed them to go onto their network, got onto the servers, encrypted their Exchange database, their claims database, their backups, everything. I was called in to help because they paid $22,000 in ransom, which is pretty cheap by today's number, but the decryption tool didn't work. It decrypted some files, but not more, and it was unreliable.”

ThreatLocker's Danny Jenkins

Jenkins said about a week into the recovery, he was still unsure if he was going to be able to get anything back in terms of money.

“The owner of the company, who was a 60-something-year-old man, called me up. The guy was crying on the phone and he said to me, 'Well, are we going to get this back up and running?' And I couldn't give him a positive answer,” he said. “I couldn't say yes to him. I said, 'We're trying everything, but right now it doesn't look good. We don't have any backups. Our databases are gone and it was a disaster.' Now, we did get him back up and running. There was a lot of cost. There was a lot of business loss. There was a lot of money lost. However, after we got him up and running, he asked me what he could do to stop this from happening again. The words zero trust didn't exist then, but I said, 'Change the way you’re thinking. You can't rely on an antivirus. You can't rely on everything being detected. You need to start blocking everything by default, take away users' permissions and limit what happens in your environment.' And even after him bawling his eyes out, to me, the answer was, hat's not viable for us. We're too small a company. It's not manageable.”

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