Spotlight on Partners recap: Bitdefender — building resilience through detection, response, and hardening

For this live and exclusive webinar, we were joined by Bitdefender’s Michael Reeves, CISSP and Technical Director for Cloud and Managed Services, as well as our own Shahar Ron El, Marketplace Product Manager, for an exciting webinar focusing on security prevention and detection strategies.

If you missed the webinar, you can watch it again right here, or keep reading for the choicest highlights of the event!

Building resilience through detection and response

“Businesses in our space weren’t really talking about security. They were talking more about availability. How do we keep our systems up and online three hundred and sixty-five days a year uh folks were moving into online purchasing and things like that And the challenge with this fear is that the legacy endpoint protection solutions that existed, let’s say, five-seven years ago just don’t work today,” Reeves said.

The same challenges large enterprises faced 15 years ago are the same challenges that small-medium business face today, says Reeves.

“Malicious actors have become automated. They have the ability now through automation, to reach out and touch any business globally if they are connected to the internet, and so they’re now using very, very advanced tools uh like we used to see in very large businesses. Now, small businesses are seeing those same types of attacks.”

Reeves pointed out the challenges he’s witnessing in today’s market include:

• Fear of breaches and business disruptions: More and more advanced tools are being used against small and medium businesses, as opposed to large corporations, which was the case 15 years ago
• Cybersecurity skills gap: There’s just not enough cybersecurity talent out there
• Too many tools: There are just too many tools out there that most businesses are being challenged with to be able to defend their environments in a really holistic way

“IT generalists, or what I call IT generalists, are now having to address really complicated, very, very advanced attacks into their businesses, and there’s just a skill gap there. That is a huge challenge for most managed service providers.”

The three critical areas that need to be addressed with your endpoint security solution

• The prevention layer — these are basically your automated security controls within your environment. This is software that’s designed to detect and protect in an automated way. The challenge in this area is, there’s just poor efficacy. In other words, most software has maybe eight or nine different security controls, and that’s it. And so there’s a tremendous amount of breadth in threat vectors in your customers’ environments, and if you got poor prevention in this layer, you have a really really difficult challenge.
• The EDR space — it’s lumped into what we call “Endpoint Detection and Response.” The challenge in this area is that most MSPs just don’t, have the human resource capital to be able to check all of these alerts, synthesize them, and figure out what the real threats are. So, there are just a lot of gaps in this area. You’ve got very poor prevention you’ve got alerts coming into various consoles that are just not checked, and they slip through.
• System hardening — is probably one of the most the easiest challenges to deal with but just don’t because there’s not enough time, and there’s not a great tool set to address this area.“When I talk about system hardening, I’m talking about lowering the attack surface in your customers’ environments,” said Reeves. “How do I lower the attack surface in my customers’ environments? And then you have you couple this with just a lack of integrations. So most customers are wide open for threats. There is a really poor prevention layer, and you’ve got humans that are overwhelmed with the sheer number of security alerts that they have to deal with.”

The three critical requirements of endpoint security

• Prevention — very effective, very broad-based automated security control layer. “Think of prevention as your defensive layer of your security. In other words, block the shots moving towards the goal.”
• Detection and response — both defense and offense.“What you want in this layer is you want really good visibility. I’m gonna suggest correlated three-hundred-and-sixty-degree visibility so that you can very quickly determine whether something is malicious or benign, and then be able to respond to it really quickly.”
• The hardening phase — the transitional part between defense and offense. “It’s the midfield section of the game, and this is extremely important in the area of security as well, because this is where you reduce your attack service.”

How Bitdefender addresses these challenges

More than 25,000 MSPs use Bitdefender.

• Endpoint prevention — Bitdefender is unique in this area in that it offers more than 30 different security controls from the network layer. These include hyper-detect, which is basically tunable machine learning.
• Sandboxing — what sandboxing does is allows the automated security control to upload an object.“Bitdefender will detonate that object automatically and associate risk with that object, knowing exactly the behavior of that object. And so sandboxing is really critical. It’s much better to detonate unknown objects away from your customers’ environment rather than in your customers’ environment.
• Endpoint detection and response / XDR / MDR — this is a security control that enables humans to react in a situation that your automated security controls cannot, or has bypassed your automated security control. “What Bitdefender does for your people resources is, we correlate information out of the box, and we give them very quick, succinct synopsis of what is actually happening in the environment. So within seconds we enable your human resources to not only know what is happening, whether it’s malicious or benign, and then be able to take very, very quick actions.”
• Correlated visualization across endpoints — easy-to-understand visual guides highlight critical attack paths, easing burdens on IT staff and managers.
• Endpoint risk analytics — system misconfiguration is the second biggest cause of security breaches. “So, Bitdefender is a managed detection and response service. That is a fully managed service and it’s integrated into GravityZone. The onboarding is literally a tick of a box. You turn it on, you click save, and within an hour you are automatically onboarded into our services that are monitored 24/7, 365 days of the year, that are really highly trained, most of them former military personnel.”

Why MSPs should use Bitdefender

More than 25,000 MSPs currently use Bitdefender. Here are just some of the reasons why:

• Opportunity to grow security and revenues with optional add-on layers
• Automations through API and integrations
• Single multitenant console
• Usage-based monthly licensing

Atera’s Bitdefender integration

Bitdefender’s integration into systems like Ateracreates a fortified defense against cyber threats. By automating the patching process, Bitdefender ensures that all security vulnerabilities are promptly addressed, reducing the risk of exploitation. Meanwhile, remote monitoring tools provide real-time visibility into your IT environment, allowing you to track the effectiveness of these patches through patch management and the overall security posture. When these elements work together, Bitdefender’s advanced threat detection and remote management capabilities can quickly identify and mitigate risks, ensuring that your systems are both up-to-date and protected. This synergy not only streamlines IT operations but also enhances your organization’s resilience against evolving cyber threats, offering a comprehensive approach to maintaining system integrity and security.