Recent cybersecurity and cloud incidents have highlighted the global economic impacts across multiple industries resulting from an ever-increasing reliance on cloud providers, at enormous cost and reputational damage. These incidents highlight how cyber-attackers further exploit such chaos via various methods to include social engineering. Enterprises experienced this in two high profile recent examples:
- The recent CrowdStrike Outage that affected millions of Microsoft Windows endpoints, and associated business operations
- and the recent DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack on Azure which emphasized the need for layered intelligent/advanced cybersecurity solutions.
The CrowdStrike incident highlights vulnerabilities in agent/signature-based solutions that require regular, and often urgent, update deployments and demonstrates an associated adverse impact on commerce which could have been mitigated through resource diversification (multiple environments, multiple cloud, and network providers) and operational practices. Testing and phased/flighted deployment models only go so far, as faulty or malicious software will be deployed at some point statistically. The CrowdStrike incident which impacted Microsoft Windows endpoints, structurally can and will happen with any similar software deployment model or OS/environment.
In the CrowdStrike Example, Dispersive customer’s NOC teams immediately leveraged their Dispersive Cloud to communicate with critical assets and ensure that everything was fully functional. Devices protected by Dispersive were off the Internet and did not need to be on the latest CrowdStrike update as part of their N-1 and N-2 protection strategy, which provided the time and space to prevent outages. Those employing Dispersive in this use case, did not experience a loss of access to asset and configuration data needed for mitigation as Dispersive addressed many of the network related security risks that are listed in the MITRE ATT&CK Matrix for Enterprises.
Separate to these specific incidents, international large-scale service providers with their own control plane and encryption utilize Dispersive:
- To make their control plane resilient without adding cost/complexity (Dispersive Stealth Networking allows non-tunnel-based connectivity between mixed networks as a replacement to VPN).
- To accelerate network performance of underlying connectivity (we optimize traffic and can underlay) through the application of spread spectrum RF concepts to networking.
- To overlay existing topology with next-gen security to remote or questionable cloud or branch locations (or users) to secure communication between trusted and un-trusted networks. Dispersive addresses eavesdropping, man-in-the-middle, insider threat, network device misconfigurations, and post quantum decryption of collected data type attacks.
- To create a virtual active/active multipath mesh network with rolling encryption keys and granular access controls, capable of obfuscating control elements to secure data in transit (even against nation-state threat actors and similar type supply chain attacks).
Dispersive adds a layer of security and resilience automatically to existing topologies that include SD-WANs, tunnels, firewalls, and cloud-edge network access (no rip and replace).
