Overworked IT Department

What it Is: Is your IT department drowning in user requests, “urgent” alerts, and a never-ending stream of threats? Alert fatigue is a real problem for many IT departments, and it can make it easier for attackers to succeed. When your IT team is too busy dealing with false alarms, real problems can easily slip right past your defenses. This can be an especially big problem with phishing, which is increasing in frequency and success rates these days.


How We Protect: Strongarm’s Suspicious service takes the burden off your IT team by allowing your users to forward potentially suspicious emails (ones that might contain a malicious link or attachment) directly to our team for review. Both individual users and your IT team can take advantage of this. Expand the capacity of your IT team by leaning on Strongarm’s broad and deep experience with phishing and all other types of cyberattacks to verify whether something is truly a problem or not.

Happy Clickers

What it Is: Employees don’t always have proper training on IT security issues, so they may be prone to click on phishing emails, malicious links, or other types of social engineer, leading to security issues for the whole organization. Even with plenty of user education, some people just love to click! Happy clickers are a fact of life for many businesses and are by far your greatest risk.


How We Protect: Strongarm acts as an extra layer of protection for those clickers in your organization. If a user clicks on a bad link, Strongarm will prevent the machine from communicating with the attacker and gives you the opportunity to give your user a dose of phishing education from right inside Strongarm. Happy clickers can also be encouraged to forward emails to Strongarm using our Suspicious service, which will review and verify whether the email is safe. If it’s a phish, we will automatically blackhole any domains in the e-mail so that if anyone else in your organization clicks on the phish, they will be protected.

Ransomware

What it Is: Ransomware is a type of malware that is able to hold digital files hostage until a sum of money is paid by the business to unlock them. It is often spread via phishing emails and has become a very popular attack in the last few years, especially against small businesses.


How We Protect: With Strongarm, businesses can prevent ransomware from freezing their files by tracking and intercepting communication with malicious infrastructure on the web. When users click on a phish, Strongarm gets in the middle and gives them an instant dose of user education. Strongarm also stops ransomware from phoning home to download the ransomware itself and its encryption keys, providing another opportunity to keep devices safe from attack.

Spearphishing

What it Is: Targeted phishing attacks often go after key employees with access to the CEO or sensitive information and can lead to major fallout, such as information loss and legal troubles. Because they are more targeted, they often have lower success rates, but the consequences can be dire.


How We Protect: After a user has clicked a phishing link, Strongarm steps in and prevents the user’s machine from actually connecting with the malicious site. Strongarm keeps password credentials safe, and stops the user from disclosing company secrets or PII to the attacker. As a bonus, we help re-enforce phishing education. Your users can also forward potential phishing emails to Strongarm using our Suspicious service, which will review and verify whether the email is safe. They will get a custom message back from our analysis team regarding whether they were a target and what the attacker was likely going after.

Exploit Kits

What it Is: Exploit kits are automated malware injection programs that search for known vulnerabilities and take advantage of them to spread malware. They’re the most common way you will encounter zero-day exploits in your browser. One of the sneakiest things about exploit kits is that they often don’t even require a single click to spread. That’s why they’re often called a “clickless threat.”


How We Protect: To protect against automated and clickless threats like these, Strongarm stops traffic on your network to hacked websites that are loaded with exploit kits. Neither antivirus nor firewalls can protect you against exploit kits, but Strongarm keeps you safe. Perhaps best of all, Strongarm protects even before patches are available.

Malvertising

What it Is: Malvertising is when criminals purchase web advertisements and then stuff malicious code into them (often exploit kits.) With most malware, someone on your network has to click on a “bad link” for anything to happen. With malvertising, users don’t need to click anything at all. The attack can start as soon as an affected web page is loaded.


How We Protect: Strongarm, uses DNS blackholing technology coupled with comprehensive threat intelligence to prevent these ads from ever appearing in your browser, which means they can’t load and can’t infect your machines. This foils attacks without impacting end users at all. Since your user didn’t do anything wrong (the website was hacked not your user,) our analysis team will triage the alert and let you know there’s nothing to worry about on your end.

Zero-Day Attacks

What it Is: Zero-day attacks target newly discovered vulnerabilities. By definition, they are undisclosed exploits. There is no amount of patching you can do to protect yourself.


How We Protect: Zero day attacks go after new vulnerabilities, but they still use the same type of attack infrastructure. Phishing sites, malware distribution and C2 - all of this remains the same. Strongarm can catch them using its threat intelligence, which are curated and updated daily—even hourly—to stay on top of the latest threats.

Content Filtering

What it Is: The Internet is both a blessing and a curse. As valuable as Google is, social media, pornography, and sports can be equal and opposite distractors. In addition, flashy ads that entice users to install malware or other incendiary software are a constant threat.


How We Protect: Strongarm has content filtering available to all of our customers free of charge. Strongarm allows you to block categories of content such as social media sites (to increase productivity) or pornogoraphy sites (based on social responsibility or because the sites are not related to work activities). We let you set up a custom message regarding company policies (or simply tell people to get back to work.)