Comodo launches free enterprise threat analysis

Data breaches not only cost businesses money in the short term, they can cause long term reputational damage as stolen details turn up for sale in dark corners of the internet.

Cyber security company Comodo is offering enterprises with more than 1,000 employees a free 'Company Threat Analysis' to determine if their sensitive information is for sale on the Dark Web and, if so, how to prevent compromises from happening again.

It creates a personalized report to identify if an enterprise's information has been stolen and dive into how this data became available to cyber criminals in the first place -- for example, via credentials stolen from direct network access or data breaches from third-party applications. For each instance, the affected company gets the chance to review a sample of the leaked credential records and details on the attack processes, to help them understand what went wrong.

"Most company employees use the same password for multiple sites and accounts," says Jerald Nine, director of threat intelligence for Comodo. "If their networks are infiltrated by hackers, it becomes extremely easy to gather legitimate credentials that can get cyber criminals into high-value accounts. Pony malware, for example, which we recently discovered during one of these analyses, can affect insurance and benefit, payroll and social media sites -- all of which house appealing credentials for buyers on the Dark Web."

Large companies are typically more vulnerable to these zero-day 'Pony' malware attacks, because they have more employees and may be specifically targeted by attackers. Cyber criminals may believe that they have more to gain from targeting larger organizations.

"It is clear that the traditional anti-virus industry has not been able to identify malware and create signatures fast enough to keep up," adds Nine. "Traditional attempts to isolate malware at the endpoint use a default-allow approach and resource-intensive virtualization or sandboxing technologies that reduce endpoint performance. These have proven unworkable in most deployments."

Companies with more than 1,000 employees can sign up for a free analysis on the Comodo website.

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