Cyber Contraceptives for Digital India

Vendors are upgrading antivirus solutions and also educating customers and users by giving guidelines and suggesting the best solutions to resolve queries

From the first antivirus attack way back in 1949 to the latest Ransomware attack on May 12, 2017, computers and users has been always on the eyes of hackers. Most people use the term “computer virus” to refer to all malicious software, which we call malware. Recently, the ransomware virus infected more than 230,000 computers in over 150 countries. According to Quick heal, it has detected over 48,000 ransomware attack attempts in India, with West Bengal witnessing the most incidents. While few isolated incidents in Kerala, Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu and Gujarat were reported.

Major Antivirus Vendors of India has taken various steps and providing solutions to their customers to prevent and protect from the ransomware attacks. Vendors are upgrading their antivirus and also educating customers and users by giving various guidelines and suggesting the best solution to resolve queries.

Bitdefender claims that they have the largest security delivery infrastructure on the globe. Performing 11 billion security queries per day, Bitdefender detects, anticipates and takes action even the newest dangers anywhere in the world in as little as 3 seconds.

Bitdefender antivirus solutions are capable in protecting the ransomware attack. Bitdefender engineers has already designed solutions to which can prevent and detect all kinds of attacks including Wannacry.
Hussain Rangwala, Director, Sales and Marketing, Bitdefender said, “We were the first one to be on the website and on papers that all our customers are protected by ransomware and they don’t need to take extra steps for protection.”

“Bitdefender is known as one of the top solutions for ransomware protection so from our point of view, we have no customer who have faced this ransomware problem till now. However, we got some queries from customers who were using other brand solutions.  We replaced their solutions with Bitdefender antivirus and now the customers are pretty happy and satisfied using our solution” he added.

According to McAfee LabsThreat Predictions 2017 Report, mobile malware will continue its growth in 2017, with ransomware, banking Trojans, and remote access tools among the leading threats. Against such an ever-increasing threat landscape, and considering some of the capabilities that are available on the mobile device here in India, security should form the foundation for India’s digitization empowerment.

Anand Ramamoorthy, Managing Director, South Asia, McAfee shared his views and said, “We have been addressing numerous concerns and educating our customers and vendors in the last one month on the WannaCry Ransomware. McAfee proactively reaches out to customers providing information on the latest trends and potential threats. From a prevention perspective, our solutions have been updated with the latest DAT updates; McAfee’s Global Threat Intelligence cloud has the latest threat intelligence. Our next generation capabilities such as Dynamic Application Containment, Real Protect and Advanced Threat Defense are able to protect our customers against any potential ransomware attack. We also provide protection on our network based technologies such as McAfee Network Security Platform (NSP)”.

Simultaneously, McAfee is constantly monitoring worldwide for various detections and variants of the ransomware. McAfee is looking for early detection capabilities with millions of sensors across the world to help provide vital information in subsequent variants.

From the Kaspersky perspective, all their security products can block ransomware attacks. For smaller businesses in particular, a ransomware attack can be a huge headache.

Altaf Halde Managing Director (South Asia) Kaspersky Lab, India shared his views, “Kaspersky Lab is offering a free tool ‘Kaspersky Anti-Ransomware Tool’ to enable businesses infected by crypto malware or ransomware to regain access to data on Microsoft Windows devices without the need to pay hackers the ransom they demand. This tool works with most security software – one doesn’t need to have Kaspersky Lab’s security installed to use this tool”.

eScan has been proactively protecting its customers from WannaCry Ransomware attacks using its in-house developed PBAE Technology. According to Anil Gupta, AVP, India sales, eScan, all of their products have critical patch management which implements the critical security patches; MS17-010 has been provided as an update globally. As a special one-off case, Microsoft has also released the update for XP and 2003 operating systems.

Sophos technology combines advanced signature-less technology and behavior-based analysis to deliver proactive and adaptive detection and mitigation against ransomware, rootkits, malicious apps, traffic and other zero-day threats. Businesses looking to take advantage of Synchronized Security can benefit from Sophos Endpoint’s capability to work in conjunction with the firewall to detect and automatically isolate suspicious or compromised devices.

Automated incident response and threat removal can save substantial amount of time for security teams and this adds a unique strength for Sophos Endpoint. Sophos also provides several free tools including a mobile security app for Android and a security solution for iOS devices.

As approx 48k ransomware attack got registered but according to F-secure, none of their customers got impacted from ransomware attack.  F-secure have a lot of behavior engines build in their endpoint. Amit Nath (Head of Asia Pacific (Corporate Business) India & SAARC – F-Secure said, “Our engine which is ahead of endpoint technology Deepguard, its a next generation behavior based engine protects against ransomware. It detects and protects customers form all attacks like ransomware”.