Stop IP Addresses with Bad Reputations Before They Enter Your Environment

Like a triple-locked door or a guard dog on patrol, stopping bad actors before they enter your environment is a critical, proactive step to take to protect what’s yours. Protecting the often-sensitive information entrusted to organizations requires this same approach to security to help avoid data breaches or the mishandling of data and the resulting financial and reputational fallout.

Proactive Versus Reactive Security

“By activating features in your existing security solutions that serve as proactive resources vs reactive ones, you can get one step ahead of bad actors,” said Chris Bailey, Senior Product Manager, MFT, Fortra. “Layering security, including looking for solutions that offer features that act preemptively on your organization’s behalf versus alerting you to danger long after the fact, is one essential step towards shoring up your security stronghold and protecting your most valuable asset – the data entrusted to you," added Bailey.

Read More: Lean Into Security: Take the Next Step Toward Securing Your Organization

6 Reasons to Incorporate a Proactive MFT Security Solution 

1. Traditional threat intelligence is reactive versus proactive against cyberthreats.  
2. Brute-Force or Denial of Service (DoS) attacks can be detected automatically, but often only after the system has been attacked.  
3. Exploited vulnerabilities can be easily replicated across deployments, creating a domino effect.  
4. Attacks may only be detectable through manual inspection of logs to identify suspicious activity.  
5. Unknown vulnerabilities can be exploited/go undetected leading to Zero Day incidents with solutions that do not check for bad IP addresses on a continual basis. 
6. Cybercriminals systematically probe MFT service endpoints to evade automatic IP blocking.  

How Proactive Security Works for One Manufacturing Plant

Let’s use a manufacturing plant with multiple MFT deployments as an example. The organization was concerned about the rising increase in cyberthreats and potential for their systems to be compromised.  While they were confident in their Managed File Transfer (MFT) solution’s ability to protect sensitive data while in transit and in motion, their system didn’t pre-emptively detect bad actors or threats before they entered their MFT environment.

They could, of course, add trusted IPs to their “allowed” list. However, if that IP address later became compromised, they would have no way of knowing whether it remained secure and trustworthy with each new session.

Fortra’s Managed File Transfer (MFT) solution, GoAnywhere MFT, offers a unique and proactive threat intelligence advantage over other MFT solutions in the industry to address the issue of persistent, continuous IP address trust.

“By simply turning on the feature in the latest version of GoAnywhere, organizations can leverage the dynamic intelligence database of Fortra’s Threat Brain. This “brain” is comprised of data and indicators from Fortra’s deep portfolio of cybersecurity solutions,” added Bailey. “As a result, MFT customers benefit from a forward-leaning approach to cybersecurity threats, such as blocking IPs with bad reputations, or malicious intent – before they enter the MFT environment.”

When enabled, this intelligence database can preemptively stop and block those bad actors from across all attack vectors, continually checking trustworthiness with each new session.  

Proactive Security Benefits for MFT Environments 

As a built-in module to enable in GoAnywhere MFT, Fortra’s dynamic cybersecurity intelligence database benefits MFT customers via: 

• Consistent re-verification: An IP's reputation is re-checked with every session to ensure it remains “safe.”  With other MFT vendors, there is no ongoing monitoring of an IP address once it is allowed or white-listed.
• Massive threat intelligence database: Fortra boasts a broad portfolio of cybersecurity solutions. Threats detected in one Fortra solution benefit other solutions, increasing the overall intelligence data available to all solutions.
• Layered protection: Combined with Threat Protection and Zero Trust File Transfer, GoAnywhere provides unmatched options to safeguard data throughout the entire data lifecycle.  

Get One Step Ahead of Bad Actors with Proactive MFT Security

Blocking the door to your MFT environment can be as easy as enabling the Threat Brain module in GoAnywhere and determining which level of security you require to meet your organization’s security mandates or compliance requirements.