Check Point launches ‘prevention-first approach’ security operations solution

The new Check Point Horizon platform for XDR, MDR and events leverages Check Point Soft prevention-first approach to improve defences across the network, cloud and endpoints, and prevent future cyber attacks.

Many of the existing MDR solutions in the market today simply deal with detection and management of cyber incidents, according to Craig Robinson, research vice president for security services at IDC, who argues that actually preventing incidents has largely been missing in the MDR arena, until now.

"Check Point Horizon's strategy of going prevention-first is a game-changing feature addition in the crowded MDR market," says Robinson.

Data from Check Point's mid-year report recently revealed a 42 per cent global increase in cyber attacks and ransomware is now the number one threat to businesses.

Attacks are increasing all the time as security teams struggle to shut down breaches before damage spreads due to the distraction of endless alerts and false positives across multiple siloed tools and a narrow attack vector view that lacks context. According to Check Point researchers, the problem is made worse by a lack of cyber experience and the ongoing skills shortage.

Against this backdrop, there is now a critical need for all organisations to have a security operations centre (SOC), with 24/7 monitoring, response, and threat hunting capabilities.

Running this kind of operation is too complex and expensive for the majority. The Check Point researchers further explained that the SOC provision up to now, does not match the scale of the challenge as the industry is only focused on detecting and responding to attacks rather than preventing them.

The secret sauce to Horizon is in its unique combination of preventative tools, the industry's top analysts and research experts and innovative AI. According to Dan Wiley, head of threat management and chief security advisor at Check Point Software, Horizon is a unified solution across an entire infrastructure that will vastly improve the cyber defences and prevent attacks from happening, while reducing overheads and TCO.

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"The strength of any MDR service is in its people, and prevention is in our DNA.

"With Horizon MDR/MPR, customers benefit from the direct experience of our incident response team who handle more than 3,000 incidents per year.

"If you do not have the resources to run a solid 24/7 SOC, we will do it for you," says Wiley.

Check Point Horizon's prevention-first approach to security operations is designed to provide SOC teams with the tools and services needed to prevent attacks in real-time with fewer resources:

• Check Point Horizon XDR/XPR increases security operations efficiency by quickly detecting, investigating, and automating responses to attacks across the entire IT infrastructure. By leveraging innovative AI technologies and big data threat intelligence, aggregated from hundreds of millions of sensors worldwide, Horizon XDR/XPR identifies threats inside the organisation and prevents them from spreading.
• Check Point Horizon MDR/MPR is a prevention-first MDR service backed by Check Point's elite experts who deliver a powerful SOC-as-a-Service. The Check Point analysts monitor the entire security estate 24/7 – no matter the products or solutions in place – utilising 25 years of incident response experience to analyse, correlate and understand what's happening, responding on a customer's behalf and making recommendations to drive a prevention mindset throughout the entire delivery of the service.
• Horizon Events provides complete event visibility across all Check Point products for efficient monitoring, search, and threat hunting. Designed for security admins and analysts to investigate and troubleshoot all security incidents, with a simple and intuitive SaaS cloud solution, it saves valuable time and eliminates complexity.

Marc Upchurch, chief information security officer, city and county of San Francisco - Department of Public Health, added that Check Point's commitment to investing in its products and services to provide an integrated prevention-first solution with an easy-to-manage consolidated security platform can be seen in the results witnessed in our environment.

"Being a public health company with limited resources, we must partner with a cyber security vendor that has low ongoing costs and good ROI.

"Our small team, combined with Horizon MDR/MPR, allows us to align our cyber security goals with patient safety initiatives to provide continuous delivery of services without disruptions 24x7x365 to the people who live in and visit our wonderful city," says Upchurch.

[Related: North Korean hackers target US, Canada and Japan energy sectors via Log4j exploit]