Media Archives - Intelys

Partnership announcement: Intelys / Arctic Wolf

Posted on 16/12/202219/12/2022 by Intelys

We have cemented our relationship with Arctic Wolf and added them as a vendor partner to augment and compliment our already robust cyber security solution offering.

Arctic Wolf has a novel approach to cyber security with their Security Operations Cloud and Concierge Security model.

The Arctic Wolf platform

Spanning thousands of installations, the Arctic Wolf® Platform processes over 2 trillion security events weekly. Built on an open XDR architecture, the platform collects and enriches endpoint, network, and cloud telemetry, and then analyzes it with multiple detection engines. Machine learning and custom detection rules then deliver personalized protection for your organization.

While other products have limited visibility, the vendor-neutral Arctic Wolf® Platform enables broad visibility and works seamlessly with existing technology stacks, making it easy to adopt while eliminating blind spots and vendor lock-in.

Concierge Delivery Model

Arctic Wolf invented the concept of Concierge Security®. With this delivery model, we pair a team of our security operations experts directly with your IT or security staff. Your Concierge Security® Team gives you 24×7 eyes-on-glass coverage. We work with your team on an ongoing basis to learn your security needs so that they can tune solutions for maximum effectiveness and ensure that your security posture gets stronger over time.
The Concierge Security® Team combines deep security operations expertise with an understanding of your environment to deliver better outcomes. We take on tactical actions like threat hunting and alert prioritization, and strategic tasks like security posture reviews and risk management.

Dax Andrews, our General Manager of Sales, had this to say:

As a specialist networking and network security business our evolution has been witness to the convergence of the network and security landscape. With that, so too has our business progressed into a niche network security partner.

Selecting a relevant vendor to align with our own strategy, vision and existing partner investments is an important part of our success along with the continued improvements in the customer environments we work in. Augmenting the layers of security services and solutions we offer helps us further entrench the skill we value so much.

When it came to Arctic Wolf, the cultural and strategic alignment was a great fit, and accelerated the conversations we were already having with our customers. With Arctic Wolf being a well-established and proven player in the global market it makes complete sense for us to announce the partnership in the local market.

Arctic Wolf’s Jason Oehley adds:

With Arctic Wolf driving accelerated expansion within South Africa we are in the process of building out an effective eco-system to support our customers. Intelys were an immediate fit for Arctic Wolf by focusing on the customer value and driving a consultancy approach with their customers.

Arctic Wolf and Intelys can ensure customers receive a full 24×7 security operations service offering while receiving a personalized experience. We welcome Intelys to the “pack” and are looking forward to growing together.

We look forward to making the unique solution offerings of Arctic Wolf available to our customers, and believe that they will add incredible value.

The difference between SD-WAN and MPLS

Posted on 17/06/202222/08/2022 by Intelys

This topic is often how the SD-WAN discussion starts.

A network migration to SD-WAN (software defined wide area network) may deliver cost savings, performance improvements and better security.

According to our partners Fortinet, the short answer is that SD-WAN offers better visibility, availability, enhanced performance, and more freedom of action. It’s why the industry has seen interest in SD-WAN rising over the past few years.

Fortinet list the following benefits of SD-WAN over MPLS:

SD-WAN delivers potential cost savings.

By reducing the amount of traffic that needs to traverse the MPLS links, one may utilize commodity internet, reducing MPLS costs.
Secure SD-WAN from Fortinet provides better protection than MPLS, because the solution is delivered as an integrated function within a next-generation firewall appliance.

A wide array of security tools, such as IPS, firewall, WAF, web filtering, anti-virus, and anti-malware are simultaneously deployed, as these are natively part of the NGFW firewall / SD-WAN device.
SD-WAN delivers better network performance, utilizing diverse links and paths based on application or traffic type, for example.

SD-WAN is application-aware, and can thus prioritize traffic accordingly, based on bandwidth, latency and other requirements.

Click here for more information on Fortinet’s Secure SD-WAN solution, or get in touch to discuss a SD-WAN solution that’s right for you and your business.

Our other partner, Aruba Networks, have made this short video which succinctly describes SD-WAN:

Announcement: We’re now Snapt partners

Posted on 06/06/2022 by Intelys

Did you know that we are Snapt partners?

Snapt provides future-proof load balancing and security solutions that are cloud-neutral and platform-agnostic.

Snapt eliminates downtime and automatically scales your sites and applications to ensure maximum responsiveness.

Using a single pane of glass, our solutions deliver centralized control and intelligence for all your clouds, platforms, architectures, and applications.

You can learn more about the available products and services by clicking through.

Fortinet Partner Specializations

Posted on 24/05/2022 by Intelys

We’re proud to announce that Intelys now holds 3 Fortinet Partner specializations.

This makes us South Africa’s most specialized Fortinet partner.

Why do you need DMARC protecting your email domain?

Posted on 09/05/2022 by Intelys

DMARC is the acronym for “Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance“.

This content is courtesy of our partners Sendmarc.

SPF and DKIM are two frameworks that attempt to correct the issue of email security. In summary, SPF tells a receiver that the mail came from an authorized server that is allowed to send that mail, while DKIM is a framework that makes sure that the mail is the same one that was sent.

The main problem with both frameworks, however, was that when the receiving server checked the SPF and/or DKIM settings and saw that they were failing, it didn’t always know what to do with the mail in question.

Should it put it in the spambucket, or not accept it at all? After all, SPF can often be set up incorrectly, even though the mail itself was legitimate.

What started to happen is that a lot of companies were publishing SPF records that were incorrect or incomplete. The receivers were getting so much mail off these incorrect servers that they weren’t sure what to do. So, they decided that the mail was legitimate, and to ignore the incorrect records and send it on anyway.

As a solution for this, a policy called DMARC was designed to sit on top of both SPF and DKIM. Because it’s a policy that a domain owner publishes, it puts the control of what the receiver must do with a particular mail firmly in the domain owner’s hands.

In the past, receivers didn’t know what to do with a mail if it failed the SPF or DKIM checks. Now with DMARC, the domain owner essentially says to the receiving server: “If you get this mail from my domain and SPF or DKIM fails, do not accept it.”

This then made the task easier for receiving servers. Finally, they didn’t have to make up their mind about what to do with a particular mail; the domain owner would tell them what to do.

The second key function that DMARC did was to send a report to the domain owner upon receiving a mail that says, for example: “We got a mail from you, and it came from this particular IP, and it was passing SPF and failing DKIM.”

With this example, the receiving server is not only being instructed by domain owners on what to do, but they are also telling domain owners about mail that they are getting from them. This is very important, because often domain owners aren’t even aware of all their own receiving servers!

Some multinationals have hundreds of servers, and don’t know about all of them. Even in the case of small businesses, there may be several servers sending mail: via a CRM system, a ticketing system, a billing system and more.

In another scenario, there may be a small business employee who starts doing email marketing using Mailchimp as a sending server, without anyone else knowing about the platform. The problem here is that if SPF is implemented and Mailchimp isn’t authorised as a sender, all the Mailchimp mails will start failing.

That’s why these DMARC reports are so important, as they tell domain owners which severs are sending mail, and which ones should be audited and authorised where applicable.

These reports then create full visibility for the domain owner, as they can see everybody sending mail from their domain. This, in turn, makes it much easier for them to authorise the correct servers, as before they may not have known about them.

Implementing DMARC creates a simple way of putting control back into the email sender’s hands – no matter where that mail is sent.

Are you interested in seeing how vulnerable your email domain is?

Fill in the form below and we’ll send you a report base don your own email domain vulnerability.

Email domain impersonation is a bigger threat than spam

Posted on 21/04/2022 by Intelys

When you think of email-related cyber threats, the first item on the list is normally spam protection, not true?

This being said, most major email providers provide spam protection by default. (Think Office 365 Exchange Online Protection, SYNAQ Securemail, or Symantec Mail Security.)

However, when it comes to email attacks that have the biggest impact to your business, email domain impersonation has far more severe potential consequences:

Financially: Customers can pay invoices to phishers that were meant for you
Reputationally: A customer who receives malware via an email from your domain is likely to remember this in future, which can damage your future relationship with them.

This, in essence is why you need email protection beyond spam protection, such as a DMARC compliance solution.

Each time a server receives a mail from your domain, a tool like Sendmarc will check the DMARC policy of the sender of the email. This is true regardless of where in the world that mail came from, and whether the sending infrastructure is yours or that of a hacker. With this check-in place, any mail that doesn’t come from a legitimate source will be rejected.

Are you thinking beyond spam protection?

Protect your clients and your business

Posted on 14/04/202214/04/2022 by Intelys

“Our bank details have not changed.” is surely one of the least pleasant things to have to put in your email signature.

Chances are, if you’ve seen this, the email sender’s email domain has been impersonated and used in a phishing attack.

Phishing is extremely commonplace these days and is used by attackers to steal information such as passwords and other credentials, and other sensitive information.

According to Sendmarc, below are several common phishing scams, which can include things such as:

Asking you to click on a link and download a malicious file onto your computer.
Sending you an email notifying you of an outstanding invoice – and then a link where you can click to pay it. Clicking on this link takes you to an illegitimate site where scammers can gather your personal information and access your bank accounts.
The email sender telling you that one of your accounts has been compromised, and then asking you to log in and reset your password, fill in your information and resubmit it.
Pretending to be one of your vendors and asking you to confirm your credit information before they can release or deliver an order.

There are 2 approaches, which work best in parallel, to prevent email phishing attacks.

Implement a technical solution such as DMARC to assure email authenticity
Train your employees to recognize phishing emails and handle them appropriately

We work with our partners Sendmarc to help our customers prevent their email domains from being impersonated, nd used in phishing attacks.

You should really know whether or not your domain is at risk of impersonation – fill in the form below and we’ll run the analysis for you and reply with the information.

A different perspective on combating email phishing attacks

Posted on 11/04/2022 by Intelys

Published by our partners Sendmarc

The concept of email phishing

Fraudulent emails sent by someone pretending to be legitimate in order to trick you into divulging personal details like banking details or passwords is nothing new.

Despite how familiar we become with the concept, email phishing continues to be on the increase with each passing year.

It happens all over the globe, not just in South Africa, and results in losses of hundreds of millions of rands every year.

Recently, Carte Blanche published a special report on phishing, and African Bank has also released similar analysis describing this growing problem, which puts companies at huge risk of losing not just money but personal data related to their businesses and employees as well.

Preventing phishing attacks

Both articles present good information about changing user behaviour in order to prevent potential phishing and/or spoofing attacks. But from a broader perspective, are we missing the point, in that there are well defined technical ways of preventing these attacks in the first place?

As the old adage says, prevention is better than cure, and what many businesses don’t realise is that there are technical solutions that can prevent the problem fraudulent emails even being sent from their domains. If this is done properly, then educating employees about potential spoof emails becomes a secondary priority.

The technical solution

So, what are these technical solutions? The best current solution is implementing a DMARC policy on your domain. Full DMARC compliance will ensure that only legitimate non-fraudulent senders are able to send email from your domain and your business can stop will stop attackers from sending illegitimate email from your domain.

On the flip side, you can be almost 100% certain that when you received mail from another domain which is DMARC compliant it almost definitely comes from that organisation.

When it comes to phishing, it seems the user is almost always blamed. But while user behaviour is important, it’s certainly not the whole picture.

The fact that it’s actually possible to trust that the mail you received was sent by the actual organisation and not an attacker is a game-changer when it comes to the phishing epidemic. With the right technical solutions in place – such as DMARC compliance – you can avoid the whole issue altogether, which takes the pressure off educating your users.

Is your domain secure from imposters and impersonators?

Fill in the form below and we’ll get back to you with a report detailing how secure your email domain is from being impersonated.

Intelys offers the width and breadth of cyber-security solutions – click here for more information.

Intelys achieve Fortinet Zero Trust Access Partner Specialization

Posted on 15/12/202107/04/2022 by Intelys

We are proud to announce that we have achieved the Fortinet Zero Trust Access specialization partnership status from Fortinet.

We look forward to using our skills and expertise in this area to further serve and add value to our clients.

Digital Innovation Demands Zero Trust Access

for more information about why Zero Trust Network Access has become a critical concern for modern organizations.