How do you handle threats to your network and protect your customers from malicious exploits?
Your customers are being attacked 24 hours a day, either on the website, they host with you or simply customers using the internet every day through your service. This means that they will be exposed to everything bad that is out there such as viruses and hackers.
Anytime customers are online, they run the risk of their computer or server being compromised. The bad guys are constantly probing for security flaws and looking for opportunities to exploit your customers’ systems and take control and grow their botnets.
If you are an internet service provider or hosting provider, these things are already happening within your network, on your infrastructure, and affecting your customers. This puts the responsibility for your company to make sure these cybercriminals are taken care of. The bad guys are moving fast and they are multiplying––recruiting new bots for their botnet army that we then have to face.
See also: Network Providers: How Abuse Handling Fits Into Your Security Concept
So how do we do this? How do we even begin to gain control over these attackers? Well, the solution has to be faster and stronger.
Handling The Ever-Present Hacker Threat
If customers or servers in your networks have already been compromised by the hackers, this means they are able to misuse your infrastructure for illegal activities. These activities can include things like spamming, phishing, DDoS attacks, and so on. You need a solution that integrates the most up-to-date information that can identify and troubleshoot your customers’ computers that have been infected or have been compromised through a security exploit–as soon as it happens.
Your abuse-handling framework will have to protect your network and infrastructure, but should you build the solution yourself or buy it?
Granted, you might have confidence in your abilities as a coder, but that also means you know what happens when projects become technically complicated. They get out of control, take longer, and end up costing more than you had expected.
The criminals that attack your infrastructure are smart, committed, and do not have to follow any rules. They live to discover security weaknesses online, take over computers and networks––not to mention they are making a fortune whilst doing this. Yes, that’s right. These cybercriminals are making money off of what you are paying for and misusing what you have in place. Protecting your network and infrastructure from them is a demanding task that never ends.
What Could Possibly Go Wrong?
Every network operator faces the challenges of abusive attacks.
- According to Intel, every 60 seconds there are 20 new victims of identity theft and 135 new botnet infections.
- DDoS Attacks using these botnets reached over 600Gbps in 2015
- Each day, 30,000 additional websites get hacked, adding to those already compromised.
It is inevitable that your customers will be targets and victims. Thus, bots you host will attack your network infrastructure as well. At the end of the day, you will be the one that has to take care of it.
You need the sharpest, most up-to-date tools to be faster and smarter than the attackers. Choosing to buy a market-tested abuse handling solution makes much more sense when you think about the risks and the way that the threats shift and evolve as attackers look for new ways to grow their botnets.
The leading consultants in security have already solved the problem so that you do not have to spend time and resources that you could better apply elsewhere. Once you have created the core applications for your enterprise, do you have six or eight months and hundreds of thousands of dollars to duplicate the work of specialist software developers?
See also: 14 Best Practices for Adequately Protecting Your Network
Why Would You Reinvent The Wheel?
Detecting sophisticated bots is something that requires an equally sophisticated network of information about abusive behavior and its sources.
The solution to network abuse is to apply a fast, integrated solution that aims to reduce compromised infrastructure within your network in a fast and reliable manner. For the price that you spend on building your solution, you can buy a fully developed solution without having to wait.
Coding an abuse handling solution will eat up your resources, your attention, and will delay the ability to provide security for the customers in your network. You will never get enough resources to build software like this because there are so many other things on your plate that are more important. You will have to fight for development resources and this is something that can take a while.
Abuse handling is a constantly evolving process. It is something that has to be continuously updated and changed as time goes on.
If you have to be constantly fighting for these resources over and over again, you will be losing valuable time that could have been spent elsewhere. Sometimes you might have to wait weeks or even months before something happens. You’ll also have to hire additional IT personnel to handle the additional development work and maintenance.
Look To A Cloud-Based Solution
A cloud-based solution can take care of that automatically and the only costs involved are the subscription fees and setup services such as training and configuration.
Another plus for these outsourced solutions is that their main focus is to keep track of the industry changes with abuse handling and will make sure these changes are implemented––so you won’t have to worry about them. You can relax knowing that their software is always going to reflect the latest standards.
Handling Threats As Soon As Possible
Whenever a network threat has occurred, time is most definitely of the essence. In order to protect your users, you need a cloud-based solution that can identify and handle these threats as soon as possible.
It’s like working in forensics. As the Crime Scene Investigation documentation states, you must “identify and protect fragile and/or perishable evidence. Ensure that all evidence that may be compromised is immediately documented, photographed, and collected.” If the forensics team doesn’t immediately identify and investigate the evidence, it will become compromised and become potentially unusable. Like network security, the problem must be dealt with immediately before it spreads or the information is lost.
See also: How SpamExperts Can Improve Your Abuse-Handling Process
Building It Heaps Expenses Upon Expense
On top of the predictable costs of building your system, there is a series of time-consuming jobs that are difficult to forecast but inevitable in hindsight. No software system of any substance can avoid the need for performance tuning, applying fixes, and time spent troubleshooting the causes of downtime.
As one thing cascades into another, you have to rewrite integrations and create customizations––which then leads to upgrading dependent applications and further rounds of fixes. If you had intended to author the code personally, your staff will grow this results in additional costs and delays to your launch.
Again, the alternative is to work with a cloud-based service that has knowledgeable and experienced personnel in-house. You’ll be able to enjoy the benefits of their labor for a small share of the cost.
As a hosting company or internet service provider, you have your main responsibilities you need to focus on, and this is what you are an expert at. Leaving the abuse handling to a cloud-based solution, you’ll be able to free up your time and focus on what you do best.
For example, when it comes to taxes–you are probably not going to build your own tax solution. You’re going to look for somebody that knows exactly how to do it and in the best way possible. Why spend time trying to build your own solutions to network abuse when you could delegate the job to the pros and focus on the things you do well?
How are you currently handling network abuse? We’d like to know.
Abusix provides the fastest cloud-based abuse handling to you; you provide the hosting and the internet to your customers. Let’s work together to find a solution that will combat this the right way.
Connect with us to discuss the services we offer and how we can help your business solve network abuse.