Cisco Umbrella Helps Colleges Fight Phishing Attacks
Cyberattacks are always increasing, with phishing emails and spam campaigns hitting almost every inbox. Phishing mail is especially insidious, as it’s designed to trick users into disclosing sensitive, personal information or organizational details. Now that institutions have significantly expanded remote work and learning, the threat has become even more pronounced.
Cisco Umbrella is a cloud-native platform that enforces security at the Domain Name System and IP layers built into the foundation of the internet. As a result, Umbrella is able to block malware, ransomware, phishing, botnets and malicious command and control servers. The block happens well before a connection is even established by the user device. This can help colleges stop threats over any port or protocol before they reach campus networks or endpoints.
Paired with Cisco’s selective proxy, colleges will receive deeper inspection of URLs and files looking for risky domains, while anti-virus engines and Cisco Advanced Malware Protection shut down threats. Umbrella even blocks direct IP connections from command and control callbacks for roaming users.
RELATED: See how one college leverages an integrated security ecosystem.
Umbrella also provides visibility into sanctioned and unsanctioned cloud services across an enterprise. This lets institutions uncover new services that are being activated and gain insights into who is using them. This can help identify potential risks and block specific applications easily. Umbrella has a highly resilient network environment that has boasted 100 percent uptime since 2006.
Last but not least, features such as Anycast routing let any of Cisco’s 30 or more data centers across the globe provide security services using a single IP address, so that requests are transparent and sent to the nearest, fastest data center. This also provides strong and automatic failover as Umbrella collaborates with more than 900 of the world’s top internet service providers along with content delivery networks and Software as a Service platforms.
All of that equates to a critical speed boost for network defenders looking to enhance their efforts discovering and remediating threats on normal days or whenever a crisis begins to stress operations.
Cisco Umbrella
ACTIONABLE: Retains and categorizes all activity
EXPANSIVE: Leverages threat intelligence service
PROACTIVE: Identifies new threats to protect users