SonicWall Stopping More than 1,000 New Unique Malware Variants Per Day

SonicWall has announced that its Capture Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) service — a cloud-based, multi-engine network security sandbox — achieved tremendous success in finding and stopping new malware variants and drove dramatic second-quarter customer growth.

These results are driven by the enhanced performance and proven ability of SonicWall Capture to mitigate both known and unknown cyber attacks in real time. Following two of the most recent high-profile global attacks — WannaCry and NotPetya — SonicWall credits Capture ATP with protecting Capture-enabled customer networks from malicious zero-day attacks.

“Organizations are faced with a complex and ever-evolving threat landscape, including a daily deluge of thousands of new ‘malware cocktails’ that remix ingredients into new and more devastating attacks,” said SonicWall President and CEO Bill Conner. “SonicWall Capture ATP has proven time and again that it not only identifies new variants, but also safely contains and stops zero-day attacks. After seeing the devastating effects of WannaCry and NotPetya — and now breaches at Equifax and Deloitte — customers are increasingly responsive to solutions like Capture, which offers sophisticated and automated threat protection.”

Achieving Strong Double-Digit Attach Rate Growth

In the second quarter (FY18), the SonicWall Capture ATP service:

• Reported a 77 percent increase in licenses sold over Q1
• Gained popularity with net-new customers, driving a 55 percent increase in attach rate over the prior quarter
• Saw a 104 percent increase in existing customer attach rates, as they move to better protect their networks and businesses

Detecting and Protecting Against Never-Before-Seen Malware Variants

In the wake of WannaCry and NotPetya, Capture ATP continues to register an increasing amount of chaotic and suspicious malware activity across its 1 million networks worldwide. Data recorded and analyzed indicates that there are as many as 1,000 or more new variants that threaten SonicWall customer networks each business day. Capture ATP is successfully detecting and stopping new malware variants — including evolving WannaCry and NotPetya strands — from penetrating customer networks.

From a second-quarter threat perspective, the SonicWall Capture ATP service:

• Reported 524 percent growth in the number of unique variants identified in the last six months
• Experienced a 57 percent increase in the number of malicious files reviewed in daily traffic
• Protected customer networks from WannaCry and NotPetya

“ItzCash achieved great benefits with SonicWALL Next-Generation Firewalls with Capture as it offered Ransomware protection, superior intrusion prevention, malware protection and real-time traffic visualization and inspection. This adoption further helped ItzCash in securing our public facing severs in a more effective manner while ensuring granular control over surfing traffic. It also enabled us to address PCIDSS compliance requirements which earlier were a point of concern,” said Daykin Creado, CTO, ItzCash Card Ltd an Ebix Group company, a customer of SonicWALL India.

A June 2017 report from Osterman Research found that about 22 percent of small businesses with less than 1,000 employees experienced a ransomware attack that forced the closure of the business. Further, according to the Ponemon Institute’s 2017 Cost of Data Breach Study, the average cost of a data breach is $3.62 million.

“After the recent series of Ransomware attack globally, India is equally effected and majority of customers are asking for solution like Advance Threat Protection to protect their environment from unknown zero day threats. We have seen demands for Advance Threat Protection solution from all verticals across. Sonicwall Advance Threat Protection Solution CAPTURE is easy to deploy as it is cloud based with multilevel protection, which is giving customers absolute protection from unknown threats,” said Debasish Mukherjee, Country Manager India & SAARC, SonicWALL.

“The hard truth is that survival for all businesses, and especially small businesses, is on the line when the average data security incident costs millions of dollars,” said Conner.

To protect customers against the increasing dangers of zero-day threats, SonicWall Capture Advanced Threat Protection — a cloud-based subscription service available with SonicWall firewalls — detects and blocks advanced threats at the gateway until a verdict is reached.

Capture is the first advanced threat-detection offering that uses multi-layer sandboxing, including full system emulation and virtualization techniques, to analyze suspicious code behavior and block until verdict. This powerful combination detects more threats than single-engine sandbox solutions, which are compute-environment specific and susceptible to evasion.

Capture ATP scans traffic and extracts suspicious code to analyze a broad range of file sizes and types. The SonicWall Capture Labs global threat intelligence infrastructure rapidly deploys remediation signatures for newly identified threats to all SonicWall network security appliances, thus preventing further infiltration.