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Fortinet launches anti-risk service, powered by ML and automation
Thu, 9th Jun 2022
FYI, this story is more than a year old

Fortinet has announced FortiRecon, a complete Digital Risk Protection Service (DRPS) offering that uses a combination of machine learning, automation capabilities and FortiGuard Labs cybersecurity experts.

The result is a solution designed to manage a company's risk posture and advise meaningful action to protect their brand reputation, enterprise assets and data.

On the whole, according to the company FortiRecon delivers a triple offering of outside-in coverage across External Attack Surface Management (EASM), Brand Protection (BP) and Adversary-Centric Intelligence (ACI) to counter attacks at the reconnaissance phase, the first stage of a cyber attack, to reduce the risk, time and cost of later stage threat mitigation.

According to Fortinet, before attacking an organisation, a cyber criminal's primary objective is to gather as much intelligence about their target as possible. This phase of early reconnaissance arms the adversary with everything they need to determine if and how they would exploit an organisation.

They will test a company's defence and response tactics, look for unpatched systems, use social media to learn more about its employees and their normal behaviour, and go as far as researching business partners, recent acquisitions, and any other third-party affiliation that could lead to a successful compromise.

As organisations digitally accelerate their businesses and deploy hybrid IT architectures that expand the attack surface, identifying and mitigating these threats has become increasingly more difficult, Fortinet states.

In response to the velocity of threats, cybersecurity best practices have evolved from point-in-time evaluations to continual monitoring, ongoing reviews and continuous enhancements to an organisation's security posture.

With the introduction of FortiRecon, Fortinet provides enterprise organisations with a tool to understand how the adversary views an organisation from the outside to help inform cybersecurity teams, the C-Level, and risk and compliance management on how to prioritise risk and improve the company's overall security posture.

FortiRecon offers companies consistent and comprehensive coverage across three areas:

External attack surface monitoring: Empowers organisations to understand their risk profile and mitigate risks early. Provides an outside-in view of an organisation and its subsidiaries to identify exposed known and unknown enterprise assets and associated vulnerabilities, and prioritise the remediation of critical issues.

EASM identifies servers, credentials, public cloud service misconfigurations, and even third-party partner software code vulnerabilities that could be exploited by malicious actors.

Brand protection: Enables organisations to protect their brand and identify risks to their customers. Proprietary algorithms detect web-based typo-squatting, defacements, and phishing impersonations, as well as rogue mobile apps, credential leaks, and brand impersonation on social media, all common techniques used by cyber threat actors.

The early detection of malicious activity allows teams to quickly take action (such as website or application takedown) to stop and prevent damage.

Adversary-centric intelligence: Increases the security awareness of an organisation's SOC team with industry and geography specific coverage to better understand their attackers and protect assets.

FortiGuard Labs cybersecurity experts assess the underground and imminent threat risks posed by active cybercriminals to an individual company by proactively monitoring public and private forums, open-source, dark web, and other cybercriminal domains. By engaging in human intelligence collection, FortiGuard Labs experts assess and curate custom threat intelligence, providing recommendations specific to the company, industry, and geography.

John Maddison, EVP of products and CMO for Fortinet, says, “The sooner in the attack cycle you identify and stop an adversary, the less costly and damaging their actions. Employing a powerful combination of human and artificial intelligence, FortiRecon provides organisations with a view of what adversaries are seeing, doing and planning.

"FortiRecon's vendor agnostic SaaS delivery model combined with an intuitive interface and easily digestible reports enable executives across the organisation to quickly understand the risks posed to their company, data, and brand reputation, while our team of FortiGuard Labs cybersecurity experts enhance the offering with takedown services, guidance on prioritisation of remediation efforts, and targeted threat research and intelligence.

For partners, FortiRecon can be sold on top of the Fortinet Security Fabric or as a stand-alone, vendor-agnostic solution that delivers digestible reports and enables their customers to understand the risks posed to their company, data, and brand reputation. FortiRecon also extends the categories of risk for which partners can provide insight to customers and increases the opportunity to land new customers that have only invested in more traditional security solutions, the company states.

FortiRecon complements Fortinet's portfolio of early detection and advanced response products, including FortiNDR, FortiXDR,  FortiDeceptor, in-line sandboxing, as well as advanced automation with FortiAnalyzer, FortiSIEM and FortiSOAR.