This March Madness, Don’t Get Upset by Cyber Criminals: Protect Your Organization from Cinderella Teams

With the first two rounds in the rear view mirror and the sweet sixteen coming up, we’re excited to announce that Check Point is sponsoring this year’s NCAA Division 1 Men’s Basketball Tournament – if you’re going to the games, be sure to look for Check Point’s ad in the official game day program.

Whether you’re watching the madness live or streaming it at work, cyber threat actors are still plugging away at trying to attack your organization. Understanding a little bit about your match up will go a long way to make sure that you emerge from the madness unscathed.

Hackers Go Dancing: Cyber Security Lessons From College Hoops

Every year, a low-seeded, overlooked underdog team manages to make a run of miraculous upsets, creating one of the most iconic narratives in American sports: the college basketball Cinderella team.

From North Carolina State winning the whole tournament as a #6 seed in 1983 to #12 Oregon gearing up this Thursday to face #1 Virginia in the Sweet Sixteen, the single-elimination format of the tournament leads to a dizzyingly high level of variance. A wannabe Cinderella team just needs to outwork and outsmart the Goliaths, getting it right just enough times to overcome the odds.

A successful malware attack operates in a similar dynamic. As our VP of Products, Dorit Dor, noted in Forbes recently, the criminals need to get it right just once in order to “win”… while the security vendors need to get it right every time. Companies that don’t secure their mobile AND cloud environments with a comprehensive and unified security system are allowing just enough gaps for the cyber attackers to pull off the upset.

Modern, fifth-generation cyber attackers can move laterally, meaning that the margin of error for companies is extremely slim. They just need to infect one employee’s phone – when that phone connects to the company’s internal network at the office, cyber attackers have the ability to “jump” the malware to the network, too.

Without the right protection, the cyber criminal’s Cinderella story doesn’t look like much of a fairy tale.

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