By Amit Sharon, Head of Global Customer Community & Market Intelligence, Check Point

IMC Companies provides supply chain expertise to customers across the U.S. I met with David Ulloa, Chief Information Security Officer at IMC Companies, to learn how the organization protects desktop, laptop, and mobile users from malware, phishing, ransomware, and other threats.

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For more than 36 years, IMC Companies has been providing logistics services like container drayage, expedited services, truck brokerage, warehousing, chassis provisioning, and secured container storage. Its network supports a proprietary real-time tracking system that delivers extremely high flexibility and efficiency, but also makes cybersecurity especially critical. The company needed a solution to secure its wide variety of endpoint devices against today’s increasingly sophisticated threats.

Amit Sharon: IMC Companies’ transportation logistics operations extend across the entire country. What are some of the unique challenges to applying security across such a vast supply chain?

David Ulloa: Security is very important for IMC because our customers rely on our information to support just-in-time supply chain operations. A customer shipping shoes from Vietnam can track their container all the way to a port in the U.S., as our driver picks up the container and transports it to a warehouse. Our in-house transportation management system provides a competitive advantage and contains customer bank account information and other sensitive data. Any downtime can cost us millions of dollars, so we needed to protect all our endpoints, including laptops, desktop computers, phones, and mobile devices from ransomware, viruses, and other threats.

Amit Sharon:  Why was Check Point SandBlast Agent the best solution for protecting those diverse endpoints?

David Ulloa: Our IT group that handles endpoints had been overwhelmed with the issues and constraints involved in managing multiple solutions. Instead of using multiple solutions for antivirus, anti-ransomware, forensics, encryption, VPN and compliance, Check Point provides all that in a single suite. With SandBlast Agent, we can proactively prevent, detect, and fix known and unknown zero-day attacks. Its built-in anti-ransomware protection defends us against sophisticated evasive attacks that can sneak past conventional network and endpoint products. We implemented the solution ourselves in less than a week, across our entire environment.

Amit Sharon: What does that level of complete endpoint protection bring to your business?

David Ulloa: The ability to discover and mitigate potential endpoint threats across our entire environment lets us keep confidential customer data safe and maximize system uptime. We receive about two million emails a month, and statistics tell us at least 55 percent of those are malignant. SandBlast Agent enabled us to stop 100 percent of the malicious emails that made it past the firewall. That’s at least five incidents per day for each of our 120 desktop users in the office.”

Amit Sharon: Are you taking advantage of any of the SandBlast Agent forensics or reporting tools? What advantages do they provide?

David Ulloa:  Yes, the automated forensics data analysis gives us detailed insights into threats, without requiring cumbersome manual processes. Before Check Point, we didn’t have any idea what took place with security threats, unless we invested hours of research. We use SandBlast Agent’s Forensics capability, which provides a report of what happened and where the threat came from, in a format that’s easy to understand. Check Point is very simple to use—we just configure it and step back.

Read the full story here.

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