Security News > 2020 > July > Companies turning to isolation technology to protect against the internet's biggest threats
Isolation technology allows companies to keep employee browsers siloed in the cloud.
To deal with this deluge of new threats, dozens of the world's biggest organizations are turning to isolation technologies and techniques to protect employees from the kind of common mistakes cybercriminals are increasingly taking advantage of.
"With isolation, you are choosing not to detect anything. That's the beauty of it. All you're really doing is taking the entire internet and entire active content on websites and moving it to the cloud and letting it run its course there so you never pay any attention to whether something is good today or bad," said Kowsik Guruswamy, chief technology officer of Menlo Security.
"If you take out the initial part of the kill chain, which is that people click on links and people go to websites and get infected, then it doesn't matter what the infection does. Isolation posits that if you can stop that initial vector, it doesn't matter whether it's a RAT or trojan. We never have to determine the goodness or the badness of anything in order to isolate. We never need threat intelligence to make a policy decision to isolate or not." Menlo Security now uses versions of isolation technology to protect eight of the ten largest banks in the world, critical infrastructure, and large government agencies.
The company has created a fun tutorial illustrating exactly how isolation technology works, but Guruswamy explained that almost all threats these days, especially malware, originate from either corrupted email links or malicious forced downloads that come from redirected advertisements on dangerous websites.