Our industry news section covers a broad range of news items of particular relevance to the cybersecurity industry and managed service providers (MSPs).
This section also included details of the latest white papers and research studies relating to malware, ransomware, phishing and data breaches. These articles provide some insight into the general state of cybersecurity, the industries currently most heavily targeted by cybercriminals, and figures and statistics for your own reports.
Hackers and scammers conduct massive spam campaigns designed to infect as many computers as possible. These attacks are random, using email addresses stolen in large data breaches such as the cyberattacks on LinkedIn, MySpace, Twitter and Yahoo. However, highly targeted attacks are increasing in frequency, with campaigns geared to specific industries. These industry-specific cyberattacks and spam and malware campaigns are detailed in this section, along with possible mitigations for reducing the risk of a successful attack.
This category is therefore of relevance to organizations in the education, healthcare, and financial services industries – the most common attacked industries according to recent security reports.
The articles contain information about current campaigns, spam email identifiers and details of the social engineering tactics used to fool end users and gain access to business networks. By following the advice in these articles, it may be possible to prevent similar attacks on your organization.
TitanHQ is thrilled to announce that the engine that powers its email security solutions – SpamTitan and PhishTitan – achieved an incredible 100% catch rate for phishing emails and malware in November 2024 in independent tests by Virus Bulletin.
Virus Bulletin is a testing and certification body that has an excellent reputation within the information security community. Virus Bulletin performs independent tests of security solutions and has been reviewing, benchmarking, and issuing certifications for security products for more than 2 decades.
The spam, malware, and phishing identification tests are conducted over a 16-day period each month, with the final results published each quarter. For the past two quarters, TitanHQ’s email security solutions have achieved VBSpam+ certification, and the results from October and November indicate SpamTitan email security and the PhishTitan anti-phishing solutions are on track to receive their third consecutive quarterly VBSpam+ certification.
The interim results for November are based on an evaluation of almost 125,000 emails. TitanHQ’s solutions correctly identified all malware and phishing emails over that period, and it was nearly a clean sweep of 100% scores; however, there was a narrow miss on blocking non-malicious spam emails, as while the vast majority of spam emails were correctly identified, 2 spam emails were unfortunately miscategorized.
The flawless results for malware blocking and phishing identification by TitanHQ’s cloud-based anti-spam software clearly demonstrate the superb reliability and effectiveness of TitanHQ’s email security solutions and validate what our customers already know – That you can rely on TitanHQ to keep your email accounts free from threats.
“We are thrilled to have significantly outperformed our main competitors and surpassed the industry average,” said Ronan Kavanagh, CEO at TitanHQ. “Our unwavering commitment to providing unmatched email security is evident in these results, and we remain dedicated to protecting our clients from evolving cyber threats.”
In addition to providing a cutting-edge, easy to use, email filtering service, TitanHQ’s cybersecurity portfolio also includes a comprehensive security awareness training and phishing simulation platform – SafeTitan; a DNS-based web filtering solution for blocking Internet threats and controlling internet access – WebTitan; an easy-to-use and cost-effective email archiving solution – ArcTitan; and an email encryption solution for securing sensitive data – EncryptTitan.
All TitanHQ solutions are cloud-based and easy to implement and use, even by individuals with little technical expertise. These solutions can be used by businesses of all sizes and TitanHQ also offers anti-spam solutions for managed service providers to allow them to provide comprehensive security services to their clients.
For more information about these solutions or joining our partner program, give the TitanHQ team a call today and be sure to check out these anti-spam tips.
Schools and higher educational institutions have long been a target for cybercriminals and attacks are on the increase. Educational institutions store large amounts of sensitive data on their students, which can include health and financial data – information that can be easily monetized. The data can be sold on the dark web to identity thieves and can be used for a range of fraudulent purposes.
Like the healthcare sector, which is also extensively targeted by malicious actors, educational institutions often have a complex mix of modern and legacy IT systems and securing those systems can be a challenge while ensuring they remain accessible to authorized individuals, especially when there is often a limited budget for cybersecurity. There are also non-technical vulnerabilities. Schools employ a diverse range of individuals including teaching and support staff and networks are accessed by students of a range of ages. Cybersecurity awareness can vary greatly among network users. The combination of vulnerabilities means the sector is relatively easy to attack.
According to a recent report from Microsoft, schools in the United States are being used by malicious actors to test their tactics, techniques, and procedures. Microsoft Threat Intelligence data indicates education is the third-most targeted sector in the United States and attacks are also increasing in the United Kingdom, especially higher education institutions where 43% of surveyed institutions said they experience a cyberattack or data breach at least weekly. In Q2, 2024, the education sector was also on a par with healthcare, information technology, telecommunications, consumer retail, and transportation sectors for ransomware attacks, each accounting for 11% of attacks in the quarter.
It is not only cybercriminal groups that target the education sector. Several state-sponsored hacking groups are targeting universities to gain access to connections and steal IP. Universities are commonly engaged in cutting-edge research and often work closely with government agencies. Nation state hacking groups target intellectual property to further research in their native countries, and it can be a lot easier to target individuals in the education sector and use their accounts to pivot to attack their contacts, which may include high-level individuals in a range of private sector industries, as well as the defense sector.
Microsoft has tracked attacks on the education sector by Iranian threat groups such as Mint Sandstorm and Peach Sandstorm, both of which conduct sophisticated phishing and social engineering attacks. North Korean hacking groups also target the U.S. education sector, with groups tracked by Microsoft as Emerald Sleet and Moonstone Sleep using novel techniques to install malware to gain access to the networks of educational institutions.
While vulnerabilities in software and operating systems can be exploited, phishing and social engineering attacks are much more commonly used to steal credentials and install malware, so it is essential that educational institutions have robust defenses against these types of attacks.
Advanced anti-spam software is essential for blocking phishing and social engineering attacks. In independent tests, SpamTitan has been shown to block 100% of malware thanks to twin antivirus engines and email sandboxing, and 99.99% of spam and phishing emails thanks to a barrage of checks and tests, including machine learning and AI-driven detection.
Many threats are delivered via the Internet, so it is vital to block access to malicious sites. WebTitan is a DNS-based web filtering solution for educational institutions that blocks access to malicious sites, prevents malware downloads from the Internet, and is used by schools to restrict the types of websites that staff and students can access to better protect students from harmful web content and comply with government regulations.
Security awareness training is also important to improve human defenses. TitanHQ’s SafeTitan training platform allows educational institutions to easily create training courses for staff and students, and test knowledge of social engineering and phishing through an easy-to-use phishing simulator.
Cybercriminals and nation state actors are likely to continue to target the education sector, so it is important to have the right defenses in place. Give the TitanHQ team a call today to find out more about improving your defenses against increasingly sophisticated cyber threats.
TitanHQ has launched a new version of its SafeTitan security awareness training and phishing simulation platform, which now includes new features for Managed Service Providers (MSPs) to allow them to enhance their security awareness training services.
Security awareness training is now vital due to the increasing number and sophistication of phishing attempts. Even with an advanced anti-phishing solution in place, it is inevitable that some phishing attempts will reach their intended targets, so the workforce needs to be trained on how to recognize and avoid phishing attempts. Companies are increasingly turning to MSPs to provide security awareness training as they lack the time and resources to develop and administer training courses and conduct phishing simulations. By providing training as a service, MSPs can better protect their clients against phishing and reduce support time, while also improving their bottom line.
Two key features added to the platform in the latest release are a multi-lure feature and reactive training for MSPs. When conducting phishing simulations internally, there is a chance that an employee will correctly identify a simulated phishing email and tip off their colleagues. The multi-lure feature of the SafeTitan platform solves this problem by allowing randomized lures to be sent during a simulated phishing campaign.
When this feature is activated, phishing emails will be sent in randomized bursts during working hours to ensure a high level of diversity within a phishing campaign and to maintain the element of surprise. The variety will help to ensure that members of the workforce experience a genuine test of their knowledge to help equip them with the skills they need to identify real phishing attempts.
Another new feature has been added to the MSP layer of the platform to ensure that MSPs can provide enhanced security awareness training. Reactive training is often not available to MSPs, yet it is one of the most effective ways of changing user behavior. Administrators can configure the platform to provide training in response to insecure behaviors by employees in real-time, ensuring timely training is provided to correct a bad behavior at the time when it is most likely to have the greatest impact. SafeTitan captures all data from users’ interactions with simulated phishing emails. If the user responds inappropriately, such as clicking a link or opening an attachment, training can be provided in real time relevant to that insecure action ensuring the employee is made aware of the error and their behavior is corrected.
For the MSP, not only does that help to improve the security awareness of the workforce, it means there is no need for manual assessments, saving MSPs valuable time. Other updates in the latest release include several much-awaited feature requests, including updates to the user experience that make navigating the platform even easier.
If you are an MSP that does not currently offer security awareness training, give the TitanHQ team a call to find out more about the SafeTitan platform. Product demonstrations, including demos of the new features, can be arranged on request.
TitanHQ has upgraded its award-winning SpamTitan email security solution, with the latest release including several enhancements to improve protection against malware, phishing, and other advanced threats. The latest release – version 9 – of the flagship email security solution is named SpamTitan Skellig, which includes major enhancements to the anti-spam engine at the core of the solution to improve malware detection and new phishing enhancements to protect against ever-evolving sophisticated threats.
SpamTitan is a leading cloud-based anti-spam service that has been shown in recent independent tests to provide exceptional protection against spam, phishing emails, and malware. The hosted spam filter includes a next-gen email sandbox, up-to-the-minute threat intelligence feed, AI and machine learning algorithms, twin antivirus engines, and more. In June 2024, Virus Bulletin put the new version of SpamTitan to the test and gave it VBSpam+ certification, with the solution achieving the second-highest final score in the test of 12 leading email security solutions. SpamTitan successfully blocked all malware samples, only missed one phishing email, and did not generate any false positives. SpamTitan had a malware catch rate of 100%, a phishing catch rate of 99.99%, a spam catch rate of 99.98%, and was given an overall score of 99.984%.
The update to SpamTitan Skellig will ensure that users continue to have best-in-class protection against email threats but there is more to the update than protecting against threats. SpamTitan has long been popular with end users due to the ease of use of the solution, which is why users consistently give the solution 5-star reviews. The latest release includes a brand new UI that is even more intuitive with improved navigation and better administrative functions across the board and makes it easier to onboard new users.
The upgraded version is available to all new users and current users can upgrade and get better protection at no additional cost for the upgrade and no change to the subscription price, with full assistance provided with upgrading if required. You can find out more about migrating to the new version here.
TitanHQ has announced a new strategic alliance with ATS Network Management, a provider of network management solutions, monitoring, security, and performance management services across South Africa and the African continent. Under the alliance, ATS Network Management will become a value-added distributor and will incorporate TitanHQ’s portfolio of cybersecurity and compliance solutions into its service stack, packaging the solutions with other tools and services to provide a more comprehensive range of services to its clients and ensuring they are shielded from constantly evolving cyber threats.
ATS Network Management will now be able to offer its clients email security and phishing prevention and remediation through TitanHQ’s PhishTitan solution for Office 365, as well as email filtering to remove malware, phishing, and unwanted emails from email systems and protect against malicious links with TitanHQ’s SpamTitan solution. SpamTitan is an award-winning email security solution with email sandboxing that protects against the full range of email threats. Independent tests have recently confirmed that SpamTitan has a 99.99% phishing catch rate and 100% malware catch rate, and it is one of the best-loved MSP spam filtering solutions.
To protect against web-borne threats and control access to the Internet, ATS Network Management will be providing DNS filtering using WebTitan. WebTitan blocks access to known malicious sites, prevents user-specified file types from being downloaded from the internet to protect against malware and control shadow IT, and restricts access to categories of web pages to improve employee productivity. To protect against the interception of sensitive email data in transit, ATS Network Management will be using EncryptTitan, and email archiving services will be offered through ArcTitan for compliance purposes.
Due to the number of threats targeting employees directly, it is vital for businesses to raise awareness of cyber threats and teach employees cybersecurity best practices. This is an area where many businesses turn to their MSPs for assistance. ATS Network Management will be offering its clients comprehensive security awareness training through SafeTitan, TitanHQ’s security awareness training platform. In addition to allowing businesses to create and automate tailored training courses with engaging content, the platform includes a phishing simulator to allow them to automate phishing simulations to identify knowledge gaps and provide targeted training where it is needed.
The partnership will help TitanHQ expand its footprint in Africa while ensuring that African businesses can benefit from TitanHQ’s cutting-edge security solutions and defend their businesses from increasingly sophisticated cyber threats.
For the second consecutive quarter, TitanHQ’s SpamTitan and PhishTitan solutions earned the #2 spot in the VBSpam+ awards, with a 99.99% phishing catch rate. For more than 20 years, the Virus Bulletin information security portal has been conducting fully independent benchmarking tests of cybersecurity solutions, including email security, anti-malware, and anti-phishing solutions. In the phishing and malware tests, Virus Bulletin fired a barrage of threats and spam at security solutions, but it is not sufficient to just be able to block malware, phishing, and spam. Email security solutions need to be able to block those threats without also blocking genuine emails so Virus Bulletin also sent a range of genuine emails to the email security solutions to make sure they were not overblocking and preventing genuine messages from being delivered quickly.
SpamTitan is provided as a cloud spam filter or gateway spam filter and incorporates machine learning and AI-based detection and sandboxing technology for predictive and behavioral analysis to identify zero-day threats. PhishTitan is TitanHQ’s inline phishing protection solution for Microsoft 365, which improves the Microsoft 365 spam filter. For every 80,000 emails sent to Microsoft 365 accounts, PhishTitan catches 20 threats that Microsoft’s most advanced security offering misses (E5 premium). PhishTitan auto-remediates these phishing threats. The same anti-spam, anti-malware, and anti-phishing engine powers both SpamTitan and PhishTitan.
The technological superiority of these solutions was demonstrated in the Virus Bulletin tests. In the Virus Bulletin Q1,2024 benchmarking tests, SpamTitan & PhishTitan achieved an impressive second place in the round of testing with a 99.914% phishing catch rate with a 0.000% false positive rate and a malware catch rate of 99.511%. TitanHQ achieved an overall final score of 99.983%
In the Q2, 2024 benchmarking tests, Virus Bulletin assessed 12 leading email security solutions and TitanHQ performed even better, achieving a phishing catch rate of 99.990%, a malware catch rate of 100.000%, and a false positive rate of 0.000%, resulting in a second-place spot for the second consecutive quarter with an overall final score of 99.984%. TitanHQ was pipped to the top spot by just 0.004% and outperformed email security providers such as Sophos, FortiMail, Mimecast, N-able, SpamAssassin, and Zoho Mail. The test ensures that TitanHQ collects another VBSpam+ certification for Q2, 2024. The scores clearly demonstrate that TitanHQ provides powerful and effective anti-spam and anti-phishing solutions for businesses and Managed Service Providers which are capable of blocking ever-evolving cyber threats. The benchmarking tests cement TitanHQ’s position as a leader in the cybersecurity industry.
“This test reaffirms TitanHQ’s unrivaled prowess in spam and phishing protection—we stand as the first choice for combating phishing attempts and spam infiltrations,” said Ronan Kavanagh, CEO at TitanHQ. “Our customers need not settle for anything less. With TitanHQ solutions, they receive unparalleled defense against phishing and spam and experience minimal false positives.”
Ronan Kavanagh explained that the company is attracting an unprecedented number of new Managed Service Provider customers who have decided to make the switch from other solutions to TitanHQ, not only because of the impressive level of protection provided, but also the low management overhead, ease of use, and the MSP features of both SpamTitan and PhishTitan, which were developed from the ground up to meet the needs to MSPs. “Their resounding feedback echoes the sentiment: TitanHQ delivers immediate and substantial threat mitigation. These independent test results validate our ongoing efforts, ensuring our customers benefit from top-tier protection against phishing, spam, and viruses at a compelling value proposition.”
A phishing campaign targeting the Los Angeles Department of Public Health saw more than 50 employee email accounts compromised and the sensitive information of more than 200,000 individuals was exposed.
In this campaign, the threat actor impersonated a trustworthy sender and emailed a link that directed employees to a malicious website where email credentials were harvested. The website had been crafted to appear legitimate and requested they log in. When their credentials were entered, they were captured and used to access the employees’ email accounts. 53 employees fell for the scam. Their email accounts contained highly sensitive information that could be used for identity theft and fraud, including names, dates of birth, and Social Security numbers, as well as financial information and health insurance information. This campaign clearly demonstrates the damage that can be caused by phishing, and how a well-crafted campaign can fool many employees and result in a costly data breach.
While this phishing attack stands out due to the number of email accounts compromised, successful phishing attacks are common in healthcare. Healthcare employees are targeted via email, SMS, and other communication platforms, including over the phone. The Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Department of Health and Human Services recently issued a joint cybersecurity advisory about a campaign targeting IT helpdesk workers at healthcare organizations. Cybercriminals call IT helpdesks and impersonate employees to request password resets and enroll new devices to receive multifactor authentication codes. In this campaign, the attackers seek email credentials and then pivot to systems used for automated clearinghouse (ACH) payments to divert payments to their own accounts.
The Los Angeles Department of Public Health phishing attack serves as a reminder of the importance of conducting regular security awareness training. Employees need to be trained how to recognize phishing attempts. Through regular training, employees can be made aware of the red flags they need to look for in all communications and will be conditioned to be always on the lookout for threats and to report any potential threats to their security team. Healthcare employees who receive regular security awareness are less likely to be tricked by phishing scams. Training data from TitanHQ shows that organizations that conduct regular security awareness training with the SafeTitan security awareness training platform and phishing simulations using TitanHQ’s phishing simulator can reduce susceptibility to phishing scams by up to 80%.
The SafeTitan platform allows healthcare organizations to easily create and automate security awareness training programs and to tailor the training courses to different departments and users, ensuring that the training is relevant and focuses on the cyber threats that each user group is likely to encounter. The platform is modular, with each module taking no longer than 10 minutes to complete, making it easy for busy healthcare workers to fit the training into their workflows. The training content is engaging, fun, and enjoyable, and covers all threats and teaches cybersecurity best practices.
Phishing simulations can be easily conducted to test the effectiveness of training and identify employees who have not taken the training on board, allowing them to be provided with further training. The SafeTitan platform is the only security awareness training platform that delivers training in real-time in response to security mistakes, ensuring additional training is provided instantly at the moment when it is likely to have the greatest impact on changing behavior.
In addition to training, healthcare organizations must implement technical safeguards for HIPAA Security Rule compliance. TitanHQ offers a range of cloud-based security solutions for healthcare organizations to manage risks and achieve Security Rule compliance. These include SpamTitan anti-spam software which incorporates AI and machine learning algorithms to predict phishing attempts and dual antivirus engines and email sandboxing to combat malware. The WebTitan web filter protects against internet-based threats and can be used to block access to malicious and risky websites and block executable file downloads from the Internet to combat malware. Healthcare organizations that use Microsoft 365 can improve phishing protection with PhishTitan – a next-generation AI-based anti-phishing solution that offers unmatched protection against phishing and allows rapid remediation of phishing threats, preventing phishing attempts from compromising multiple email accounts.
All TitanHQ solutions are quick and easy to implement and use and can help healthcare organizations achieve and maintain HIPAA compliance, block more threats, and avoid costly data breaches. Contact TitanHQ today for more information about improving your security posture.
TitanHQ has announced two new strategic alliances that will improve access to the company’s cybersecurity solutions in the Indian subcontinent and the Middle East. Evanti Tech is a Mumbai-based provider of IT infrastructure, cloud, and security services that helps to protect Indian businesses against cyberattacks, ransomware attacks, and other cybersecurity threats. The new alliance with TitanHQ will see Evanti Tech serve as a value-added distributor, incorporating TitanHQ’s cloud-based email security solutions into its cybersecurity suite to provide its clients with multi-layered protection capable of defending against a constantly evolving cyber threat landscape. The addition of TitanHQ’s email security solutions will allow the company to better protect its clients from email-based threats such as ransomware, malware, phishing, spear phishing, and business email compromise.
TitanHQ has also announced a new alliance with the Dubai, UAE-based cybersecurity managed service (CSMS) provider Nanjgels. Nanjgels protection methodology is based on five pillars of security – Protect, Identify, Detect, Remediate, Respond, with the company providing infrastructure security, user security, network security, data & app security, and security operations and response. Under the new alliance, Nanjgels will be adding SpamTitan email security solutions to its portfolio and will be offering them to all clients in the region to help them improve email security and block spam, phishing, spear phishing, BEC, ransomware, and other email threats.
The SpamTitan suite of products has been developed from the ground up to meet the needs of managed service providers and help them better protect their clients from email-based threats. SpamTitan includes double anti-virus protection to block known malware threats, email sandboxing to identify and block zero-day malware threats, protection against malicious links in emails, and spam detection mechanisms such as SPF, DKIM, DMARC, and greylisting to block more than 99.99% of spam and unwanted emails. The solution scans inbound and outbound emails and includes data loss protection features to combat insider threats.
Multi-award-winning SpamTitan is an ideal solution for protecting Microsoft 365 accounts. Almost 20% of phishing emails circumvent Microsoft 365 Exchange Defender and Microsoft Exchange Online Protection (EOP). SpamTitan integrates seamlessly with Microsoft 365 to augment defenses and block the phishing and malware threats that Microsoft misses. SpamTitan has achieved 36 consecutive VB Bulletin Anti-Spam awards, and recent independent tests have confirmed the solution blocks in excess of 99.95% of malware.
TitanHQ’s multi-tenant solutions are hugely popular with managed service providers as they make it easy to sell, onboard, manage, and deliver advanced security solutions directly to their client base and reduce the amount of time that MSPs need to devote to protecting their clients. TitanHQ offers antispam solutions for MSPs, phishing protection, DNS filtering, email encryption, email archiving, security awareness training, and phishing simulations. If you are a managed service provider looking to improve security, contact TitanHQ to find out more about the TitanShield program and the products you can easily add to your security stack to better protect your clients.
TitanHQ has added a new auto-remediation feature to its Microsoft 365 anti-phishing solution, PhishTitan, to better meet the needs of managed service providers (MSP) and M365 administrators.
According to Statista, more than two million companies worldwide use Microsoft 365, including more than 1.3 million in the United States. Given the number of companies that use Microsoft 365, it is naturally a big target for cybercriminals and nation-state actors. If threat actors can steal M365 credentials, they can access a treasure trove of valuable business data and gain a foothold for more extensive and damaging attacks. Microsoft offers protection against spam, phishing, malware, and business email compromise attacks, but the best level of protection is only available with its costly E5 premium license, which is prohibitively expensive for many small businesses. Even companies that can afford this costly license do not get cutting-edge protection against phishing and BEC attacks.
To consistently block sophisticated phishing attempts, BEC attacks, and zero-day threats, businesses need more advanced protection than Microsoft can offer, and many turn to PhishTitan from TitanHQ – an integrated Cloud Email Security Solution (ICES) that provides cutting-edge protection against the most damaging, sophisticated phishing threats, BEC, account takeover, VIP impersonation, and zero-day attacks. In recent Virus Bulletin Tests, the engine that powers PhishTitan achieved an exceptional spam catch rate of 99.983%, a malware catch rate of 99.511%, and a phishing catch rate of 99.914%, with zero false positives. PhishTitan was shown to outperform Microsoft’s highest level of protection. For every 80,000 emails received, PhishTitan blocks 20 more unique and sophisticated attacks than Microsoft’s E5 filtering option.
The latest update to PhishTitan adds a new auto-remediation feature, which allows administrators to tailor the management of malicious emails based on the severity level. When a threat is detected, a banner is added to the email that warns the user about the threat; however, auto-remediation allows administrators to apply rules to deal with these messages according to the threat level, such as automatically diverting the emails to the junk folder. This feature acts like a virtual SOC and minimizes the risk to end users, especially individuals who tend to ignore email banners.
Auto-remediation is just one of the new features PhishTitan has gained since its launch. PhishTitan has also received an update to protect users from the growing threat of QR code phishing attacks (QRishing). QR codes are problematic for many anti-spam and anti-phishing solutions, as they cannot decipher the URLs in QR codes and check the destination URL, which is why cybercriminals are increasingly using QR codes in their phishing emails. PhishTitan can analyze the URLs encoded in QR codes, assess the risk, and notify end users.
PhishTitan also supports allow-listing, which administrators can use to automatically white-list trusted senders to make sure that their emails are always delivered, and notifications can also be fed into Microsoft Teams. Since administrators can spend a considerable amount of time in the application, a dark mode has been added to improve the user experience, and many more updates are planned and will be rolled out soon.
“We are excited to introduce Auto Remediation, QR code protection, and many additional powerful new features to our valued customers. At TitanHQ, we collaborate closely with partners to develop tailored solutions addressing critical customer IT security challenges,” said TitanHQ CEO, Ronan Kavanagh. “PhishTitan provides MSPs with an unmatched value proposition, featuring effortless deployment and lucrative recurring revenue streams, ultimately delivering a positive return on investment.”
If you want to improve protection against email threats or have any questions about PhishTitan, give the TitanHQ team a call. TitanHQ also offers award-winning DNS filtering, spam filtering, email encryption, email archiving, security awareness training, and phishing simulation solutions, all of which are available on a free trial.
TitanHQ has announced it has signed a new partnership agreement with Equinox Technologies which will see TitanHQ’s cybersecurity solutions offered throughout Africa. Equinox Technologies is a pan-African, tech-enabled, business service provider that provides a range of services to more than 40 countries in Africa from its operational hubs in Abuja, Nigeria; Cape Town, South Africa; Nairobi, Kenya; and Tunis, Tunisia. Equinox Technologies helps businesses of all sizes expand and invest seamlessly across international borders through the provision of business-critical administrative, security, and compliance support. The services provided include enterprise mobility management, software engineering, IT operations, digital services, and cybersecurity.
The strategic alliance with TitanHQ will see Equinox Technologies act as a value-added distributor, packaging TitanHQ solutions with other products and services to meet its clients’ cybersecurity and compliance needs and better protect them from the rapidly evolving landscape of cyber threats. Under the new agreement, Equinox Technologies will become the exclusive distributor of TitanHQ solutions in Africa, further expanding TitanHQ’s global footprint.
Equinox Technologies will help its clients improve email security by offering TitanHQ’s cloud-based anti-spam service (SpamTitan), phishing protection solution (PhishTitan), and email encryption solution (EncryptTitan), protection from web-based threats through TitanHQ’s DNS filtering solution (WebTitan), threats that target employees with TitanHQ’s security awareness training and phishing simulation platform (SafeTitan); and help them meet their email retention and compliance obligations through TitanHQ’s email archiving solution (ArcTitan).
“This collaboration signifies Equinox Technologies’ commitment to fortifying its cybersecurity offerings,” said TitanHQ CEO, Ronan Kavanagh. “Together, Equinox Technologies and TitanHQ will be able to shield African companies from the constantly evolving landscape of cyber threats through a comprehensive suite of security solutions.”
TitanHQ is proud to announce the addition of a new solution to its cybersecurity portfolio that helps businesses combat the growing threat of phishing. PhishTitan provides powerful phishing protection for Microsoft 365 that is capable of catching and remediating sophisticated phishing attempts, including spear phishing attacks, business email compromise, phishing emails generated by artificial intelligence tools, and zero-day phishing threats that Microsoft’s native defenses for M365 fail to detect and block. It is these threats that pose the biggest threat since they are missed by Microsoft’s email security defenses and are difficult for employees to identify as malicious since they lack many of the red flags that employees are taught to look out for in security awareness training programs.
PhishTitan incorporates TitanHQ’s proprietary machine-learning algorithm, which integrates directly with M365. PhishTitan performs an AI-driven analysis of inbound emails (internal and external) which includes textual analysis, link analysis, and attachment scanning. Links are analyzed via multiple curated feeds that constantly update the solution to allow malicious websites linked to phishing and malware distribution to be identified and blocked. Phishing emails often include links that have been masked to hide the true destination URL. PhishTitan rewrites URLs to show the true destination. One tactic used by phishers to bypass email security solutions is to only weaponize links in emails after delivery. To protect against this tactic, PhishTitan checks inbound emails before delivery to inboxes and also offers time-of-click protection against malicious links in emails.
Attachments are scanned with twin antivirus engines, and suspicious email attachments are sent to the sandbox for behavioral analysis. Machine learning detection models scour the body of emails looking for tell-tale signs of phishing and adapt to constantly changing phishing tactics. The machine learning algorithms also learn from reports of phishing attempts by end users, which they can report with a single click using a TitanHQ-supplied Outlook add-in. PhishTitan can also be configured to apply banner notifications to external emails and protect against the leakage of sensitive company information.
The solution has been designed to meet the needs of businesses of all types and sizes and has been developed from the ground up to meet the needs of managed service providers (MSPs) to allow them to easily add advanced phishing protection to their service stacks. It takes around 10 minutes to set up the solution, and around 6 minutes for MSPs to onboard new clients.
The solution was trialed across the TitanHQ user database of more 12,000 customers and 3,000 MSPs in Q4, 2023, with TitanHQ customers reporting that the solution outperforms their existing anti-phishing solutions. TitanHQ is now pleased to start offering the new product to new customers. For more information on PhishTitan phishing protection Microsoft 365 contact TitanHQ today. PhishTitan is available on a 14-day free trial and product demonstrations can be arranged on request to show you how easy the product is to use and exactly what it can do.
“A staggering 71% of MS business users suffer at least one compromised account monthly. With this in mind, the overwhelming feedback from our customer base has been that phishing is the number one problem to solve in the email security community,” said TitanHQ CEO, Ronan Kavanagh. “We therefore allocated resources and investment to develop a solution with new, cutting-edge, robust, fast phishing threat intelligence driven by a team of security specialists. We are pleased to be able to meet the market’s needs with a product that delivers.”
TitanHQ products have received four “Top Solution Awards” from Expert Insights in Q4, 2023 in the Email Security, Web Filtering, Security Awareness Training, and Email Archiving categories.
Expert Insights is a leading business software review website that is used by IT decision-makers for researching the best business software solutions. The platform has more than 1 million readers a year and helps more than 85,000 businesses each month with their software purchase decisions. The website includes honest and impartial technical reviews and helpful guides to allow IT decision-makers to purchase with confidence.
Each Quarter, Expert Insights recognizes the world’s best B2B technology solutions through its awards program. The awards are based on Expert Insights’ independent technical analysts and editorial team, customer feedback, and industry recognition. In Q4, 2023, Expert Insights issued awards in over 40 categories, from authentication to zero trust security.
“We are thrilled to unveil our list of the ‘Top Solutions’ for Winter 2023, highlighting the extraordinary innovation in the B2B technology landscape,” said Craig MacAlpine, CEO and Founder of Expert Insights. “These awards celebrate leading solutions across more than 40 product categories, based on our own technical analysis and the engagement of thousands of enterprise tech professionals that use Expert Insights to research solutions each month.”
TitanHQ’s cybersecurity solutions were recognized and were named top solution in four categories:
Email Security – SpamTitan
Web Filtering -WebTitan
Security Awareness Training – SafeTitan
Email Archiving – ArcTitan
SpamTitan is a cutting-edge email security solution for blocking spam and protecting against email threats. The solution has artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities and can block all known malware, zero-day malware threats, and phishing, spear phishing, and business email compromise attacks.
WebTitan is a leading DNS filtering solution that allows businesses to carefully control the web content that can be accessed via wired and wireless networks and allows businesses to restrict access to certain websites to improve productivity, reduce legal risk, and protect against phishing, malware, ransomware, and other online threats.
SafeTitan is a comprehensive security awareness training and phishing simulation platform for teaching employees security best practices and improving resilience against the full range of cybersecurity threats. The platform provides training in real-time in response to poor security behaviors, which are triggered immediately when those behaviors are detected to ensure that training is delivered when it is likely to have the biggest impact.
ArcTitan is an easy-to-implement “set-and-forget” email archiving solution that helps businesses meet their legal responsibilities for data retention and ensures that no email is ever lost, with lightning-fast search and retrieval.
“Our team is truly honored by Expert Insights’ acknowledgment of TitanHQ as the ‘Top Solution’ Provider in their Q4 2023 Awards.,” said TitanHQ CEO, Ronan Kavanagh. “This recognition across multiple categories underscores our commitment to empowering our partners and MSPs with cutting-edge technology, enabling them to deliver advanced network security solutions to their clients.”
TitanHQ has recently announced a new partnership with one of India’s leading managed service providers, Tata Tele Business Services (TTBS). TTBS is the leading provider of business connectivity and communications solutions in India and has the largest portfolio of ICT services for businesses in the country.
Like many countries, India is facing a major increase in cybercrime. 78% of Indian organizations experienced a ransomware attack in 2021, web-based attacks have jumped sharply, and a 2022 Group-IB study placed India third globally for phishing attacks in 2021 with more attacks than any other country in the Asia-Pacific region. Indian businesses need to ensure that they have the necessary defenses in place to combat increasingly sophisticated cyberattacks, especially attacks that target employees.
Businesses often turn to their managed service providers for cybersecurity and seek solutions that can protect them against malware and phishing. TTBS provides cybersecurity solutions to SMBs and its cybersecurity packages have now been improved with the addition of SpamTitan email security and the WebTitan DNS-based web filter. Both solutions are 100% cloud-based, easy for MSPs to add to their service stacks, and easy to manage.
TTBS provides advanced email security with phishing protection through the Tata Tele Email Security Plus Program, which delivers advanced threat protection for email through TitanHQ’s AI-driven SpamTitan anti-phishing solution. Protection against Internet-based threats is provided through the Tata Tele Smart Internet Program, which includes web filtering provided by WebTitan. WebTitan is fed threat intelligence from a network of 650 million endpoints, ensuring malicious websites are blocked before threats are encountered.
“We are delighted to partner TitanHQ to offer Tata Tele Email Security- an advanced email security solution that is in line with Zero Trust security agenda of enterprises,” said Vishal Rally, Sr. VP & Head – Product, Marketing and Commercial, Tata Teleservices Ltd. “As a leading technology enabler TTBS is committed to simplifying and democratizing email security for businesses of any size. This partnership will ensure the protection of enterprise sensitive data efficiently and cost effectively”.
“We are excited to partner with Tata Teleservices to offer their growing customer base our advanced threat protection layer for email and web security,” said TitanHQ CEO, Ronan Kavanagh. “Over several years Tata Teleservices has excelled in the areas of customer service and security, our partnership further cements this commitment”.
If you are an MSP that has yet to start offering cybersecurity packages to your clients, or if you are keen to improve protection through AI-driven cybersecurity solutions, give the TitanHQ channel team a call to find out more about how TitanHQ can help you better protect your clients and improve your profits.
TitanHQ has made several enhancements to its suite of cybersecurity solutions this month, including an update to the SafeTitan security awareness training and phishing simulation platform to better meet the needs of Managed Service Providers (MSPs) and the release of a new version of the WebTitan DNS-based web filtering solution – Version 5.03, which is now being rolled out for all customers. SpamTitan spam-filter users are also due to get an upgrade, with version 9.01 of the platform due to be released.
The SafeTitan update added a new Auto Campaigns feature for MSPs to better meet the needs of their SMB clients and protect them against increasingly sophisticated phishing threats. While it is vital to have an email security solution such as SpamTitan in place to block email-based threats, workforces also need to be provided with security awareness training to ensure they have the skills to recognize and avoid the full range of cyber threats.
The SafeTitan platform can be used by SMBs for training their workforces and giving them practice at identifying threats and also by MSPs to meet the training needs of their clients. The new Auto Campaigns feature is an automation tool that allows MSPs to reduce the time spent planning and managing security awareness and phishing simulation campaigns for their SMB clients. The AI-driven feature helps MSPs streamline the security training process and improve efficiency while saving time and resources. The Auto Campaigns feature allows MSPs to create an annual set of phishing simulation campaigns for all clients within minutes.
WebTitan is an award-winning web filtering solution that is used by thousands of SMBs, enterprises, and MSPs for controlling access to the Internet and blocking web-based cyber threats. The latest version of the platform includes several new features and bug fixes.
Users now benefit from a new summary report page, the custom block page has a new layout, and several new features have been added. These include support for the customization of the global default policy on the MSP level, which allows the application of a custom default policy on the creation of a customer account. Support has been added for the customization of the default policy on the customer level, it is now possible to inherit the allowed & blocked domains from the customer default policy, and support has been added for allowing/blocking a top-level domain (TLD) on a customer policy and global domains.
SpamTitan is due for an imminent upgrade which will include several new, advanced MSP features. Version 9.01 will have a new history/quarantine feature for MSPs, that will allow them to quickly act on customer emails at the MSP level. Link Lock inheritance has been added at the MSP level to avoid having to drill down to individual domains to make changes, and a new pattern filtering feature has been added which simplifies SpamTitan administration for MSPs and allows them to secure all customers from one place. There is also a simplified mail view, which improves the user experience and makes email analysis simpler.
MSPs also have an Other Products option, which allows them to easily offer other products in the TitanSecure bundle to customers – ArcTitan email archiving, WebTitan web filtering, and SafeTitan security awareness training – and provide a comprehensive, multi-layered security defense system to customers.
On March 30, 2022, the U.S. Senate Homeland Security Committee cleared the Healthcare Cybersecurity Act – new legislation that promises to strengthen the cybersecurity posture of the U.S. healthcare and public health sectors. The U.S. healthcare sector has taken a battering in recent years as cybercriminals have stepped up attacks on the sector. Healthcare organizations are an attractive target due to the vast quantities of sensitive data they store. The data can easily be monetized and used for identity theft and medical fraud, and preventing access to that data puts patients at risk, which increases the probability that extortion attempts will be successful. Cyberattacks on the healthcare sector have proven to be lucrative, with healthcare providers often forced into paying huge ransom demands to decrypt their files, prevent the exposure of stolen data, and get critical systems back up and running quickly to improve patient safety.
In 2020, healthcare cyberattacks increased by 55% breaking the record set the previous year. More than 26 million medical records were compromised that year, which increased to over 40 million records in 2021 and 2022. 2023 looks like it will see similar numbers of records compromised. Healthcare is a critical industry and healthcare cybersecurity is a patient safety issue. Action is desperately at the federal level to improve resilience to cyberattacks and the Healthcare Cybersecurity Act is a step in the right direction. The Healthcare Cybersecurity Act calls for the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and the Department of Health and Human Services to collaborate and come up with a plan for improving the security posture of the sector. Within a year of the legislation being passed, CISA is required to complete a detailed analysis of the risks to healthcare assets and data, identify the information security challenges faced by organizations in the sector and come up with a plan to address the shortage of cybersecurity staff, including making recommendations for cybersecurity training for the workforce and enhancing incident response. The legislation also calls for the creation of a Cyber Security Operations Center specifically for the healthcare sector to share real-time threat intelligence to help defend against and respond to cyberattacks.
In the meantime, the cyberattacks continue. While hospitals and health systems are investing heavily in cybersecurity and are improving their technical defenses, hackers are developing new methods to attack the sector, often by exploiting human weaknesses. The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) requires healthcare providers, health plans, and other covered entities to develop a security awareness training program for employees, but the legislation was signed into law two decades ago and provides little in the way of detail as to what such a program should include or how often training should be conducted. Follow the letter of the law and you will be compliant but will do little to improve your security posture. What is required is a comprehensive training program that can be easily tailored to all members of the workforce and training them on how to recognize the specific threats they are likely to encounter.
The ultimate goal of security awareness training is to develop a security culture, and that simply isn’t possible with an annual training session. Security awareness training needs to be ongoing, with employees up to date on the latest threats, and training needs to be reinforced. This is an area where TitanHQ can help. TitanHQ offers healthcare organizations an easy-to-use platform for developing healthcare-specific training courses covering a broad range of security topics. The platform includes training content on hundreds of topics, delivered through computer-based training courses, videos, and quizzes. The content is engaging and gamified and has been developed to be easy to fit into busy healthcare workflows, with the training content taking no more than 10 minutes per module.
Administrators can easily develop training courses for individual employees, roles, and departments to ensure it is relevant, and the platform is behavior-driven, with training content automatically generated based on specific employee behaviors such as failed phishing simulations and security errors, such as saving sensitive data in an insecure location. Since the training is generated instantly, it ensures employees receive the training when it is likely to have the maximum impact – immediately after a security mistake is made.
The platform also has enterprise-level reporting, which provides executives with a 360 view of the entire organization and the return on investment, with the data provided in an easily digestible format for management, and detailed reports for the compliance team to demonstrate full compliance with the training requirements of the HIPAA Security Rule.
If you want to improve your organization’s security posture, training the workforce to be more security aware is a great place to start. For more information on SafeTitan, to sign up for a free trial, get in touch with the TitanHQ U.S. team today.
G2 (formerly G2 Crowd) has recently published its G2 Crowd Grid® Winter 2023 Report, which highlights the leading IT security products for businesses. G2 Grid Reports are based on satisfaction scores from genuine business users of IT solutions and are plotted into a quadrant along with market presence data, with each solution positioned in one of four quadrants: Leader, High Performer, Contender, and Niche. The Leader quadrant indicates products have high satisfaction scores from users and a strong market presence.
TitanHQ is happy to announce that SpamTitan Email Security has been placed in the Leader quadrant in five categories: Cloud Email Security, Small Business Email Security, Email Anti-Spam SMB, Email Protection, and Email Security, and was also given a top five position in 12 other categories.
G2 is a trusted source of reviews of technology for business and is used by thousands of businesses to help them with their purchasing decisions. G2 includes more than 2,072,000 reviews of business software from genuine users of the solutions, and those data are combined with social media reviews and other trusted online sources of data for its quarterly Grid reports. The G2 platform and Grid Reports are relied upon by more than 5 million buyers every month.
TitanHQ is a Galway, Ireland-based provider of cloud-based cybersecurity solutions. Those solutions include email security, DNS filtering, email archiving, email encryption, security awareness training, and phishing simulations. The products consistently attract high satisfaction scores from users on G2 and other business software review platforms such as Capterra, Gartner, GetApp, and Software Advice. Across those platforms, SpamTitan has attracted more than 500 5-star ratings based on customer reviews, and SpamTitan is also the category leader for email security on PeerSpot and Expert Insights, two other highly trusted review platforms.
The high scores show how much users love using SpamTitan products – SpamTitan Cloud, SpamTitan Gateway, and SpamTitan Plus – and how effective they are at blocking email-based threats. SpamTitan Plus is the latest addition to the SpamTitan family of products and was launched last year to provide leading-edge protection against phishing attacks, in particular, real-time phishing threats by utilizing AI and machine learning and extensive threat intelligence data – more than any other anti-phishing solution on the market. The result is 1.5x faster detection of malicious emails than the leading industry anti-phishing solutions from Barracuda, Proofpoint, and Mimecast. In addition to providing excellent protection, SpamTitan is easy-to-implement, easy to use, and far more affordable for businesses than many similar solutions. Users also benefit from exceptional front-line support. If any problems are experienced, help is rapidly provided.
The naming of SpamTitan as a leader in so many categories is a testament to the hard work of everyone at TitanHQ, and the considerable investment in the product. “The overwhelmingly positive feedback from SpamTitan users on independent review sites is a return for the massive investment we made into our products and threat intel,” said Ronan Kavanagh, CEO, TitanHQ.
If you want to save money on email security without sacrificing protection, why not give SpamTitan a try by taking advantage of the free trial of the solution today and see for yourself why SpamTitan products are consistently rated so highly by users.
The cybersecurity company Cyren has collapsed, leaving its customers at risk. If you use Cyren for email and web security, you should change provider immediately!
It is sad news when any company is forced to significantly reduce its workforce, which for Cyren recently involved laying off 121 employees “in response to current market conditions and associated challenges with raising additional capital.” Cyren issued a press release saying that such extensive layoffs represent a significant reduction in all of the company’s workforce, and that “in the absence of additional sources of liquidity, management anticipates that the Company’s existing cash and projected cash flows from operations will not be sufficient to meet the Company’s working capital needs in the near term.”
So what does that mean for close to 1 billion users that rely on the company’s cybersecurity solutions? TitanHQ contacted the company’s CISO in relation to the news and received a response. “The SDK will work for as long as the systems in the cloud will continue running. Unfortunately, we have no personnel left to watch after the systems, so it is hard to predict how long they will run for.”
As a provider of email and web security solutions, TitanHQ can confirm that without constant updates to anti-spam signatures, the ability of a solution to block new phishing attacks will rapidly diminish, which means that customers will be exposed to threats. While it is possible that Cyren will be able to attract further investment, in the short term customers should be very concerned. Unfortunately, a mass exodus of customers is the last thing Cyren needs, but those customers need to ensure that they continue to be protected against email and web-based threats, which means switching to another solution provider.
TitanHQ has already received many calls from Cyren customers following the company’s February 1, 2023, press release announcing the financial difficulties the company is facing and has offered those customers a special deal that can provide short-term protection while they decide on the best next step, and that is to extend the free trial of SpamTitan Email Security and the WebTitan DNS Filter to 30 days.
Both solutions can be implemented in a matter of minutes and will ensure Cyren customers remain protected against email and web-based threats. The TitanHQ team has been busy helping Cyren customers get up and running with the two solutions over the past 2 weeks since the announcement was made.
Naturally, TitanHQ would love to continue to provide these solutions to Cyren customers past the 30-day free trial and hopes they continue to use the solutions, but this is a no-obligation free use of the platform aimed at helping Cyren customers stay protected. If after the end of the 30 days they decide to go elsewhere, that is no problem at all. This is a totally free offer with no obligation to continue and with no strings attached.
The TitanHQ team will be monitoring capacity – which is already hugely overprovisioned – to ensure that there is no impact on current users, and response times to queries are constantly monitored to ensure that customers are not impacted. TitanHQ’s infrastructure can also be rapidly scaled up to meet demand should the need arise.
Cyren customers wishing to take advantage of the offer should contact TitanHQ to speak to the migration team, and assistance will be provided to get you up and running quickly.
Growth at TitanHQ has been tremendous over the past two years thanks to a sizable investment from the UK private equity firm, Livingbridge, in 2020, and the release of new cybersecurity solutions to better meet the needs of SMBs, enterprises, and the MSPs that serve them. TitanHQ has released SpamTitan Plus, which builds on the strong performance of SpamTitan Cloud and delivers industry-leading protection from phishing along with the security awareness training and phishing simulation platform SafeTitan – The only behavior-driven security awareness training platform that delivers security awareness training in real-time in response to security mistakes by employees.
For many years, TitanHQ has been enjoying strong organic year-on-year growth, and over the past couple of years has significantly expanded its footprint in the United States, helped by several strategic new hires and a new office in Shelton, Connecticut, staffed by a highly experienced team. That growth has recently been recognized by Deloitte, which has ranked TitanHQ as the 45th fastest-growing company in Ireland at the 2022 Deloitte Technology Fast 50 Awards. This is the second year in a row that TitanHQ has made the Top 50. The 2022 Deloitte Technology Fast 50 Awards is one of the most prestigious award programs for technology companies in Ireland and has been running for 23 years. The positions calculated by Deloitte are based on the previous four years of revenue growth.
“As the business environment becomes more complex, the Irish technology sector has shown great resilience and tenacity. This year’s ranking shows growth across a broad range of sectors with companies coming up with innovative solutions to address changing consumer and business demands while faced with adversity,” said David Shanahan, Partner, Deloitte. “It’s also encouraging to see so many new entrants, including seven in the top ten. Despite the challenges of late, the Irish indigenous tech sector continues to succeed.”
Combined, the top 50 companies in the list have generated more than €500 million in revenue, averaging €10 million per company, and in 2021 employed more than 5,500 people. The average growth rate for all companies was 594%. This year there were 17 companies that made it into the top 50 for the first time, with 7 of those companies ranking in the top 10. 8 Irish counties and all four provinces are represented in the list, and this year has seen an increase in the number of companies with female CEOs. 7 of the 50 companies are led by women.
“Organic year-on-year growth and recent significant investment have turbocharged TitanHQs growth. This has allowed TitanHQ to accelerate ambitious growth plans through increased investment in product development – and in people,” TitanHQ’s CEO, Ronan Kavanagh.
TitanHQ has collected 5 awards for its cybersecurity solutions in the Expert Insights Fall 2022 ‘Best-Of’ Awards across 5 product categories.
Expert Insights is an online platform for businesses that provides independent advice on business software solutions to help businesses make informed purchasing decisions about software solutions. The advice provided on the website is honest and objective, and the site features helpful guides to help businesses purchase with confidence. The site is used by more than 85,000 businesses each month, with the website helping more than 1 million readers each year.
Twice yearly, Best-of awards are given to the top ten solutions in each of the 41 product categories. The awards showcase the best quality solutions that are helping businesses to achieve their goals and defend against the barrage of increasingly sophisticated cyberattacks. The awards are based on several factors, such as the features of products, market presence, ease of use, and customer satisfaction scores, with the award winners chosen by the in-house team of editors. The editorial team conducts research into each solution to assess its performance, functionality, and usability, and assesses the reviews from genuine business users of the solutions.
TitanHQ collected five awards for its products in the Spring 2022 Best-of awards, and this has been followed up with another 5 Fall 2022 Best-of awards. TitanHQ was given a Best-of award for SafeTitan in the Phishing Simulation and Security Awareness Training categories, SpamTitan Cloud received an award in the Email Security category, WebTitan Cloud got an award in the Web Security category, and ArcTitan won in the Email Archiving category. Further, ArcTitan Email Archiving was rated the top solution in the Email Archiving category and SpamTitan was rated the top solution in the Email Security category.
There were several big winners at the Fall 2022 Expert Insights Best-of awards, with TitanHQ joining companies such as ESET, CrowdStrike, and Connectwise in winning big.
“We are honored that TitanHQ was named as a Fall 2022 winner of Expert Insights Best-Of award for phishing simulation, email security, security awareness training, web security and email archiving” said TitanHQ CEO, Ronan Kavanagh. “Our cloud-based platform allows partners and MSPs to take advantage of TitanHQ’s proven technology so they can sell, implement and deliver our advanced network security solutions directly to their client base”.
WebTitan Cloud is an award-winning DNS filter that prevents access to malicious websites and allows businesses to control the web content users can access with precision. This week, TitanHQ has announced the release of a new version of WebTitan Cloud, that includes new features to improve usability, security, protection for remote workers, and provides greater insights into DNS requests. These new features now form part of an industry-leading feature set that is in a cloud-delivered solution that is easy to set up, use, and maintain.
New UI with Advanced Reporting Features
If you are a current WebTitan Cloud user, the first change you will notice is the new user interface which provides easy access to all WebTitan Cloud features. The enhancements provide intuitive, advanced, relevant, and easy-to-digest data, through new interactive reports and data visualization tools, which are embedded into the UI to improve the user experience.
The advanced security reports show malware-infected clients, malware-infected domains, malware-infected users, blocked phishing sites, blocked phishing domains, and blocked phishing sites by user, and the view can be customized by date and client IP. New reports show behavior, blocked sites, and trends to provide insights into network use and threats. These reports have been added based on the feedback received by WebTitan Cloud users.
Interactive Threat Intelligence with DNS Data Offload
The latest version of WebTitan Cloud provides users with easier access to valuable threat intelligence to aid IT decision-making, network troubleshooting, and security planning. Users can now list DNS request history on screen, download DNS request logs, view all DNS data to gain valuable insights into activity, and easily extract DNS query data for sophisticated integrations and advanced data analysis.
DNSSEC Security Enhancements
WebTitan Cloud now benefits from security enhancements to protect against DNS attacks by strengthening authentication using Domain Name System Security Extensions (DNSSEC). DNSSEC uses digital cryptographic signatures to verify the origin and integrity of data during the DNS resolution process to protect against malicious DNS poisoning attacks. Users of WebTitan Cloud can implement DNSSEC through a simple and straightforward process to improve security.
WebTitan OTG Improvements for Protecting Off Network Users
The WebTitan On-the-Go (OTG) agent allows users to extend the protection of WebTitan Cloud to off-network users, no matter where they connect to the Internet. WebTitan OTG was introduced some time ago; however, the latest release includes several enhancements. The JSON Config filters have been replaced for OTG devices, and the agent used to protect, manage, and monitor off-network users has been significantly improved. It is also much easier to add and update exceptions to OTG devices through an easy-to-use interface.
“This WebTitan release is hitting so many key pillars of success for TitanHQ. The data offload feature has been requested by many customers and creates real differentiation for our solution in the market. This coupled with our new advanced reporting were major requests from our MSP customers,” said Ronan Kavanagh, CEO of TitanHQ. “Finally, security is at the heart of what we do and are, the addition of DNSSEC just continues to add to our credentials.”
For more than 10 years, PeerSpot (formerly IT Central Station) has been helping tech pros make intelligent decisions on the best information technology solutions to implement to ensure they get the solutions that perfectly address the needs of their businesses. The PeerSpot Buying Intelligence Platform is powered by the world’s largest community of enterprise tech buyers and bridges the gap between vendors and buyers. Vendors are helped through the voice of their customers, and enterprise tech buyers receive relevant and practical advice to help them make better purchasing decisions. The platform provides in-depth reviews of products, online forums, and tech buyers have access to direct Q&A support.
This year sees PeerSpot launch its first Annual User’s Choice Award program to recognize the products that are helping businesses to achieve their goals. Customers of enterprise technology vendors are invited to vote for their favorite B2B Enterprise Technology products across 11 product categories.
In 2022, those product categories are:
Endpoint Protection for Business
Firewalls
Backup and Recovery Software
Network Monitoring Software
HCI
All-Flash Storage Arrays
Email Security
Ethernet Switches
Application Security Tools
Functional Testing Tools
Rapid Application Development Software
In order for a solution to be included in the relevant category, it must be amongst the highest-rated products on the PeerSpot Buying Intelligence Platform. That requires a product to have generated significant user engagement on the platform and to have been rated highly by verified users of the solutions.
The winners in each category will be decided by popular vote.
TitanHQ is proud to have had its SpamTitan solution included as one of the top spam filtering, anti-phishing, and anti-malware solutions in the email security category. SpamTitan provides layered protection for enterprises, SMBs, and managed service providers and blocks email-based threats such as phishing, malware, spam, viruses, and botnets. The solution incorporates signature- and behavior-based detection to block malware threats and predictive technologies to anticipate zero-minute threats. SpamTitan is much loved by users not just for its performance, but also ease of set up, use, maintenance, price, and the industry-leading customer support provided by TitanHQ. SpamTitan has an overall star rating of 4.6/5 on the platform.
If you love using SpamTitan and it has helped your business block more threats, cut down on the resources you have had to devote to email security, or saved you money, TitanHQ encourages you to vote for SpamTitan. Voting will take around a minute of your time. Votes are being accepted until September 16th, 2022, and the winners in each category will be announced by PeerSpot on October 25, 2022.
TitanHQ has announced an update has been made to its flagship anti-phishing solution, SpamTitan Plus. The new enhancements have been added to the predictive phishing detection capabilities of SpamTitan Plus to help users block personalized URL attacks.
Phishing attacks on businesses have become much more sophisticated and new tactics are constantly being developed to evade standard email security solutions. While commercial email security solutions perform well at identifying and blocking spam emails, achieving detection rates in excess of 99%, blocking phishing emails is more of a challenge and many phishing threats sneak past email security solutions and are delivered to inboxes.
One of the ways that cyber threat actors bypass email security solutions is by creating personalized URLs for their phishing emails. One of the methods used by email security solutions for blocking phishing URLs is a real-time blacklist of known malicious URLs and IP addresses. If an email is sent from an IP address that has previously been used to send spam or phishing emails, the IP address is added to a blacklist and all emails from that IP address will be blocked. The URLs in phishing campaigns are set up and massive email runs are performed. When those URLs are detected as malicious, they are also added to a blacklist and will be blocked by email security solutions.
However, it is becoming increasingly common for personalized URLs to be used. These URLs can be personalized for the targeted organizations at the path and parameter level, and since a unique URL is used in each attack, standard anti-phishing measures such as blacklists are ineffective at detecting these URLs as malicious. That means the emails containing these malicious URLs are likely to be delivered to inboxes and can only be blocked after they have been delivered. That typically means an employee needs to report the email to their security team, and the security team must then act quickly to remove all phishing emails in that campaign from the email system. That process takes time and there is a risk that the links in the emails could be clicked, resulting in credential theft or malware infections. Most of the phishing detection feeds that are used by email security solutions do not gather the necessary intelligence to be able to inform customers of the level at which a phishing campaign should be blocked. SpamTitan Plus, however, does have that capability.
“With predictive phishing detection, SpamTitan Plus can now combat automated bot phishing,” said Ronan Kavanagh, CEO of TitanHQ. “At TitanHQ we always strive to innovate and develop solutions that solve real-security problems and provide tangible value to our customers. The end goal is to have our partners and customers two or three steps ahead of the phishers and cybercriminals.”
SpamTitan Plus
SpamTitan Plus is an AI-driven anti-phishing solution that is capable of blocking even the newest zero-day phishing threats. The solution has better coverage than any of the current market leaders and provides unparalleled time-of-click protection against malicious hyperlinks in phishing emails, with the lowest false positive rate of any product. SpamTitan Plus benefits from massive clickstream traffic from 600+ million users and endpoints worldwide, which sees the solution block 10 million new, never-before-seen phishing and malicious URLs a day.
The solution protects against URL-based email threats including malware and phishing, performs predictive analyses to identify suspicious URLs, URLs are rewritten to protect users, real-time checks are performed on every click, and the solution includes 100% of all current market-leading anti-phishing feeds. That translates into a 1.5x increase in unique phishing URL detections, 1.6x faster phishing detections than the current market leaders, and 5 minutes from initial detection of a malicious URL to protecting all end user mailboxes.
For more information about the best phishing solution for businesses, give the TitanHQ team a call today. Current users of SpamTitan Plus already have these new capabilities added, at no additional cost.
Following on from being included in the Expert Insights’ list of the Top 100 Most Innovative Cybersecurity Companies of 2022, TitanHQ has been named a finalist in the 2022 CompTIA UK Spotlight Awards in the Innovative Vendor Award Category.
The Computing Technology Industry Association (CompTIA) is an advocate for the $5 trillion global information technology ecosystem and the estimated 75 million professionals who design, implement, manage, and safeguard the technology that powers the world’s economy.
CompTIA provides education, training, certifications, philanthropy, and market research and promotes industry growth, the development of a highly-skilled workforce, and the creation of an environment where innovation happens and opportunities are made possible through technology that is available to all.
Every year, CompTIA recognizes individual and organizational excellence in the UK tech industry through the CompTIA UK Spotlight Awards, which took place on June 16 at the CompTIA UK Business Technology Community Meeting, in Bristol.
TitanHQ is delighted to have been named a finalist at this year’s awards and to be recognized for its innovative cybersecurity solutions that are helping SMBs and Managed Service Providers defend against increasingly sophisticated cyber threats.
Over the past 12 months, TitanHQ has enjoyed excellent growth, has brought in a wealth of new talent, and has released two innovative new cybersecurity solutions to its product portfolio: SpamTitan Plus and the SafeTitan Security Awareness and Phishing Simulation Platform.
SpamTitan Plus provides cutting-edge, industry-leading protection against zero-day phishing threats. The AI-driven anti-phishing solution has better coverage, a significant uplift in phishing link detections, and faster detection speeds, with the lowest false positive rate of any product. The solution includes updates from massive clickstream traffic of 600+ million users and endpoints worldwide, which protects against 10 million+ new, never-before-seen phishing and malicious URLs each day.
According to research, 97% of users fail to identify all phishing emails, so advanced phishing protection is essential. So too is security awareness training, to teach employees how to identify phishing and other threats and increase threat reporting rates to security teams.
TitanHQ now offers a comprehensive platform that businesses can use to train their employees to be security titans and create a human firewall to complement their technical anti-phishing safeguards. SafeTitan includes an extensive library of interactive, fun, and engaging training content, a phishing simulator, and is the only behavior-driven security awareness training platform that delivers security awareness training in real-time.
If you want to benefit from these new solutions and any of TitanHQ’s other innovative cybersecurity protects – DNS filtering, email encryption, and email archiving- contact TitanHQ today.
TitanHQ has collected several accolades already in 2022 for the full range of cloud-delivered solutions. The 2022 tally now includes recognition as one of the top 100 most innovative cybersecurity companies.
The Expert Insights’ Top 100 Most Innovative Cybersecurity Companies list was created to recognize the most innovative companies in cybersecurity – companies that develop highly innovative solutions to better protect businesses and consumers from increasingly sophisticated cyber threats. The Top 100 list is broken down into 12 different categories, with TitanHQ included in the Email and Messaging Security Category.
It is vital for businesses of all sizes to implement robust defenses to block email-based attacks. Email is the leading vector for malware delivery and phishing attacks are increasing in number and sophistication. As TitanHQ CEO, Ronan Kavanagh, pointed out, “The overwhelming feedback from our users and customer base has been that phishing attacks are becoming more advanced, proficient and dangerous. Phishing is the number one problem to solve in the email security community.”
TitanHQ’s SpamTitan suite of products provides cutting-edge, robust, and rapid protection against phishing attacks, malware threats, and other email-borne cyberattacks. In addition to the SpamTitan Gateway and SpamTitan Cloud solutions, TitanHQ recently released SpamTitan Plus, which provides best-in-class protection against phishing attacks, with the most comprehensive coverage of any solution, incorporating 100% of current market-leading anti-phishing feeds. That translates into 1.5x faster URL threat detection, 1.6x faster phishing detection than the current market leaders, and just 5 minutes from initial detection of malicious URLs to protecting all mailboxes.
“Over the past year, TitanHQ has significantly grown its global presence, strengthened its executive leadership team, and added to its product and services portfolio, all of which have contributed to our impressive placement on the 2022 Expert Insights’ Top 100 Most Innovative Cybersecurity Companies list,” said Kavanagh.
The latest accolade follows on from TitanHQ collecting no fewer than five Expert Insights’ ‘Best of’ Awards in the spring for SpamTitan Email Security, WebTitan DNS Filter, ArcTitan Email Archiving, with two awards for SafeTitan Security Awareness Training.
TitanHQ has recruited the popular channel veteran Tom Watson, who will serve as the company’s new Channel Chief to help bring profitable growth to all TitanHQ Managed Service Provider (MSP) partners.
TitanHQ is committed to serving the MSP community and channel and offers a wide range of cybersecurity solutions that have been developed from the ground up to meet the needs of MSPs. The TitanHQ product portfolio now includes best-in-class email security, DNS filtering, email archiving, email encryption, and security awareness training and phishing simulation solutions, that are easy to implement, manage, and fit seamlessly into MSP’s service stacks. The solutions are delivered through an MSP-centric platform to allow MSPs to provide defense-in-depth security solutions to their SMB and enterprise clients.
Demand from MSPs in North America for TitanHQ solutions has prompted a major expansion of US operations. TitanHQ is well aware that such tremendous growth must be supported by locally sourced experienced advisors such as Tom Watson. Tom brings considerable experience to TitanHQ, having previously owned an MSP business and served as Channel Chief at top-level vendors such as NinjaOne and Axcient. Tom will be based at TitanHQ’s new North American base in Shelton, Connecticut, where he will be working alongside locally sourced talent such as TitanHQ VP of Sales, Jeff Benedetti, and his North American team.
Tom has been tasked with managing TitanHQ’s MSP tradeshows, roadshows, and webinars, and will oversee the creation of a brand-new MSP partner program. “I see my role as being more of a liaison than anything,” said Tom, regarding his new position at TitanHQ. “TitanHQ already has a fantastic offering. You’ll be hearing me talk about that in the future. For now, I think it’s more important to highlight the commitments TitanHQ has made to the channel. This is a company that is 100% dedicated to making sure they serve the MSP community.”
Tom went on to explain the reason why he chose to join the TitanHQ team. “I’ve wanted to work for a rising cybersecurity company for quite a while now. Here I know I can use my skills and understanding of MSP operations, sales, and marketing to help MSPs succeed. Working together with TitanHQ we can give MSPs everything they need to provide quality cyber services to their clients.”
Everyone at TitanHQ is excited about Tom joining the company and the role he will play in ensuring TitanHQ remains the leading provider of cloud-based cybersecurity solutions to MSPs serving the SMB market by supporting growth in the North American market.
“As we continue to further expand into the North American market, introducing industry experts like Tom to our team is vital to allow us to continue to partner with MSPs looking for best in class cybersecurity solutions,” said TitanHQ CEO, Ronan Kavanagh. “We are thrilled to welcome Tom to the team, his wealth of experience working with the MSP sector will serve us well as we continue on our growth journey.”
This month, TitanHQ has collected five prestigious awards for its cloud-based security solutions from Expert Insights. Expert Insights is an online publication with editorial and technical teams in the UK and US, that provide insights into cybersecurity and cloud-based technologies to help businesses make the right purchasing decisions.
Hundreds of B2B solutions are covered on the website, along with editorial buyers’ guides, blog articles, and industry analyses, with interviews and technical product reviews written by industry experts. More than 80,000 business owners, IT admins, and users visit the website every month to research products ahead of making a purchase.
Expert Insights issues ‘Best-Of’ awards to recognize companies that have developed products that provide essential services to businesses, help drive business growth, improve efficiency, and secure their IT environments against an ever-increasing range of cyber threats. The Expert Insights’ Spring 2022 Best-Of awards are issued across a range of categories, including cloud software, security, and storage, with up to 11 vendors chosen in each category. Vendors and their products are selected based on extensive research into the solutions by industry experts, and from feedback from genuine business users of the solutions. “These awards recognize the continued excellence of the providers in these categories,” said Joel Witts, Expert Insights’ Content Director.
TitanHQ collected awards for SpamTitan Email Protection, WebTitan DNS Filter, ArcTitan Email Archiving, and SafeTitan Security Awareness Training, with each product being awarded Best-in-Class in their respective categories.
SpamTitan was named as the Best Email Security Gateway and was ranked the number 1 solution. WebTitan ranked best in the Web Security Solution category, ArcTitan was ranked number 1 in the Email Archiving Solution for Business category, and SafeTitan collected two best-of awards, one in the Security Awareness Training Category and another in the Phishing Simulation category.
“The recent pandemic and the growth of remote working initiatives have further highlighted the need for multiple layers of cybersecurity and our award-winning solutions form key pillars in this security strategy,” said TitanHQ CEO Ronan Kavanagh. “We will continue to innovate and provide solutions that MSPs can use to deliver a consistent, secure, and reliable experience to their customers.”
Less than two months after hiring channel chief Jeff Benedetti, TitanHQ has announced 12 further strategic new hires who will form a new North American team to service the US and Canadian Managed Service Provider (MSP) market.
The new team members have extensive channel experience, having previously held positions at the likes of Datto, Skout Cybersecurity, Agile Blue, and Barracuda and are based in TitanHQ’s new North American base in Shelton, Connecticut, headed up by Channel Chief Benedetti.
The new team includes Eric Morano, who has been appointed Director of Channel Development. Eric has 15 years of sales leadership and GTM experience at Datto, Skout Cybersecurity (BarracudaMSP), AgileBlue XDR, CDW, and Verizon. Moreno will be responsible for optimizing TitanHQ’s partner engagement and growth.
New Channel Account Managers include Craig Somma, who has 25 years of technology sales GTM leadership that was gained at Tech Dept, Micro Warehouse, and Gov Connection, Joseph Rende who has 10+ years of channel sales experience at Gartner and Datto, Pat DeAngelis who has 10+ years of MSP technology experience at Datto, Threatlocker and Armor Cybersecurity, and Jeff Brown has 10+ years of sales experience at Datto, SKOUT Cybersecurity, Agile Blue. New Account Executives include Alex De Los Santos, who has 8 years of sales experience at Datto and ADP, Alex Nankervis, who has 8 years of sales experience at Datto and Indeed, Kyle Leyerzapf, who has 5 years of sales experience at Datto, Patrick Barry who has 6 years of sales and accounts experience with Accu-Tech Corporation and Maxim Healthcare, and Jamal Ibrahim, who has 4 years account management experience with Altium and RCG. Marc Bonnaci has also joined the Sales Development team and has 7 years of sales and professional experience most recently at Agile Blue.
The new TitanHQ North American Team
The past three months have seen significant activity at TitanHQ. In addition to bringing in Benedetti to head the channel team, TitanHQ launched its SpamTitan Plus Anti Phishing solution in December 2021 and announced the acquisition of Cyber Risk Aware in February, and launched SafeTitan Security Awareness Training.
SpamTitan Plus is a cutting-edge, AI-driven anti-phishing solution with more comprehensive “zero-day” threat protection and intelligence than all of the current market leaders, with significant uplifts in phishing link detections and much faster detection speeds. This new addition to the SpamTitan product family has been very well received.
Cyber Risk Aware is a global leader in security awareness training to mitigate human cyber risk, and the platform is used by many companies to train their workforces to improve threat awareness. The platform, which has been re-launched as SafeTitan, is an intuitive, real-time security awareness training platform that improves awareness and human resilience to ransomware, malware, BEC attacks, and phishing. Demand for the new SafeTitan security awareness training and phishing simulation platform has been exceptional, with huge interest coming from MSPs and IT departments globally.
On top of these major launches, TitanHQ recorded record-breaking growth in January and February 2022 and has generated the highest revenue and new MSP partner figures in its 20-year history. More than 2,200 MSPs now use TitanHQ’s best-in-class SaaS Cybersecurity Platform daily, with the numbers continuing to grow at an incredible rate, especially in the United States and Canada, hence the need to open a new U.S. office and bring in a wealth of new talent.
TitanHQ, the leading cybersecurity SaaS business, today announced its acquisition of Cyber Risk Aware. Established in 2016, Cyber Risk Aware is a global leader in security awareness and mitigation of human cyber risk, providing assistance to companies to train the workforce on how to protect the company network.
Cyber Risk Aware delivers real-time cyber security awareness training to staff in response to actual staff network behavior. This intuitive and real-time security awareness training reduces the likelihood users will be impacted by the latest threats such as ransomware, BEC attacks, and data breaches, whilst also enabling organizations to meet compliance obligations. Leading global businesses that trust Cyber Risk Aware include Standard Charter, Glen Dimplex, and Invesco.
The acquisition will further bolster TitanHQ’s already extensive cybersecurity offering. The combination of intelligent security awareness training with phishing simulations and TitanHQ’s advanced email protection and DNS security solutions creates a powerful, multi-layered cybersecurity platform that secures end users from compromise. This is the go-to cybersecurity platform for IT Managed Service Providers and internal IT teams.
“This is a fantastic addition to the TitanHQ team and solution portfolio. It allows us to add a human protection layer to our MSP Security platform, with a fantastic feature-rich solution as demonstrated by the high caliber customers using it. Stephen and his team have built a great company over the years, and we are delighted to have them join the exciting TitanHQ journey.” said TitanHQ CEO Ronan Kavanagh.
The solution is available to both new and existing customers and MSP partners at TitanHQ.com and has been re-branded as SafeTitan, Security Awareness Training. Cyber Risk Aware existing clients are unaffected and will benefit from improvements in the platform in terms of phishing simulation content and an exciting, innovative product roadmap.
Stephen Burke, CEO of Cyber Risk Aware, commented: “I am incredibly proud that Cyber Risk Aware has been acquired by TitanHQ, cybersecurity business that I have greatly admired for a long time. Today’s announcement is fantastic news for both our clients and partners. We will jointly bring together a platform of innovative security solutions that address the #1 threat vector used by bad actors that cause 99% of security breaches, “End User Compromise”. When I first started Cyber Risk Aware, my aim was to be the global security awareness leader in delivering the right message, to the right user at the right time. Now as part of TitanHQ, I am more excited than ever about the unique value proposition we bring to market”.
TitanHQ has appointed channel veteran Jeff Benedetti as the company’s new Vice President of Sales – North America.
Jeff Benedetti – TitanHQ VP of Sales, North America
TitanHQ is the leading web filtering, email filtering, and email archiving Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) business and already has a strong presence in North America, with the North American operations run from TitanHQ’s U.S. base in Tampa, Florida. TitanHQ has been enjoying strong growth in the region and the new appointment will help to ensure the growth continues over the long term.
Jeff Benedetti has nearly two decades of experience in sales and go-to-market leadership in the technology and security markets. Benedetti joins the TitanHQ Go-to-Market leadership team from SKOUT Cybersecurity, where he led the Sales and Marketing teams. The firm was acquired by Barracuda Networks last summer. Prior to the position at SKOUT Cybersecurity, Benedetti served as the Director of US Sales at Datto where he played a key role in improving partner growth and expansion in the U.S. while Datto achieved unicorn status and an acquisition by Vista Private Equity. Benedetti has also held leadership roles at Apple Inc. and Tech Depot.
“End-user compromise is the #1 threat vector for bad actors and causes 99% of security breaches. As the cyber problem compounds, MSPs continue to be a single resource to secure their customers’ users, networks, and infrastructure,” said Benedetti. “The opportunity to enable our partners with a best-in-class security platform and partner program built for growth is massive.”
TitanHQ has been providing security solutions to business and managed service providers (MSPs) for more than 20 years and now provides email security, DNS security, email archiving, and email encryption services to more than 8,500 businesses worldwide. Among TitanHQ’s customers are more than 2,500 MSPs, which use TitanHQ solutions to protect themselves and their clients from malware, ransomware, botnets, viruses, phishing attacks, and other cyber threats.
TitanHQ has developed its solutions to meet the needs of MSPs, with MSP needs factored into the products at the development stage. The company has grown to become the leading provider of cloud-based email and web cybersecurity solutions for MSPs serving the SMB market, and the company is enjoying continued, strong growth. TitanHQ is looking to continue to build long-term growth and as the IT service provider of choice for MSPs.
“We are thrilled Jeff has joined TitanHQ to further expand our already strong growth in the U.S. market. As a well-respected International sales executive within cybersecurity, Jeff is an important addition to TitanHQ. His decades of expertise will be pivotal in driving growth and will benefit partners and customers as TitanHQ continues to innovate and grow,” said TitanHQ CEO Ronan Kavanagh.
This coming February, some of the world’s brightest cybersecurity professionals will be converging at Threatlocker’s Zero Trust World 2022 in Orlando, Florida. Over the course of the two-and-a-half-day event which runs February 21-23, attendees will be treated to live hacking demonstrations, will be able to take part in hands-on exercises in workshops, and there will be training opportunities and certification labs. The event is very much focused on providing valuable insights into how to become an even more successful MSP and IT professional.
This year, attendees will hear from some of the world’s leading cybersecurity professionals who will be discussing the importance of zero trust in today’s cyber threat landscape and other important cybersecurity topics. They will provide expert advice that can be actioned when attendees return to their jobs to better defend against the full range of cyber threats.
This year, TitanHQ is excited to be attending the event and will be exhibiting and showcasing SpamTitan Email Security, WebTitan DNS filtering, ArcTitan email archiving, and EncryptTitan email encryption.
For the past 20 years, TitanHQ has been providing cloud-based security solutions to SMBs and managed service providers serving the SMB market. Today, more than 12,000 businesses rely on TitanHQ’s security solutions, including more than 2,500 MSPs in 150 countries.
If you are attending the event, be sure to visit the TitanHQ stand to find out more about TitanHQ solutions and to discover how they can make your life easier, protect against cyber threats, and improve the profitability of your business.
If you have not yet booked your place at the event, you can register here.
TitanHQ has been included in the 2021 Deloitte Technology Fast 50 List of the fastest-growing tech companies in Ireland. The Award program has now been running for 22 years and celebrates innovation and entrepreneurship in Ireland’s indigenous technology sector.
Deloitte compiles the list based on percentage revenue growth over the past 4 years, with TitanHQ ranking in position 33 in the list after a long period of sustained growth. That growth continued throughout the COVID-19 pandemic when many businesses have struggled. Not only has the company significantly increased its customer base over the past 4 years, the workforce has also had a major expansion. Between September 2020 and April 2021, TitanHQ’s workforce doubled in size.
As well as impressive organic growth, TitanHQ has benefitted from investment from Livingbridge Investor Group which has allowed the company to continue to recruit the best talent to support its business and invest in product development. As well as making improvements to its existing product portfolio, the company released a new product this month – SpamTitan Plus.
SpamTitan Plus builds on the protection provided by SpamTitan Gateway and SpamTitan Cloud but significantly improves detection of the malicious URLs in emails that are used for phishing and malware distribution. SpamTitan Plus has coverage of all major phishing feeds and has the fastest and best detection rates of malicious URLs than any of the market-leading anti-spam solutions.
“As a result of increased demand globally for our solutions, we have invested heavily in product development and embarked on a recruitment campaign to double our workforce in a program that will allow that growth to continue,” said TitanHQ CEO, Ronan Kavanagh. “The quick move to remote working last year has made us all aware of how important it is to be adaptable and have the right security solutions in place to protect users, customers, company data, and systems.”
TitanHQ’s customer base has now increased to more than 12,000 businesses, including over 2,500 managed service providers in 150 countries, with much of TitanHQ’s growth over the past 4 years due to the increase in overseas customers. That growth was also recognized by Deloitte, which awarded TitanHQ runner-up spot in the Scale Up Award. The Scale Up Award recognizes companies that have enjoyed significant overseas growth over the past 4 years.
“Congratulations to all of the companies that ranked this year. This is the first year we have seen the impact the pandemic has had on revenues of Irish tech companies,” said David Shanahan, Partner, Deloitte “It will come as no surprise that many of this year’s winners have achieved accelerated growth and scale as a result of the pandemic and being able to capitalize on the global move to a digital way of life.”
Phishing is the number one cybersecurity threat faced by businesses and attacks are becoming highly sophisticated. Phishing is used to obtain sensitive information such as login credentials and for distributing malware and ransomware. 91% of all cyberattacks start with phishing emails.
Many businesses now provide security awareness training for the workforce to raise awareness of the threat from phishing and to teach employees the skills that will allow them to identify and avoid phishing emails, but the click rates in phishing emails remain high. According to Security Affairs, 97% of users fail to identify phishing emails. The reason is phishing emails are now being created that are virtually indistinguishable from genuine communications from trusted sources and phishers are experts at social engineering.
The best defense against phishing is a spam filter – A technical solution that scans all inbound (and outbound) emails and performs a wide range of checks and analyses, all of which must be passed in order for an email to be sent to an inbox. Spam filters scan the message headers and message body for signs of spam and phishing, and attachments are scanned using anti-virus engines that identify known malware variants. Hyperlinks in messages are also checked; however, phishers are constantly developing new techniques for hiding malicious URLs from email security solutions.
TitanHQ’s spam and phishing protection solution – SpamTitan – already provides excellent protection from spam and phishing emails; however, a new product – SpamTitan Plus – has now been launched that significantly improves detection rates. SpamTitan Plus provides advanced phishing protection with better coverage, better phishing link detections, faster detection speed, and also has the lowest false positive rate of any product.
“The overwhelming feedback from our users and customer base has been that phishing attacks are becoming more advanced, proficient, and dangerous. Phishing is the number one problem to solve in the email security community,” said TitanHQ CEO Ronan Kavanagh. “With that in mind, we allocated resources and investment to develop a solution with new, cutting-edge, robust, fast phishing threat intelligence driven by a team of security specialists. We’re very happy with the result – SpamTitan Plus”.
SpamTitan Plus includes leading-edge, AI-driven anti-phishing prevention and incorporates the newest “zero-day” threat intelligence, providing better protection than current market-leading email anti-spam service providers at neutralizing malicious links in emails.
All URLs in emails are inspected to determine if they are malicious and are rewritten, and a time-of-click analysis is performed. This is important as the URLs in phishing emails may not be malicious at the time of delivery and may be weaponized with malware after they have passed email security checks. The time-of-click protection involves several dynamic checks, including a page evaluation to identify spoofed websites and login pages and the following of any redirects. If a user clicks on a malicious URL, instead of being directed to the website they will be sent to a local block page that provides further information.
Independent tests of SpamTitan Plus show:
100% coverage of phishing threats from the current market-leading anti-phishing feeds
5X increase in unique phishing URL threat detection than the current market leaders
6X faster and more rapid phishing detection than the current market leaders
10 million new, previously undiscovered phishing URLs are detected every single day and there is only a 5-minute delay from the initial detection of a malicious URL to protect an end user’s mailbox.
SpamTitan is relied upon by 12,000 customers and 3,000 Managed Service Providers for protecting against spam and phishing emails. They can now choose to significantly improve protection with SpamTitan Plus. For more information about SpamTitan Plus, Give the TitanHQ team a call today.
With the number of cyber threats increasing, it has never been more important for business leaders to ensure their networks and systems are well defended. Throughout the pandemic, companies have been reporting data breaches at an alarming rate, with many of those cyberattacks having a devastating impact on victims.
Look no further than the ransomware attacks on the Irish Department of Health and the Health Service Executive in May 2021. Those attacks saw highly sensitive data stolen, files encrypted, and doctors and nurses were prevented from accessing patient records. The attacks resulted in almost all systems being taken offline, all core services were affected, and many outpatient services had to be canceled. The effects of the cyberattacks were still being felt several months later.
In light of the increased threat of attack and the seriousness of the consequences should an attack succeed, Think Business, Ireland has raised awareness to the importance of improving cybersecurity defenses. To help Irish businesses find the cybersecurity solutions they need, Think Business, Ireland has recently compiled a list of the top 26 Irish-owned businesses that are leading the charge in the fight against cybercrime.
Ireland punches well above its weight when it comes to cybersecurity. Ireland is a top investment location for global cybersecurity players, but there are many homegrown Irish companies that provide truly world-class cybersecurity solutions on the global stage, including software-as-a-service offerings and cloud-based security solutions.
One of those companies is Salthill, Galway-based TitanHQ, which has been included in the list of the country’s top cybersecurity firms. TitanHQ has been in business for 25 years and has won multiple awards for its email security, web filtering, and email archiving solutions and the company has been enjoying impressive growth at a time when many businesses were under incredible strain due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
The company has ambitious growth plans and has been heavily investing in product development and people, with that investment expected to significantly improve on the 12,000 businesses and 2,500 managed service providers that rely on its solutions to keep cyber threats at bay.
Helped by significant investment from Livingbridge investor group, the company’s growth has been turbocharged. Over the past 18 months, TitanHQ has more than doubled its workforce, which now consists of a rock-solid team of 90+ people. The company has certainly earned its place in Think Business, Ireland’s list of the top 26 Irish cybersecurity companies to watch out for.
“We are delighted to be listed next to some of the biggest names in the Irish Cybersecurity space. As the threat landscape continues to be a significant risk to organizations across the globe, we are dedicated to continuous innovation to provide consistent, secure, and reliable protection to our customers,” said TitanHQ CEO, Ronan Kavanah.
Left to Right: Ronan Kavanagh, CEO, Diane Wright, people operations manager, Sean Morris, chief technical officer, Gina Mc Grath, digital marketing executive, and Dryden Geary, marketing director.
Left to Right: Ronan Kavanagh, CEO, Diane Wright, people operations manager, Sean Morris, chief technical officer, Gina Mc Grath, digital marketing executive, and Dryden Geary, marketing director.
Expert Insights has announced its Fall 2021 Best-of Cybersecurity Awards and each of TitanHQ’s products was ranked No1 in their respective categories. This is the second successive year where TitanHQ has had a clean sweep and topped the list for Best Email Security Gateway, Best Web Security Solution, and Best Email Archiving Solution for Business. In addition, SpamTitan ranked top in the Best Email Security Solution for Office 365 category.
Expert Insights is a recognized online cybersecurity publication and industry analyst, that has technical and editorial teams in both the United States and United Kingdom. The publication covers cybersecurity and cloud-based technologies, and its website is used by more than 80,000 business owners, IT admins, and others each month to research B2B solutions. Expert Insights produces editorial buyers’ guides, blog posts, conducts interviews, and publishes industry analyses and technical product reviews from industry experts.
The annual awards are intended to recognize the leading cybersecurity companies and their products, with the winners selected based on industry recognition, customer feedback, and research conducted by its editorial team and independent technical analysts.
SpamTitan Email Security and WebTitan Web Security were both recognized for their powerful threat protection, and along with ArcTitan Email Archiving, were praised for ease-of-use, cost-effectiveness, and industry-leading technical and customer support.
“TitanHQ are proud to have received continued recognition for all three of our advanced cybersecurity solutions. As the threat landscape continues to be a significant risk to organizations across the globe, we are dedicated to continuous innovation to provide consistent, secure, and reliable protection to our customers,” said Ronan Kavanagh, TitanHQ CEO.
The advanced threat protection, ease-of-use, and cost-effectiveness of the solutions are part of the reason why TitanHQ is the leading provider of cloud-based security solutions for managed service providers serving the SMB market. These factors have helped to make the solutions the gold standard for SMBs looking to improve security and ensure compliance.
The healthcare industry has long been targeted by cybercriminals looking to gain access to sensitive patient data, which is easy to sell on the black market to fraudsters such as identity thieves. In recent years hackers have turned to ransomware. They gain access to healthcare networks and encrypt data to prevent patient information being accessed and issue a ransom demand to the keys to decrypt files. Since the start of 2020, these two goals have been combined. Hackers have been gaining access to healthcare networks, then exfiltrate data prior to deploying ransomware. If the ransom is not paid, the data is leaked online or sold on. Patient data may even be sold even if the ransom is paid.
Both of these attack types can be achieved using phishing. Phishing allows threat actors to steal credentials and raid email accounts and use the credentials for more extensive attacks on the organization. Phishing emails can also trick healthcare employees into downloading malware that gives attackers persistent access to the network.
Protecting against phishing attacks is one of the most important ways to prevent data breaches and stop ransomware attacks, but there is no single measure that can be implemented that will provide total protection. Here we explain 5 steps that healthcare organizations should take to protect against healthcare phishing attacks. These include measures required by the HIPAA Security Rule so can help to ensure you achieve and maintain compliance.
5 Measures to Protect Against Healthcare Phishing Attacks
Each of the measures we have listed below is important and will work with the others to significantly improve your security posture; however, the first measure is the most important of all as it will stop the majority of phishing emails from being delivered to employee inboxes.
Spam Filtering
To achieve Security Rule compliance, HIPAA regulated entities must implement technical safeguards to ensure the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of electronic protected health information. A ant-spam service is one of the most important technical safeguards to protect against email-based attacks such as phishing. Spam filters will generally block in excess of 99% of spam and phishing emails and 100% of known malware.
Any inbound email must pass through the spam filter where it will be subjected to a variety of checks. These include antivirus scanning to block malware, checks against blacklists of known malicious IP and email addresses, and frameworks such as SPF, DKIM, and DMARC to identify and block email impersonation attacks. Advanced spam filters such as SpamTitan include additional malware protection through the use of a sandbox. Email attachments are executed in this safe environment and are checked for potentially malicious actions. This measure helps to identify previously unknown malware and ransomware variants.
SpamTitan also uses techniques such as Bayesian analysis to determine the probability of an email being spam or malicious. Greylisting is also used, which involves the initial rejection of a message with a request to resend. Spam servers do not tend to respond to these requests, so the lack of response or delay is a good indicator of spam.
SpamTitan also incorporates machine learning techniques, ensuring spam filtering improves over times. Thresholds can also be set for individual users, user groups, departments, and organization-wide, to give the greatest protection to accounts that are most likely to be targeted.
2-Factor or Multi-Factor Authentication
2-factor or multi-factor authentication is another technical safeguard to protect against phishing attacks. 2FA/MFA blocks the next stage of a phishing attack, where credentials for an account have already been obtained by an attacker, either through phishing, brute force attacks or other methods.
In addition to a password, a second factor must be provided before an individual is authenticated. This is often a token on a verified device. When an attempt is made to use a password to access the account from an unfamiliar device, location, or IP address, another factor must be provided before access is granted. This is typically a code sent to a mobile phone. 2-factor authentication will block more than 99.9% of automated attempts to gain access to an account according to Microsoft.
Security Awareness Training
Security awareness training is concerned with educating the workforce about threats such as phishing and teaching them how to recognize and avoid those threats. In security awareness training, employees are taught how to identify phishing emails and social engineering scams and are taught cybersecurity best practices to eradicate risky behaviors. Employees are targeted by phishers and not all phishing emails will be blocked by a spam filter. By training the workforce, and providing regular refresher training sessions, employees will get better at identifying and avoiding threats.
The HHS’ Office for Civil Rights explained in guidance for the healthcare industry that teaching employees how to recognize phishing is part of the requirements for HIPAA compliance. Financial penalties have been imposed for organizations that have not provided security awareness training to the workforce.
Conduct Phishing Email Simulations
Training for the workforce will raise awareness of threats, but it is important to test whether training has been assimilated and if it is being applied in real world situations. By setting up a phishing simulation program, security teams will be able to gauge how effective training has been. A failed phishing simulation can be turned into a training opportunity, and employees who regularly fail phishing email simulations can be provided with further training.
Phishing email simulation programs use real-world phishing examples on employees to see how good they are at identifying phishing emails. They can be used to gain an understanding of the types of phishing emails that are being opened and which links are being clicked. This information can be used to improve security awareness training programs.
Sign Up to Receive Threat Intelligence
Another important step to take to protect against phishing attacks is to stay up to date on the latest threats. The tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTP) of hackers and phishers is constantly evolving, and being aware of the latest TTPs will help healthcare organizations mitigate the threats.
Stay up to date by reading the threat alerts published by agencies such as CISA, the FBI, NSA, and HC3, and consider signing up an information sharing and analysis center to receive timely cyber threat intelligence updates. Knowing about new phishing campaigns targeting the sector will allow steps to be taken to block those threats, whether that is a cybersecurity newsletter for staff, implementing new spam filter rules, or other proactive steps to reduce risk.
TitanHQ has released a new version of its award-winning email security solution that includes a new security feature – Geo-blocking email filtering, as well as several other security updates and fixes to improve usability.
Geo-blocking is a feature that has been requested by customers and has now been included in the product at no additional cost to users. Geo-blocking, as the name suggests, allows SpamTitan users to block or allow emails originating from certain geographical locations, based on either IP address or country. This feature allows businesses to add an extra layer of protection to block geographic threat vectors and stop malware, ransomware, and phishing emails from reaching inboxes.
The new feature allows businesses and organizations to block emails coming from any country. This extra control is important, as most malware-containing emails come from a handful of overseas countries – Countries that most small- to medium-sized businesses do not normally work with. Blocking emails from those countries eliminates threats, without negatively impacting the business.
Activating the geo-blocking feature could not be any easier. SpamTitan users can click to restrict emails from any country in the SpamTitan Country IP Database and all emails coming from those countries will be blocked. There will naturally be instances where things are not so cut and dry, but that is not a problem. Geo-blocking can be activated for a specific country, and IP addresses, domains, or email addresses of trusted senders within those countries can simply be whitelisted to ensure their messages are delivered.
“Geoblocking has been a much-requested feature and as always we listen to our customers and provide what they need to implement the very best email security they can,” said TitanHQ CEO Ronan Kavanagh. “After experiencing 30% growth in 2021, TitanHQ expects these product enhancements and new features to make 2021 another record-breaking year.”
Several other security enhancements have been made to further improve the already excellent threat detection and blocking mechanisms within SpamTitan. SpamTitan 7.11 includes an upgraded email sandboxing feature to provide even greater protection against malware, ransomware, phishing, spear-phishing, Advanced Persistent Threats, and malicious URLs embedded in emails. These enhancements also provide more detailed information about new threats to help SpamTitan users mitigate risk.
As always with a new release, recently reported bugs have been fixed, and SpamTitan has been further improved with enhanced email rendering in Mail Viewer. Users also now have the ability to remove quarantine report token expiry and improve domain verification, to name but a few of the enhancements.
SpamTitan is delivered either as a 100% cloud-based solution or as an anti-spam gateway, which is run as a virtual appliance on existing hardware. Existing SpamTitan Cloud customers need to do nothing to upgrade to the new version of the solution, released on September 14, 2021. SpamTitan Cloud is automatically updated to the latest version.
Users of SpamTitan Gateway will need to manually upgrade to the latest version via System Setup > System Updates.
Reselling Office 365 doesn’t offer much in the way of profit for MSPs, although there are benefits for MSPs that come from offering Office 365 and it is possible to make Office 365 more profitable.
Before explaining where the margin is for MSPs in Office 365, let’s first take a look at the benefits for MSPs from offering Office 365.
Benefits for MSPs from Offering Office 365 to Clients
SMBs are increasingly moving from on-premises solutions to the cloud and Office 365 is one of the most popular cloud services. Office 365 now has more than 135 million commercial monthly users and that number is growing rapidly.
MSPs may not be able to make much from Office 365 alone, but by providing Office 365 MSPs can win more business and gain a competitive advantage. There is no outlay involved with offering Office 365 to clients, the product is great and meets clients’ needs, and money can be made from handling Office 365 migrations.
MSPs can also benefit from migrating existing clients from Exchange or SBS Exchange to Office 365. Office 365 is far easier to manage so they stand to save a great deal of time on troubleshooting and maintenance, which can be a major headache with Exchange.
By offering Office 365 you can win more business, reduce operational costs, and stay competitive. However, the best way to make money from Office 365 is through add-on services.
How MSPs Can Make Office 365 More Profitable
The margins for MSPs on Office 365 are rather thin to say the least. Many MSPs find that offering Office 365 on its own doesn’t provide any profit at all. Charging extra per license to improve profitability is an option, but clients could just go direct to avoid the extra cost.
The margins may be small, but managing Office 365 does not require a great deal of effort. You may only make around 50c or $1 per user but sign up enough clients and you could get a reasonable return. There is an opportunity for profit at scale; however, to make a decent return you need to sell services around Office 365.
One of the best ways to make Office 365 more profitable is by offering additional security services. Security is an area where Office 365 can be significantly improved, especially spam filtering. Microsoft has incorporated a spam filter and anti-phishing protections into Office 365, but they fall short of the protection offered by a dedicated third-party spam filter.
Phishing is the number one security threat faced by businesses and Office 365 anti-phishing protections leave a lot to be desired. By offering enhanced spam and phishing protection through a third-party spam filter, not only can MSPs make a decent margin on the add-on solution, by blocking phishing attacks and malware at source, a considerable amount of time can be saved on support. Offering spam filtering can help to generate additional recurring revenue, with SpamTitan provided as a high margin, subscription based SaaS solution.
There are plenty of other opportunities for selling third-party solutions to make up for the lack of options in Office 365. Email archiving is an easy sell and a quick win for MSPs. An email archive is important for compliance and security, saves on storage space, and improves efficiency, and gives clients access to emails from any location. Email archiving is available with office 365, but the solution has some severe drawbacks, and may not meet compliance requirements. Offering a feature-rich email archiving solution that is fully compliant, easy to use, with lightning fast search and retrieval should be an easy sell to Office 365 users.
Spam filtering, email archiving, web filtering, and encryption can be bundled together as an enhanced security package, with each element providing a decent return for MSPs. Given the cost of mitigating a data breach, by preventing breaches, an enhanced security offering will pay for itself and should not be too difficult to sell to Office 365 users.
Office 365 MSP Add-ons from TitanHQ
For more than 20 years TitanHQ has been developing innovative security solutions for businesses. Today, more than 7,500 businesses are protected by TitanHQ security solutions and more than 2,000 MSPs have signed up to the TitanHQ Alliance Program.
All TitanHQ solutions have been developed from the ground to meet the needs of the SMB marketplace and MSPs. TitanHQ’s spam filtering solution – SpamTitan, email archiving solution – ArcTitan, and web filtering solution – WebTitan, save MSPs support and engineering time, have great margins, and can be easily integrated into MSPs security stacks to make Office 365 more profitable. All TitanHQ solutions are quick and easy to deploy, and can be implemented into your existing Service Stack through API’s and RMM integrations. The MSP-client hierarchy enables you to keep clients separated and choose whether to manage client settings in bulk or on an individual basis. MSPs benefit from competitive pricing strategies, including monthly billing as we understand your clients are billed monthly.
There are multiple hosting options, including hosting the solution within your own data center, and all TitanHQ products can be supplied as a white label, ready to take your own branding. We have made our solutions as easy as possible to use, with intuitive controls and everything placed at your fingertips. However, should you ever have a problem, you will benefit from the best customer service in the industry, as well as scalable pre-sales and technical support and sales & technical training.
Low management overhead – A set and forget solution
Use our private cloud or your own data center
Extensive suite of APIs for integration into your central management system
Multi-tenant solution with multiple management roles
Scalable to thousands of users
In and outbound email scanning with IP domain protection
Extensive drill down reporting
Flexible pricing models to suit your needs, including monthly billing
Generous margins for MSPs
Fully customizable branding
TitanSHIELD Program for MSPs
To make it as easy as possible for MSPs to incorporate our world class network security solutions into their service stacks, TitanHQ developed the TitanSHIELD program. The TitanShield MSP Program allows MSPs to take advantage of TitanHQ’s proven technology so that they can sell, implement and deliver our advanced network security solutions directly to their client base. Under the TitanSHIELD program you get the following benefits:
TitanSHIELD Benefits
Sales Enablement
Marketing
Partner Support
Private or Public Cloud deployment
Access to the Partner Portal
Dedicated Account Manager
White Label or Co-branding
Co-Branded Evaluation Site
Assigned Sales Engineer Support
API integration
Social Network participation
Access to Global Partner Program Hotline
Free 30-day evaluations
Joint PR
Access to Partner Knowledge Base
Product Discounts
Joint White Papers
Technical Support
Competitive upgrades
Partner Events and Conferences
24/7 Priority Technical Support
Tiered Deal Registration
TitanHQ Newsletter
5 a.m. to 5 p.m. (PST) Technical Support
Renewal Protection
Better Together Webinars
Online Technical Training and FAQs
Advanced Product Information
Partner Certificate – Sales and technical
Access to Partner Technical Knowledge Base
Competitive Information and Research
Sales Campaigns in a box
Not-for-Resale (NFR) Key
Public Relations Program and Customer Testimonials
Product Brochures and Sales Tools
TitanHQ Corporate Style Guide and Logo Usage
Partner Advisory Council Eligibility
TitanHQ Partner Welcome Kit
QTRLY Business Planning and Review
Access to TitanHQ’s MVP Rewards Program
Access to Partner Support
To find out more about TitanHQ’s MSP offerings, for details of pricing and MSP margins, contact the TitanHQ Alliance Program team today and take the first step toward making Office 365 more profitable.
TitanHQ has announced the release of a new version of WebTitan Cloud that includes new security features, easier administration, and the introduction of WebTitan OTG (on-the-go) for Chromebooks for the education sector.
One of the main changes introduced with WebTitan Cloud version 4.16 is the addition of DNS Proxy 2.06, which supports filtering of users in Azure Active Directory. This is in addition to on-premise AD and directory integration for Active Directory. The support for Azure Active Directory will make it easier for customers to enjoy the benefits of WebTitan Cloud, while making management easier and less time-consuming. Support for further directory services will be added with future releases to meet the needs of customers.
Current WebTitan customers do not need to do anything to upgrade to the latest version of WebTitan, as updates to WebTitan Cloud are handled by TitanHQ and users will be upgraded to the latest version automatically to ensure they benefit from improved security, the latest fixes, and new functionality.
The latest WebTitan Cloud release has allowed TitanHQ to introduce a new solution specifically to meet the needs of clients in the education sector – WebTitan OTG (on-the-go) for Chromebooks.
The use of Chromebooks has grown significantly over the past year, which corresponds with an increase in student online activity. WebTitan OTG for Chromebooks allows IT professionals in the education sector to ensure compliance with federal and state laws, including the Children’s Internet Protection Act (CIPA), and ensure students can use their Chromebooks safely and securely.
WebTitan OTG for Chromebooks is a DNS-based web filtering solution that requires no proxies, VPNs or any additional hardware and since the solution is DNS-based, there is no impact on Internet speed. Once implemented, filtering controls can be set for all Chromebook users, no matter where they connect to the Internet. The controls will be in place in the classroom and at home and all locations in between.
Administrators can easily apply filtering controls for all students, different groups of students, and staff members, including enforcing Safe Search. The solution will block access to age-inappropriate content, phishing web pages, malicious websites used for distributing malware, and any category of website administrators wish to block. Chromebooks can also easily be locked down to prevent anyone bypassing the filtering controls set by the administrator.
WebTitan OTG for Chromebooks delivers fast and effective user- and device-level web filtering and empowers students to discover the Internet in a safe and secure fashion. Reports can be generated on demand or scheduled which provide information on Chromebook user locations, the content that has been accessed, and any attempts to bypass filtering, with real-time views of Internet access also possible.
“This new release comes after an expansive first quarter. The launch of WebTitan Cloud 4.16 brings phenomenal new security features to our customers,” Said TitanHQ CEO, Ronan Kavanagh. “After experiencing significant growth in 2020, TitanHQ expects these product enhancements and new features to make 2021 another record-breaking year.”
It has been an exceptionally busy year for TitanHQ with global demand for TitanHQ solutions has skyrocketing. Enterprises, SMBs and Managed Service Providers (MSPs) have been turning to TitanHQ to provide the security they need to protect their now largely distributed workforces from email and web-based attacks during the pandemic and block malware, ransomware, phishing attacks and other growing threats.
TitanHQ’s email security solution – SpamTitan; web security solution – WebTitan; and email archiving solution – ArcTitan, have now been adopted by more than 12,000 businesses worldwide, including more than 2,500 MSPs, with customers including well-known names such as Pepsi, Virgin, T-Mobile, O2, Nokia, Datto, Viasat, and Purple.
The past year has seen tremendous organic year-on-year growth and during the pandemic the company received significant investment from the Livingbridge investor group, which has really helped turbocharge company growth with significant investment in product development.
While many businesses have been forced to contract during the pandemic, business has gone from strength to strength for TitanHQ, as can clearly be seen from the huge investment in people. TitanHQ has embarked upon a major recruitment drive that has seen the TitanHQ workforce almost double since September 2020, with many of the new members of the workforce widely distributed and working remotely.
“As a result of increased demand globally for our solutions, we have invested heavily and embarked on a recruitment campaign to double our workforce in a programme that will allow that growth to continue,” said TitanHQ CEO, Ronan Kavanagh. “We have also invested because while we believe remote working is a by-product of the current pandemic, it is very much going to be the mode of future work. The quick move to remote working last year has made us all aware of how important it is to be adaptable and have the right security solutions in place to protect users, customers, company data, and systems.”
The ambitious growth plans are sent to continue, with new roles created across many departments including sales, technical support, software development, and marketing, with the expanded workforce helping the company to achieve even greater heights and reach even more clients internationally.
If you want to join the growing team at TitanHQ and become a member of an innovative and growing workforce, positions are still available.
Throughout 2020 the healthcare sector has been a major target of ransomware gangs, but the education sector is also facing an increase in attacks, with the Pysa (Mespinoza) ransomware gang now targeting the education sector.
Pysa ransomware is a variant of Mespinoza ransomware that was first observed being used in attacks in October 2019. The threat group behind the attacks, like many other ransomware threat groups, uses double extortion tactics on victims. Files are encrypted and a ransom demand is issued for the keys to decrypt files, but to increase the probability of the ransom being paid, data is exfiltrated prior to file encryption. The gang threatens to monetize the stolen data on the darkweb if the ransom is not paid. Many attacked entities have been forced to pay the ransom demand even when they have backups to prevent the sale of their data.
Since October 2019, the Pysa ransomware gang has targeted large companies, the healthcare sector, and local government agencies, but there has been a recent increase in attacks on the education sector. Attacks have been conducted on K12 schools, higher education institutions, and seminaries, with attacks occurring in 12 U.S. states and the United Kingdom. The rise in attacks prompted the FBI to issue a Flash Alert in March 2020 warning the education sector about the increased risk of attack.
Analyses of attacks revealed the gang conducts network reconnaissance using open source tools such as Advanced Port Scanner and Advanced IP Scanner. Tools such as PowerShell Empire, Koadic, and Mimikatz are used to obtain credentials, escalate privileges, and move laterally within networks. The gang identifies and exfiltrates sensitive data before delivering and executing the ransomware payload. The types of data stolen are those that can be used to pressure victims into paying and can easily be monetized on the darkweb.
Identifying a Pysa ransomware attack in progress is challenging, so it is essential for defenses to be hardened to prevent initial access. Several methods have been used to gain access to networks, although in many cases it is unclear how the attack started. In attacks on French companies and government agencies brute force tactics were used against management consoles and exposed Active Directory accounts. Some attacks have involved exploitation of Remote Desktop Protocol vulnerabilities, with the gang is also known to use spam and phishing emails to obtain credentials to get a foothold in networks.
Since several methods are used for gaining access, there is no single solution that can be implemented to block attacks. Educational institutions need to use a combination of security solutions and cybersecurity best practices to harden their defenses.
Antivirus/antimalware solution is a must, as is ensuring it is kept up to date. Since many attacks start with a phishing email, an advanced email security gateway is also important. Choosing a solution such as SpamTitan that incorporates dual AV engines and email sandboxing will maximize the chance of detecting malicious emails. SpamTitan also incorporates machine learning methods to identify new methods of email attacks.
End user training is also important to teach staff how to identify potentially malicious emails and train them on cybersecurity best practices such as setting strong passwords, not reusing passwords, and the dangers of using public Wi-Fi networks. Also consider disabling hyperlinks in emails, flagging emails that arrive from external sources, and implementing multi-factor authentication on accounts.
Patches and security updates should be implemented promptly after they have been released to prevent vulnerabilities from being exploited. You should use the rule of least privilege for accounts, restrict the use of administrative accounts as far as possible, and segment networks to limit the potential for lateral movement. You should also be scanning your network for suspicious activity and configure alerts to allow any potential infiltration to be rapidly identified. All unused RDP ports should be closed, and a VPN used for remote access.
It is essential for backups to be made of all critical data to ensure that file recovery is possible without paying the ransom. Multiple backups of data should be created, those backups should be tested to make sure file recovery is possible, and at least one copy should be stored securely on an air-gapped device.
This year sees PeerSpot launch its first Annual User’s Choice Award program to recognize the products that are helping businesses to achieve their goals. Customers of enterprise technology vendors are invited to vote for their favorite B2B Enterprise Technology products across 11 product categories.
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