Acronis True Image 2021 Unites Award-Winning Backup With Advanced Antimalware, Creates Personal Cyber Protection Solution

Acronis, a global leader in cyber protection, has today announced the release of Acronis True Image 2021. The new release integrates advanced cybersecurity capabilities with unmatched personal backup to create the first complete personal cyber protection solution for home users, prosumers, and small businesses around the world.

Delivery comes as the COVID-19 pandemic exposes gaps in traditional solutions and strategies. Securing home machines has never been more important, yet a recent Acronis survey found nearly half (47%) of remote workers never received clear guidance on working from home.

Incorporating cybersecurity capabilities such as real-time antimalware protection, on-demand antivirus scans, web filtering, and videoconference protection into Acronis True Image ensures users have complete cyber protection. For individuals and small business users, unifying these vital capabilities in one solution makes their protection easier to manage and more affordable, while greatly improving the security.

“As more people work or attend classes from home, the FBI documents a 400% increase in cyberattacks because hackers know home systems are not usually as well-defended as an office,” said Serguei “SB” Beloussov, founder and CEO of Acronis. “Backup without cybersecurity is an incomplete option in that situation, as is cybersecurity without backup. Acronis True Image 2021 delivers the easy, efficient, and secure cyber protection needed today.”

Standalone backup and cybersecurity are obsolete

With the modern reliance on everyday devices like computers, smartphones, and tablets, the data they contain has an inherent value. Cybercriminals are constantly evolving their attacks to reach that data, which is why security research firms such as AV-Test report more than 350,000 new malware threats every day.

Since backup software and files are often the targets of these new attacks to prevent recovery, backup alone no longer provides suitable protection for users. Similarly, conventional cybersecurity solutions do not provide the data protection and recovery capabilities users need.

Relying on multiple products that were not designed to work together creates security gaps, is more complex to manage, and is more costly. With a single, integrated solution, Acronis True Image 2021 users can proactively stop any malware attack and then quickly restore affected files. The single, intuitive interface reduces the complexity of managing their security and backups.

Integration delivers superior cyber protection

For the last few years, Acronis True Image has been the only personal backup solution with a built-in antiransomware that stops attacks in real-time, while automatically restoring any affected files.

With the launch of Acronis True Image 2021, those capabilities are expanded with the addition of the company’s advanced antimalware technology, which is currently deployed in Acronis Cyber Protect Cloud. This next-gen, full-stack antimalware has been shown by independent security labs such as Virus Bulletin and AV-Test to return a 100% detection rate with zero false-positives.

As a result, home users gain advanced capabilities with Acronis True Image 2021, including:

* Real-time protection, driven by AI-enhanced behavioral heuristics, which stops all malware – including zero-day attacks by never-before-seen threats

* On-demand antivirus scans of the full system or quick scans of at-risk files, either of which can be scheduled in advance or run instantly

* Web filtering that automatically blocks Windows users from accessing malicious websites that harbor malware, disinformation, scams, and phishing attacks

* Videoconference protection prevent hackers and malware injection attacks from exploiting popular apps like Zoom, Cisco Webex, and Microsoft Teams

* Comprehensive detection, with both behavioral analysis and signature-based analysis engines

These advanced antimalware capabilities are included with Advanced and Premium licenses, and offered as a three-month trial with Standard and Essential licenses.

Acronis True Image 2021 gives individuals and small businesses access to the same protection technologies relied on by global companies and top teams in the world’s most high-pressure professional sports.

“Cyber protection is a top priority for Rahal Letterman Lanigan Racing,” explains Bobby Rahal, co-owner of Rahal Letterman Lanigan Racing. “When our races were on pause, Acronis continued to provide protection for our team working remotely. Now, with Acronis True Image, everyone can safeguard their personal data against the worst-case scenario.”

Pricing and availability

Four versions of Acronis True Image are available: Standard, Essential, Advanced and Premium. One-computer licenses starting at $59.99 for Standard and $49.99 for Essential. Special launch prices for Advanced and Premium licenses (starting at $69.99 and $99.99, respectively) are available until November 2020, at which time the full MSRP will be in effect (starting at $89.99 and $124.99, respectively).

SmarterBiz Raises INR 8 Crores Pre-Series from StartupXseed and Prominent Angels

 • A post-COVID new norm start-up working on Customer Experience delivery with the most secure technology stack

• Aims to grow at 8X doing about 72 Crores in ARR by Mar 2021 

• Remote WFH solution to enable companies to traverse towards OPEX model 

• Solving Customer Experience (CX) for enterprises 

SmarterBiz, India's first end-to-end CX platform enabled with the gig workforce has raised INR 8 crore as a part of their Pre-Series A round. 

The contributors for this funding round were StartupXseed Ventures (Deep Technology – B2B – Early-stage fund); Mr. Bhaskar Pramanik, Former Chairman of Microsoft India; Mr. MJ Aravind, Former co-founder Daksh, Former Partner Artiman; Mr. Ravi Viswanath; Mr. Ramesh Radhakrishnan; Mr. Ranjan Biswas; and Mr. MJ Aniketh. 

Founded in 2014 by Rajesh Bernard, Vijay Krishna, and Prateek Mehta, the company was funded initially by Utthsihta Yekum Fund.

SmarterBiz is an AI-powered customer experience platform that enables remote management of customer journeys and agent life cycles. SmarterBiz has helped several enterprises, including unicorns build scalable, flexible, and hyper-local customer experience, cost-effectively. 

The COVID-19 pandemic has challenged businesses to ensure business continuity and manage increased customer interactions through remote workforce and reduced costs. With the SmarterBiz CX platform, customers can now remotely enable and manage the complete life cycle of the CX process across both digital and human touchpoints. With a single integrated approach, SmarterBiz takes away the pain of running customer experience on multiple siloed systems and processes that do not talk to each other. SmarterBiz provides an end-to-end platform to CX teams to manage the entire lifecycle of their customer, technology backbone, process, and customer support agents on the cloud. 

SmarterBiz serves several enterprises, including five segment leaders in E-commerce, BFSI, Hospitality, and Telecom sectors. It manages more than 5000 agents as part of its gig workforce. 

Rajesh Bernard, CEO & Co-founder of SmarterBiz said, "SmarterBiz has built a CX platform for a gig-workforce ideally suited under these COVID 19 conditions. SmarterBiz is committed to offering an omnichannel experience that elevates the experience across all customer touchpoints. We provide a competitive advantage to our customers by offering a choice between automation and manual intervention at all these touchpoints. With the investment, we plan to grow by 8X ARR this year and create more gig opportunities in the market." 

"Companies like SmarterBiz can foresee the benefits technology can bring, to reinvent the businesses and add value to the system. It will surely be a game-changing category disruptor during and post-COVID 19. There will be an increasing need for companies to integrate customer journeys, tech, remote work, and Gig models into their business process. We believe that SmarterBiz will be one of the most sustainable global companies of the future, for the solution it brings in and the execution capabilities of the team," said Mr. BV Naidu, Managing Partner, StartupXseed Ventures.

"At last, a seasoned leadership team, a novel premise, immaculate conceptual skills, and meticulous execution. SmarterBiz is indeed a company to watch out for." Mr. M J Aravind, Ex co-founder Daksh. 

The key benefits of the solution for customer experiences are that it facilitates remote work opportunities across India, flexible working hours, earning potential in a WFH set up, and is a mobile light, simple, and efficient application. 

The unique CX platform—Uearn.ai— streamlines the customer journey across multiple touchpoints with an omnichannel CX tech platform, fluid workflow management, and gig workforce, replacing the CapEx model to an OpEx model. The competitive advantage of SmarterBiz is the scalability (4X) it offers at lower costs and faster time to serve as compared to traditional models. 

About SmarterBiz: SmarterBiz, founded in 2014, is India's first end to end CX platform enabled with gig-workforce. It allows companies to shift their CX centres to 100% OpEx model. SmarterBiz streamlines customer journeys across multiple touchpoints with its CX platform—Uearn.ai—lowering the cost to serve, time to serve, for CX centre. It delivers the customer experience through its platform and gig-workforce, bringing convergence of tech and people to run multi-layered operations for its clients. Its fluidity allows clients to scale 4X times faster than the traditional model supported by a talented workforce that can work from remote distributed locations. Uearn.ai facilitates remote work opportunities and has 5,000 trained gig workforces with customer experience profiles. Uearn is available as a remote gig workforce app in Google Play Store. 

SmarterBiz is transforming the CX delivery for some of the leading banks to tech unicorns. To know more, visit www.smarterbiz.ai

Trend Micro Brings DevOps Agility and Automation to Security Operations through Integration with AWS Solutions

Trend Micro Incorporated (TYO: 4704; TSE: 4704), the leader in cloud security, enhances agility and automation in cloud security through integrations with Amazon Web Services (AWS). As a result, Trend Micro delivers flexible and scalable all-in-one security that helps DevOps engineers securely build and innovate as they migrate to and build in the cloud. 

Trend Micro has demonstrated the strength of its collaboration with AWS since 2012 with a deep understanding of customer use cases and by integrating with leading AWS security services at launch. Most recently, Trend Micro Cloud One™ offerings have been natively integrated with AWS Control Tower and AWS Systems Manager Distributor. These additions are designed to bring immediate benefit to security, cloud, and DevOps teams leveraging AWS by automating enforcement of security capabilities earlier in the account and resource provisioning process. 

"Trend Micro is an Advanced Technology Partner in the AWS Partner Network (APN) with  a long-standing history of providing security solutions to help customers address their portion of the shared responsibility model," said Siva Padisetty, General Manager, AWS Systems Manager, Amazon Web Services, Inc. "Trend Micro's continuing investment in integrations with native AWS capabilities, such as AWS Control Tower and AWS Systems Manager Distributor, reduces onboarding and management friction while adopting an enhanced security posture." 

According to a recent report from IDC, "Trend Micro is the dominant leader in Software-Defined Compute (SDC) workload protection," making up 29.5% of the worldwide hybrid cloud workload security market share, proving the company's hybrid cloud security expertise, capabilities and trust by customers. As the leading cloud security experts, Trend Micro engineers develop security solutions designed to meet the needs of cloud engineers. 

"We understand that security teams don't always have complete control or visibility into how cloud instances are being spun up, configured and used across the company," said Sanjay Mehta, senior vice president of business development and alliances for Trend Micro. "Listening to and understanding customer needs and feedback drives our innovations and collaboration with AWS. Having our solutions plug in natively with AWS offerings like AWS Control Tower and AWS Systems Manager Distributor adds visibility and automates security for our customers." 

Through this collaboration, Trend Micro Cloud One offers the broadest platform support and API integration to protect your AWS infrastructure whether building with Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances, AWS Lambda, AWS Fargate, containers, Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), or Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) networking. 

Trend Micro Lands Industry’s Most Comprehensive XDR Platform in Asia Pacific, Middle East, and Africa

Trend Micro Incorporated (TYO: 4704); the leader in cloud security, today announced that its XDR suite is officially available in Asia Pacific, Middle East, and Africa (AMEA). Trend Micro XDR is the first in the cybersecurity industry that offers the most extensive correlated detection going beyond endpoint detection and response (EDR). It collects and analyzes activity data from emails, endpoints, servers, cloud workloads, and networks, enabling security operations center (SOC) teams to detect, investigate, and respond to threats more effectively.  

Today’s SOC analysts are up against sophisticated threats that are designed to circumvent the most advanced protection. Adding fire to the fuel is the massive volume of alerts they have to triage on a daily basis. Low job satisfaction and cybersecurity talent shortage are commonplace challenges for SOCs across the region.  

Trend Micro’s XDR is designed to address such operational nightmares in a SOC. It delivers three major benefits, unparalleled by any other existing point solution:  

Reducing alert fatigue: XDR automatically correlates and analyzes data from multiple security vectors to tell a bigger story. With XDR, level one SOC analysts no longer have to comb through mountains of noisy alerts and logs to identify a potential attack. XDR does it automatically for them and generates a few high-fidelity alerts instead of a thousand low-confidence ones, significantly reducing alert volume.  

Powerful workbench that provides contextual visibility for alerts: The XDR dashboard presents attacks in a visualized manner, enabling SOC analysts to see the different stages, attack vectors, dwell time, and the spread and impact. XDR also offers contextually aware response options so SOC analysts can take quick actions within the platform.  

Augmenting SIEM and effortless API integration: Trend Micro XDR augments SIEM for the SOC team, with centralization of normalized data and incident response capability that improve operational efficiency and productivity. XDR provides pre-built SIEM connector for Splunk to pull high-fidelity alerts into SIEM dashboards. For customers with their preferred SIEM solution, a public API can be used for the integration.  

Trend Micro’s XDR is also available as a managed service (MDR), to further alleviate the pressure of constrained in-house teams. The MDR team conducts 24/7 full-threat analysis and threat hunting, and provides response plans and remediation recommendations.  

“EDR is only one piece of the whole detection and response puzzle. It’s great but it has limited reach, as it only collects data on the endpoints. To have integrated visibility across multiple security vectors is a top-priority item on any SOC’s to-do list. And XDR ticks that box”, says Dhanya Thakkar, senior vice president for AMEA. “There has been tremendous demand from our customers in the region for XDR capabilities since last year. Now they will be able to have the full XDR experience.”  

“XDR gives us an additional dimension in threat detection - it allows for faster correlation of endpoints events to related services, such as network and email, to help us quickly identify entry point and the spread of infection visually. This is a tremendous boost to the efficiency of our incident response teams”, shares Ian Loe, Senior Vice President, Cybersecurity, Infrastructure & Performance Architecture, at NTUC Enterprise Co-operative Limited.  

Trend Micro’s XDR is recently named by Forrester as a Leader in enterprise detection and response, and achieved the highest initial detection in the MITRE ATT&CK Framework.  

Trend Micro and Girls in Tech Partner to Help Close the Gender Gap in the Technology Industry

Trend Micro Incorporated (TYO: 4704; TSE: 4704), a global leader in cybersecurity solutions, today announced a new initiative in its long-running effort to close the diversity and talent gap in the technology industry. The company will extend its partnership with Girls in Tech, a global non-profit bringing the world together through education and experiences. Together, the two organizations will address the worldwide skills shortage in cybersecurity by helping to develop a large talent pool of women eager to get their start in the industry.

Although there is a global shortfall of more than four million cybersecurity professionals today, just a quarter (24%) of current roles are estimated to be taken by women. Both organizations, with global reach, are passionate about connecting with more women and gender-diverse talent and helping find them opportunities to advance their careers and secure the future. Girls in Tech, with 60,000 global members, has been dedicated to raising awareness of this skills gap and to overcome the divide for more than ten years and Trend Micro runs global education programs with a focus on helping women develop new skills to fill the open jobs.

“I’ve always been passionate about and dedicated to encouraging greater gender diversity in the industry. It’s why at Trend Micro we’re committed to supporting equal opportunities in the workplace and in 2018 launched our Close the Gap initiative,” said Eva Chen, co-founder and CEO of Trend Micro. “I’m delighted to be teaming with Girls in Tech to further advance our efforts. Especially in light of recent events, I believe we must celebrate and encourage diversity at every turn today. It’s what makes us human.”

As part of this expanded partnership with Girls in Tech, Trend Micro will develop a new Cybersecurity Fundamentals course for the non-profit. Instead of choosing a course that already exists within the program, Trend Micro has called on its world-class security team to build a custom course for Girls in Tech specific to today’s market need. The course, a blend of e-learning, online instructor-led classes and a hands-on lab via Trend Micro Product Cloud, will cover cybersecurity essentials, network security threats, an introduction to malware analysis, and much more.

“Girls in Tech shares with Trend Micro a unified vision for a future in which women are provided the same opportunities to pursue professions in technology as their male counterparts,” said Adriana Gascoigne, founder and CEO of Girls in Tech. “We look forward to continuing our partnership with Trend Micro to positively impact the technology landscape for women today and generations to come.”

Trend Micro and Girls in Tech first worked together on the Close the Gap program at AWS re:Invent 2018 where they brought managing directors from 30 global Girls in Tech chapters together to brainstorm diversity ideas and programs with industry executives.

Registration for the new Cybersecurity Fundamentals course is now open. The virtual course will run from Aug. 31 to Sept. 25 and last four hours per week.

Trend Micro Protects Cybage Software Against Security Vulnerabilities

Trend Micro Incorporated, a global leader in cybersecurity solutions, is providing its security solutions to Cybage Software, a global technology engineering services organization. Trend Micro Deep Security, which is implemented across 100 servers of the company, enables comprehensive protection for on-premises data centers, and prevents the spread of viruses, spyware and other threats to various internal and external endpoints. The solution currently supports over 1,500 kernels of Linux at Cybage Software, making processes faster and more efficient.

Securing their Linux-based servers from hosting infected files was a major priority for Cybage Software. They needed a solution that could provide end-to-end coverage for all of their Linux servers and Trend Micro was able to give adequate support. With Trend Micro Deep Security, they have been able to prevent unauthorized software changes, and stop the execution of unknown and unwanted applications. The solution also integrates well with existing applications.

As a large organization, Cybage Software had adopted a multi-vendor approach to their IT environment and had a number of stand-alone IT solutions. Trend Micro seamlessly manages to keep operations from all these vendors running smoothly. The console comes with a completely customizable dashboard that allows us to closely monitor the status of each layer of security—anti-malware, web reputation, firewall, integrity monitoring, and intrusion prevention—in a single pane of glass.

“With virtual patching, we have been able to take a systematic approach to patching, scheduling it as needed and when it’s most suitable for us, rather than rushing to find a solution under the threat of an attack. Trend Micro offered exhaustive coverage and comprehensive protection, making it the product of choice. Deep Security helped eliminate the operational pains and downtime of emergency patching, and reduce the risk of breach disclosure costs. Also, Trend Micro team was always available on hand to provide support and guidance, and the solution itself was easy to use,” said Satish Kharat, Head of Information Systems and Security, Cybage Software Pvt. Ltd.

Vijendra Katiyar, Director - Enterprise Business, India & SAARC, Trend Micro said “Cybage Software was looking for a solution that could not only defend against vulnerabilities of servers but also support heterogeneous environment i.e. Linux and windows. Trend Micro simplified their security operations through Deep Security, which offers a consolidated security controls like next generation anti-malware capabilities, application control, log monitoring and virtual patching which helps in addressing known and unknown vulnerabilities. By applying automated virtual patches to servers and applications, it shields servers until an actual patch is applied.”

Trend Micro has proposed that Cybage Software evaluate the endpoint security solution -Trend Micro Apex One, to eliminate security gaps and stop threats across the entire organization. Apex One will help leverage a blend of cross-generational threat techniques to provide protection against all types of threats. This will further strengthen endpoints’ security posture of Cybage Software by using a host-based intrusion prevention system that would provide real-time visibility into activities on their servers.

Demystifying Ransomware - The Cyber Pandemic Spreads Wings

By Sharda Tickoo, Director – Technical, Trend Micro India

With an evolving digital landscape and the rapid proliferation of sophisticated cyberattacks, security can no longer be relegated as an afterthought by organizations. The world continues to witness numerous cyberattacks – from Wannacry to the latest Maze attack, with each attack being more unique and complex than the preceding one, and making businesses succumb to huge losses. What’s common between these attacks, you may ask – they are all ‘ransomware'. This ‘cyber pandemic’, as we would like to call it due to its inherent nature of spreading far and wide, has spread its wings across countries leading to concerns around security of data. Its enormity can be gauged from the fact that almost 62% of organizations globally have experienced a ransomware attack in the past one year, as reported by an industry survey by CyberEdge. And, which will likely continue to do so in the foreseeable future, with newer and stealthier attacks underway.

A case in point is the recent Maze ransomware, which created headlines the world over. What’s unique about this ransomware is that it not only encrypts the data but steals it, and with the threat actors threatening to publish the data, which makes it exponentially more devastating. On why organizations should look at ransomware as the proverbial ‘elephant in the room’ and not just shelve the topic aside, let’s delve a bit in into demystifying few of the aspects, which include - ransomware transmission; whether it’s ever a good idea to pay up a ransom, and if ‘prevention’ might be the best ‘vaccine’ in dealing with it.

Infectious modes of transmission

How lethal is ransomware, and why do many of the cyber experts still consider it to be the numero-uno cyber threat even today? All the findings and the industry data validate this fact, with one such finding by Cybersecurity Ventures, a global cybersecurity research firm predicting that – ‘globally, businesses in 2021 will fall victim to a ransomware attack every 11 seconds, down from every 14 seconds in 2019.’ Its proliferation has further been accentuated because of the COVID-19 outbreak, as more and more employees continue to work remotely, and there is less protection due to remote access. It is likely that the users are more susceptible to falling prey to COVID-19 themed malicious emails.

What’s the modus operandi of a ransomware attack and its transmission? Phishing emails are the most common way through which ransomware penetrate an organization – as attachments masquerading as a file which victims tend to trust. However, there are several other vectors through which ransomware can also permeate, which includes endpoints, cloud workloads, networks, web gateways, files, mobile phones and even instances seen across Linux servers.

Typically, ransomware encrypts data using different file formats or extensions with different Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) keys, and hence decryption becomes almost impossible.

‘Ransom’ in ransomware - not a good thing

This is a perennial question, whether to comply to the demands of the ransomware actor or not. It’s important for an organization which has been breached to understand the attackers’ unseen motive, which in many cases is to get a quick return on investment. According to a joint study by PwC India and Data Security Council of India (DSCI), the data breach cost in India has gone up by 8% in 2 years, which is alarming. We notice that many-a-times organizations are ready to pay a ransom to speed up the recovery of their data and systems. However, it’s important to note that paying it does not guarantee that the users will get the decryption key or unlock tool required to regain access to the infected system or hostage files and may only further encourage threat actors to attack organizations. As long as the ransom scheme, or the ‘cyber heist' as we like to call it, continues to be profitable, cybercriminals will continue to leverage it on vulnerable targets.

Prevention and Remediation – Keys to defend

In the current parlance, to deal with ransomware an occasional intake of medicine won’t suffice, and a ‘vaccine’ is the order of the day. This is where ‘prevention’ could be the panacea or much needed vaccine that organizations should prescribe to rather than looking at knee-jerk reactive approach to ransomware attacks, which is the current practice.

Despite the prevalent ideals of digital transformation, lack of basic security hygiene, legacy systems with outdated operating systems and unpatched vulnerabilities are still a reality. As per Gartner’s analysis of clients’ ransomware preparedness, globally over 90% of ransomware attacks are preventable. There is no silver bullet when it comes to stopping ransomware. As part of a layered defense strategy against ransomware, organizations should have multiple security controls in place across email, endpoints, networks, and servers. Since these are correlated, a centralized security visibility across all these layers from a single console helps to reduce IT complexity and to stay on top of the ransomware threat.

Let’s observe some of the best practices that organizations and users can adopt to strengthen their defenses against ransomware and mitigate risks:

Back up important files using the 3-2-1 rule—create 3 backup copies on 2 different media with 1 backup in a separate location.

Enable virtual patching, especially for operating systems that are no longer supported by the vendor.

Ensure emails are safeguarded with sandboxing technology and anti-spam solution, and there is an advance scanning & detection technology in place for mail endpoint & network traffic.

Implement multi-factor authentication and least privilege access policies to prevent abuse of tools that can be accessed via admin credentials, like RDP, PowerShell and developer tools.

Regularly update software, programs, and applications to protect against the latest vulnerabilities.

Increase awareness of how ransomware spreads, i.e., through spammed emails and attachments.

Avoid opening unverified emails or clicking links embedded in them.

The hard question that CISOs, CTOs, CIOs and all the security and IT managers should ask themselves is that, in the eventuality of a newer ransomware threat, are they really prepared well enough to deal with it. 

Obama urged to appoint a cyber security czar

Report indicates that cyber security a major threat to US and has urged president-elect Barack Obama to appoint a cyber security czar.

Cyber security will pose a major threat to the US during the next administration, a new report has said, urging.

The report, Securing Cyberspace for the 44th Presidency, issued by the Centre for Strategic and International Studies, also urged president-elect Barack Obama to appoint a cyber security czar.

"Cyber security is now a major security problem for the US. Only a comprehensive national security strategy that embraces both the domestic and international aspects of cyber security will make us more secure," said the report.

Criticizing President George W. Bush for relying on the free market to secure the nation's networks, the report accused the Department of Homeland Security of being unable to protect the government from cyber attacks.

"In no other area of national security do we depend on private, voluntary efforts. We believe that cyberspace cannot be secured without regulation," it said.

The report recommended the creation of a White House office - Assistant to the President for Cyberspace - to coordinate responses to cyber threats across domestic, intelligence, military and economic elements of the government. It called for increased funding for research into cyber security.