As the number of businesses moving to the cloud continues to increase, the amount of services and applications that now use encryption to secure information and ward off threats increases with it – but is it enough?
When looking at a recent Gartner report that claims as much as 80% of web traffic will be encrypted by 2019, it’s clear that many businesses feel this is the best path to take in order to protect their data from malicious activity.
However, for all the benefits encryption brings to help increase security for enterprises that communicate over the Internet, the fact that malware is incredibly difficult to detect in files that have been encrypted means that the criminals who specialise in this type of cyber theft stand to benefit immensely from it, too.
In that same report, Gartner goes on to state how it believes that half of the malware campaigns in 2019 will use some form of encryption to disguise malware delivery, command and control activity, or data exfiltration.
In addition to this statement, the fact that many organisations active today do not have a strategy in place to detect or prevent malware within encrypted traffic is highly concerning and the demand for solution is higher than ever before.
Fortunately, since June 2017 Cisco has been carrying out trials for their Encrypted Traffic Analytics (ETA) with various customers around the globe and have recently confirmed that they have extended those trials to most Cisco enterprise routing platforms.
The goal of ETA is to detect malicious content buried within encrypted traffic simply by scanning it, rather than having to decrypt it.
With this tool, users can benefit from:
Security visibility: Gain insight into threats in encrypted traffic using network analytics. Obtain contextual threat intelligence with real-time analysis correlated with user and device information.
