40% of cyberattacks target SMBs, and up to half of all small businesses experience a breach each year. As a result, 60% of SMBs that experience a cyber incident will go out of business. We aspire to change the course of these devastating statistics.
Community Shield empowers our entire small business community to look out for each other and form a collective, defensive shield against Internet threats and cyber attacks by sharing threats between each AccessEnforcer®. When an attacker conducts reconnaissance or an attack that is detected by any AccessEnforcer, Community Shield retrieves that information and automatically leverages insights from the event, verifies the event is not benign or a false positive, and converts the shared intelligence into protection for all AccessEnforcers. This threat information in the current implementation consists of thousands of IP addresses used by attackers. Community Shield will actively stop malicious network traffic from entering or leaving the secured network, ensuring insights from any single community member provide automated protection to the entire community.
The price is free for our Community, and the value is priceless.
Community Shield® is the real-world implementation of a distributed cyber security system leveraging information sharing. The concept was created, researched, and patented by our Founder, Lawrence Teo. Lawrence has led our dedicated team at Calyptix in this pursuit to provide small organizations with the network security they need.
Lawrence Teo (2011). Systems and methods for enhanced network security (US Patent No. 8,065,725). U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.
Community Shield® is a feature that automatically is enabled when the AccessEnforcer updates to 5.0.3. No further configuration is required.
No, this update and feature is free to all subscribed AccessEnforcer units. Our only ask? Do your part by leveraging the tools at your disposal to stop malicious intruders in their tracks.
Each night, the Community Shield® is updated with the latest list of malicious IP addresses that should be blocked based on insights gained from the Community and External Threat Feeds. Often, we see malicious cyber attacks happen over the weekend, over holidays or in the late evening hours when “no one is watching.” With Calyptix, the Community Shield® is now watching and blocking for you. We are responding in real time to provide the greatest protection for our small business community.
Community Shield® daily notifications are included in our core subscription offering without any additional fee, and will be activated automatically without any effort on your part.. The efficacy of detection to date has been very high. If you receive a notification, you should take immediate action to investigate and address the event. You will ONLY receive notifications if malicious outbound activity has been detected on your systems so do not be alarmed if you do not receive any notifications.
For those that use a typical network structure, there will be no effect. The Community Shield runs in the background, without any actions required by you.
There are four primary objectives of Community Shield®.
First, add protection from US-based IP infrastructure. Over the last several years, there has been a significant increase in US-based infrastructure used for malicious cyber attacks. Geo Fence, while highly effective for blocking malicious traffic from foreign nations, cannot be enabled to block inbound US-based network traffic at most small businesses, especially those that need to permit remote access from authorized users. The Community Shield® supplements the protection from Geo Fence by focusing on shielding networks from US-based IP infrastructure used to attack small businesses. Collectively, the Community Shield® can identify malicious IP addresses that are often disguised by using US-based infrastructure, and notify the community of the intent behind these IP addresses.
Second, provide enhanced protection from international IP addresses that represent the highest and most persistent threats to small businesses.
Third, reduce network alert fatigue (because inbound Community Shield® alerts can be ignored). Thwarting access by attackers to your network and systems with Community Shield® will significantly reduce security alerts generated from failed logins, brute force attacks, scans, exploit attempts, IDS/IPS alerts and more. Less noise means more time to focus on the events and alerts that matter.
Fourth, provide detection and prevention. The Community Shield® also blocks outbound traffic. Controlling outbound traffic, especially implementing a default deny policy, in small businesses is extremely challenging and time consuming. Community Shield® blocks outbound traffic to known malicious and suspicious IP addresses. By obstructing this communication, Community Shield® delivers prevention and detection of machines connecting to hostile infrastructure that may be engaged in efforts to complete an exploit cycle, communicate with command-and-control systems, extra data and more.
