Headquartered in London, with R&D facilities, manufacturing plants and data centers all over the world, Telit is a global leader in Internet of Things (IoT) deployment. The company, which employs 1,100 people across 42 sites, helps reduce both time to market and the costs, risks and complexities associated with deploying IoT services through industries and vertical markets.
The key to ensuring its customers’ success centers around Telit’s four core values; business scalability, ease of integration, investment protection and world-class quality. To support these values, Telit’s IT infrastructure must operate as optimally as possible with high availability at all times.
For many years, Telit’s email protection strategy involved standard mail relay technologies and phishing email simulations to measure the awareness level of its employees. Despite having several layers of email filtering from a variety of vendors, however, malicious emails were still passing through gateways and filters. Further, even when a well-trained employee was able to identify a suspicious email, they would first have to alert the security team via email. From there, the security team would have to walk the employee through a complicated reporting process before they could launch a manual investigation and response. The time-consuming process was unnecessarily taking up a lot of the security team’s limited time – even more so when considering false positive reports.
Telit’s IT & information security team works around the clock to improve services, readiness levels and global processes and procedures. To ensure business continuity and high availability, the small team of 20 IT and information security professionals is responsible for global design, implementation and security of the company’s private cloud. In addition, the company depends on the team for risk management and cybersecurity for over 2,500 endpoints around the world. To support the team’s efforts, Telit invested in IronSchool, IRONSCALES’ employee simulation and training software that provides gamified simulated training programs specifically to improve phishing awareness. Previously, Telit faced time and resource constraints that prohibited it from consistently training and continuously measuring the awareness levels of its employees across 24 countries.
“For Telit, it is almost impossible to train all our employees without IRONSCALES,” said Itzik Menashe, Global IT Director of Telit.
“We understand the significance in training our employees continuously throughout the year using different techniques, unfortunately we don’t have the capability to do it on our own. This brought us to use IRONSCALES.”
Now Telit regularly distributes short videos and gamified learning quizzes to its employees who failed simulations with tips and guidance on where they went wrong and what to look out for next time.
The ability to provide real-time feedback on both positive and negative performance has proven very effective.
“It’s a wake-up call for our employees.”
Facing increasingly frequent and targeted phishing attacks, Telit recognised that relying on phishing awareness and outdated email filters alone was no longer sufficient to detect and block evolving threats. Furthermore, the constant influx of reports began to overburden its security team, making the process of confirming phishing attacks or declaring a false positive incredibly time consuming.
In order to be one step ahead of the attackers, address the attacks passing through the filters and relieve the security team, Telit continued its partnership with IRONSCALES by investing in IronTraps and IronSights.
IronTraps is an automatic phishing incident response technology that conducts analysis, mitigation, remediation and forensics automatically or at the click of a button. Unlike most security applications, IronTraps does not require an army of highly trained SOC/Security specialists to manually deal with hundreds of daily reported security events and responses.
IronSights, which serves as employees’ virtual security analyst, includes a report button that allows for seamless forwarding of suspicious emails with attachments, report status, augmented dashboard with real-time alerts and feedback. Its most unique feature, however, is its anti-impersonation function that combines human intelligence with machine learning to detect anomalies and communication habits at the mailbox level–unlike alternative legacy products that only monitor on the gateway level. This empowers users to become successful breach detectors.
Since adopting the full IRONSCALES product suite, Telit has experienced a meaningful return on investment (ROI) in terms of finances, efficiencies, human resources and daily prevented attacks, including the infamous Google Docs phishing attack, which was prevented by IRONSCALES earlier this year.
“Employees can report suspicious emails with one click via the Outlook plug-in without waiting for IT to explain the process, saving valuable time of our otherwise-strained team,” said Menashe. “IRONSCALES helps us train our employees to recognise and easily report phishing emails, resulting in significant savings on IT human resources.”
The automation and machine learning inherent to IronTraps and IronSights not only removes the burden from Telit’s IT team, but it also empowers them to focus on more lucrative initiatives while improving prevention and expediting detection and response to the plethora of daily sophisticated email phishing attacks. Furthermore, whenever an employee does report a suspicious email, IronTraps automatically analyses the message and mitigation and remediation can begin within seconds.
“We garnered immediate ROI when an employee reported a legitimate attack and IronTraps automatically mitigated the phishing email sent to 30 employees within minutes – without IT involvement”, said Menashe.
Overall, Telit employees have been more effective in identifying phishing attacks as a result of ongoing phishing simulations and training. In addition, IRONSCALES has tremendously alleviated some of the SOC team’s burden. Now, the security group is comforted in knowing that:
- Employees have a virtual security analyst sitting on their shoulder 24/7/365
- They spend less time manually investigating false positives due to automated forensics
- Suspicious emails that are reported get analysed within seconds
- Remediation begins automatically whenever a message is identified as harmful
- The system works nonstop with automatic prevention and response all from a centralised dashboard
- Everything is integrated and orchestrated automatically, allowing for greater control and seamless communication with other devices in the network, such as SIEM and IR platforms. For example, Hexadite, once notified by IRONSCALES, can completely eliminate threats from the entire network automatically
- They have a reliable support team willing to add features to improve the product based on their insights
“IRONSCALES integrates its technology and reporting capabilities into the daily tasks of our employees, providing indirect training,” said Menashe. “Its real-time feedback encourages employees to participate without forcing them to commit or having to persuade them of the benefits. Instead, it becomes part of their natural working environment.”
Telit also benefits from being part of Federation, IRONSCALES’ anonymous and global real-time phishing intelligence sharing technology. Federation shares important email phishing intelligence event information automatically and anonymously to ensure the same cyber-attack won’t hit any other company under IRONSCALES’ protection. Meaning, if an attack hits an IRONSCALES customer halfway around the world, that same attack would never impact Telit.
“From training and awareness, to automated incident response, to real-time intelligence sharing, IRONSCALES’ multi-layered approach is truly indispensable,” said Menashe.