Sophos Pens Partnership With Tenable

Sophos has announced a partnership with Tenable, the Exposure Management company, to launch a new managed risk service.

This service features the Sophos team leveraging Tenable’s exposure management technology and collaborates with the security operations experts from Sophos Management Detection and Response (MDR). The partnership enables the security solutions provider to provide attack surface visibility, continuous risk monitoring, vulnerability prioritization, investigation, and proactive notification designed to prevent cyberattacks.

The modern attack surface has expanded beyond traditional on-premises IT boundaries, with organizations operating frequently unknown numbers of external and internet-facing assets that are unpatched or under protected, leaving them vulnerable to cyberattackers. This is evident in the newest Sophos Active Adversary Report, which identifies three tasks that organizations must prioritize to minimize the risk of brazen intrusions that lead to ransomware or other types of attacks.

These include closing exposed Remote Desktop Protocol [RDP] access, enabling multi-factor authorization and patching vulnerable servers, all of which were top entry points in breaches handled by Sophos Incident Response in 2023.

“Sophos and Tenable are two industry security leaders coming together to address urgent, pervasive security challenges that organizations continuously struggle to control. We can now help organizations identify and prioritize the remediation of vulnerabilities in external assets, devices and software that are often overlooked. It is critical that organizations manage these exposure risks, because unattended, they only lead to more costly and time-consuming issues and are often the root causes of significant breaches,” said Rob Harrison, senior vice president for endpoint and security operations product management at Sophos.

“We know from Sophos’ worldwide survey data that 32% of ransomware attacks start with an unpatched vulnerability and that these attacks are the most expensive to remediate. The ideal security layers to prevent these issues include an active approach to improving security postures by minimizing the chances of a breach with Sophos Managed Risk, Sophos Endpoint, and 24×7 Sophos MDR coverage,” Harrison added.