Sophos Rapid Response helps MSPs to tackle cyber threats

Cyber security firm Sophos has announced the release of its new Rapid Response service, designed to help MSPs proactively identify and neutralise customers’ cyber security threats.

For a fixed-fee, the remote incident response service tackles active cyber security attacks for the duration of a 45-day contract, with a dedicated 24/7 team of incident responders, threat hunters and threat analysts.

Rapid Response has been designed to neutralise a wide range of security incidents, including ransomware, network breaches and hands-on keyboard adversaries. By removing these threats from the network, Sophos says the service will help minimise damage and costs, as well as reduce recovery time.

"Readily accessible tools make it possible for attackers to net bigger pay-outs in one week’s worth of work than most people will make in their lifetime," explained Peter Mackenzie, incident response manager at Sophos.

"Criminals infiltrate networks and stealthily plan their attacks in the background, before strategically launching ransomware as the final payload – often during the overnight hours when no one is watching in order to execute on as many machines as possible.

"Sophos Rapid Response takes immediate action to extinguish the fire, which in the case of a hospital that we helped this month after it was hit by Ryuk ransomware and forced to shut down, meant the difference of life or death."

Available now to both existing and non-Sophos customers, Rapid Response offers a fixed-pricing model based on an organisation’s number of users and servers and is structured to accommodate businesses of all sizes.

The service forms part of Sophos’ Managed Threat Response (MTR) offering, which proactively tackles cyber security problems for more than 1,400 customers. Once immediate threats have been neutralised, the Rapid Response program then monitors the network with around-the-clock threat hunting, investigation, detection and response from the MTR team.

“Advanced attacks can quickly halt business operations, and IT managers who have experienced ransomware firsthand know this all too well, reporting the need to spend proportionately more time on incident response and less time on threat prevention than those who haven’t been hit,” commented Joe Levy, chief technology officer at Sophos.

“Sophos Rapid Response disrupts active attacks, eliminating the complex and time-consuming process of stopping determined attackers, so organisations can get back to their normal operations faster.”