Deception Technology Projects Receive Top Honors for Aflac and Home Depot at ISE Southeast

By Carolyn Crandall

Last week, The ISE® Southeast Executive Forum and Awards 2017 were held in Atlanta, GA. and we were extremely pleased to learn that two projects, one by Aflac and the other by Home Depot were recognized for their unique use of deception-based detection technology.

The ISE® Southeast Award recognizes the information security executives and their teams who have demonstrated outstanding leadership in risk management, data asset protection, regulatory compliance, privacy, and network security. As part of the program, ISE awards “The Information Security Project of the Year Award”, which focuses on information security projects completed in the past 12-18 months. These projects and their teams are recognized for having a significant impact on an organization’s risk management or information security posture.

Aflac, the largest provider of supplemental insurance in the U.S., was named the first winner of the 2017 ISE® Southeast Project of the Year Award for its deception technology project. The company maintains an outstanding security posture, with high-end cybersecurity solutions throughout their network. Nevertheless, they felt there were gaps in their ability to detect advanced threats early and accurately once an attacker breached existing defenses. After seeing how deception-based technology could detect an attacker’s lateral movement once inside the network, without generating false positives. They decided to deploy lures and traps where the attackers could be neutralized, and studied.

Home Depot, a home improvement supplies retailing company, was named a 2017 ISE® Southeast Project of the Year Award finalist for its deception project. Home Depot’s growth strategy involves an active acquisition strategy, but a key priority in their integration program was to establish visibility into the acquired entities networks to understand vulnerabilities that may exist. The Home Depot Info Sec team proactively partnered with all acquisitions to elevate their security capabilities to industry cutting edge solutions by deploying advanced deception and early detection systems. Specifically, as a part of deploying deception, they established the capabilities to detect hidden or time triggered malware that could move laterally across the affiliate networks, identify tactics being taken to compromise endpoints relying on stolen credentials to escalate privileges and compromise the environment. This proactive approach helped them develop a lightweight but highly effective and scalable security strategy across distributed subsidiaries that helped protect the integrity of the environment to maintain high customer confidence, customer loyalty, and revenue generation intended from these acquisitions.

We are thrilled to see a deception project named as a 2017 ISE® Southeast Project of the Year. Aflac shared that they chose deception technology because it offered a novel approach to detecting threats regardless of whether the source was a rogue insider or a criminal threat actor. Congratulations to DJ Goldworthy, Ben Murphy, Tim Callahan and the security team at Aflac in what ISE stated was “raising the bar for security programs by funding and successfully delivering a project to implement a forward-thinking solution that significantly changes the game in security operations and threat detection.” More information on how Aflac leveraged deception can be seen here: https://tinyurl.com/z82kkay

For more information on why Home Depot chose deception technology, click here: https://tinyurl.com/gmqqx5g. Aflac and Home Depot are part of growing number of companies who are adopting deception technology. The deception technology market is expected to grow from $1.04 Billion in 2016 to $ 2.09 Billion by 2021 according to Research and Markets in its report last month.