A registrar needs to investigate suspicious emails and web activity
When suspicious activity is detected or compliance teams receive reports of abuse, the company’s engineers use the Silo web isolation platform to investigate, while keeping potential threats off the corporate network and endpoints. By doing investigations off-network, they eliminate the risk of being infected by potentially malicious domains, and of revealing the company’s identity, IP address or other details.
The company was looking for a solution that would help its small IT team investigate suspicious emails and web activity in a secure and manageable environment that’s fully isolated from the company. IT’s existing process — a terminal server setup with AWS — was rather complicated and required a lot of resources and maintenance to manage, patch, and redeploy images that the security team needed to conduct its discreet research.
At the same time, the compliance team needed a solution that would enable it to properly investigate reports of abuse, as required of all registrars by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). ICANN requires accredited registrars to take reasonable and prompt steps to investigate and respond to reports of abuse within 24 hours of submission, including a dedicated email address and telephone number that is monitored 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
Both teams sought a solution that would meet the following requirements:
- Easy to deploy and maintain
- Use existing infrastructure
- Support anytime, anywhere access without needing additional software
- Easily integrate into the company’s existing processes and workflows
- Scale with the company as their security and compliance needs mature
“We love the ability to do our research from an anonymous IP address. We can do it from anywhere, without having to open a virtual machine, or log into a VPN. Working with Silo is quick and easy.”
- Senior Security EngineerSilo web isolation platform provides safe browsing and anonymous research
The company’s security engineers found Authentic8’s Silo web isolation platform through a Google search. Immediately, they launched a Silo instance right from the website. After a quick proof of concept, the company deployed Silo to a few select security and compliance team members.
“It’s really easy to use,” comments a Senior Security Engineer. “You just download it and log right in. Once all of our users received their credentials, they were able to start exploring the product features right away. Secure Browsing is straightforward – it feels and behaves just like an ordinary browser. Silo for Research takes a bit more time to get used to because of its many features and investigative capabilities.”
The teams that are in charge of investigating suspicious activity and potential abuse now have the tool that empowers them to go deep into the web, even the dark web, without revealing their location, exposing their IP to attribution, and compromising their mission. With Silo for Research, security and compliance engineers can gather valuable intelligence, including screenshots and URLs and source code, that helps them expose threats using their services to host abusive content.
“Silo is really easy to use – you just download it and log right in. Once all of our users received their credentials, they were able to start exploring the product features right away. Secure Browsing feels and behaves just like an ordinary browser.”
- Senior Security EngineerCost and time saving
The company’s IT team is planning to sunset all its previous secure browsing tools once all their researchers have migrated to the Silo web isolation platform. Without the infrastructure to maintain, images to configure and deploy, or software to install, Silo has proven to be the cost-effective solution for both advanced threat research and compliance enforcement.
