AfrAsia Bank, an internationally- acclaimed institution*, embraces AI-based Unified End-Point Security with emerald BlackBerry partners, Grove.

As we venture into 2022, with all of our greatest aspirations, we can stand tall and hope that we will see an improvement in the volumes and sophistication of cyber security attacks in Africa. 

Unfortunately, based on many cyber security predictions forecasted for 2022, it does not look like things are going to slow down. In fact, many are predicting cyber-attacks to speed up and become more sophisticated – the reason as to why the term “golden era for ransomware” is being increasingly used to describe 2021 and beyond. 

Proactively, AfrAsia Bank has reviewed its cybersecurity strategy, embedding at its core a clear mission and purpose to navigate this ‘golden era’. The most interesting part about their journey is, not only did they test multiple tools, but they also ventured into exploring how AI and Machine Learning can bring an enhanced level of reassurance and protection to their end-point and mobile assets across the estate. 

About AfrAsia Bank 

Headquartered in the vibrant Mauritius International Financial Center since 2007, with a representative office in South Africa, AfrAsia Bank specialises in banking that bridges Africa, Asia, and the World.  The Bank adopts an entrepreneurial approach to tailor flexible financing and investment solutions for their private and corporate clients. Since its inception, their anchor Mauritian shareholder, IBL Ltd – the largest conglomerate on the Island – and their strategic shareholders, the National Bank of Canada (NBC) and Intrasia Group, have portrayed an inherent belief in their vision to position the Bank as a leading player in the financial sector.  

Today, AfrAsia Bank serves clients in more than 160 countries, is ranked 3rd in terms of total assets in the local banking sector as per the TOP 100 Companies in Mauritius, and is categorised as a Domestic Systemically Important Bank. Upholding a key focus on customer service excellence through innovation and teamwork, AfrAsia has been internationally-acclaimed as the *Best Private Bank and Best Bank in Mauritius by the Digital Banker/Global Private Banker and EMEA Finance in 2021. 

 AfrAsia Bank’s Cyber Security Journey

The Bank’s journey attests to the fact that to maintain a competitive stance and be an industry forerunner, one has to continually innovate alongside strategic cybersecurity solution providers in the industry.  The Bank continues to achieve key milestones on its cyber security journey with Grove, a leading cyber security provider and a Blackberry Emerald partner in EMEA. 

Confronted with an increased risk of day zero malware and ransomware attacks, the Bank made a pivotal and swift switch to the next generation end-point provider through the Blackberry Unified End-point Security (UES) suite along with the Blackberry Guard, a 24/7 Managed Detection and Response (MDR). 

Meytal Balas, MEA Sales Territory Manager for Blackberry: “AfrAsia invited BlackBerry and other Endpoint Security market leaders to participate in a Proof of Concept to evaluate our leading next-generation endpoint protection suite of services. Following rigorous testing of the solutions, AfrAsia decided to go ahead with the endpoint protection solution and the entire cyber security suite, including BlackBerry Protect, Optics, and Persona.”

Atish Gungadur, Head of ICT Security at AfrAsia Bank comments: “The AI-powered BlackBerry endpoint security will enable us to gain visibility into the activity of every application on every endpoint, automate threat detection, and respond more effectively to those. The BlackBerry Protect’s artificial intelligence technology and its capacity to prevent ransomware and zero-day threats from being executed is an exceptional solution in helping us face cyberattacks in a smarter way. That not only brings an added value to the Bank but most importantly, it equips us to better secure the data we store for our employees, our customers, and our partners.”

Going a step further, underscoring their goals to secure their endpoints and maintain employee productivity, AfrAsia Bank has also chosen BlackBerry Guard, a 24/7 Managed Detection and Response (MDR) service.  BlackBerry? Guard is a subscription-based 24x7 managed extended detection and response (XDR) service. As a client, you stand to benefit from the versatility of our expert analysts who act as an extension of your team, providing actionable intelligence to prevent threats quickly while minimizing alert fatigue—in this way, it allows you to focus on key security initiatives rather than spending time and resources recovering from breaches or triaging alerts.

Jamiil Mahomudally, AfrAsia Bank’s IT Security Manager, highlights the need for proactivity and a staunch collaboration to counter cyberattacks: “Being constantly under the threat of malicious attacks, organisations must have a proactive and advanced artificial intelligence and a machine learning endpoint security solution to protect the CIA triad (Confidentiality, Integrity, and Availability) of their data. It’s important to spot the right partner who can deliver a seamless execution. I must say that the very low-resource-intensive and expert consultancy from Blackberry Team ensured a smooth transition from the existing antivirus solution to CylanceProtect&OPTICs with minimum disruption to our business operations and application.”

To this, Meytal Balas concludes: “We are grateful to have AfrAsia as a satisfied customer, and we thank them for believing and trusting BlackBerry as their cyber security partner.”

Preventing Ransomware Incidents with the BlackBerry Cyber Suite

The most efficient way to prevent a ransomware incident from occurring is to stop an attacker from exploiting a system’s vulnerability with a malicious script or utilizing malware to deposit ransomware on a victim’s computer. BlackBerry? Protect is an endpoint protection platform (EPP) solution that utilizes sophisticated artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) technology to stop both tactics. Deployed at the endpoint utilizing BlackBerry unified agile agent technology, BlackBerry Protect determines in milliseconds whether a file is safe to run. If so, the file is then permitted to execute. If not, execution is prevented, the file is quarantined, and a set of alert and contextual data is displayed in the BlackBerry? Cyber Suite management console. This file detection process is performed independently on each endpoint and consumes minimal system resources. There is no need to consult a remote database, install continual updates, or connect to the cloud. BlackBerry Protect AI models detect and prevent the execution of malware and ransomware in both open and isolated networks. 

Sameh Sabry, Technical Lead, Middle East, Turkey, and Africa for Blackberry had this to say: “While Endpoint Detection and Response is a priceless instrument for any security operations center, a conventional approach might do more harm than good. At BlackBerry, we take a preventative approach to Detection and Response, leveraging our long history of developing algorithmic models designed to stop attacks at machine speed. The focus is principally on preventing as many threats: from successfully executing, reducing the risk, and the number of alerts that need to be detected and ultimately responded to, lowering the overhead required to operate the solution by not inundating analysts with alerts of low to no value.”

He further adds: “AfrAsia Bank has afforded us the opportunity and platform to demonstrate our solid prevention capabilities throughout our extensive proof of concept, using BlackBerry Protect to minimize the attack surface greatly along with the augmentation of our Context Analysis Engine to detect and automatically respond to attacks early in the attack lifecycle.” 

Cyber AI and Ransomware

Unfortunately, the rules and signature approaches are just not effective anymore, as evidenced by the number of ransomware victims each day, who are still using old techniques to solve this problem and getting attacked. 

Recently in one of our Cyber AI & Ransomware in Africa: Tackling the growing menace of ransomware attacks webinar, 51% of the audience agreed that to have the best chance of preventing a ransomware attack, it would be important to invest in the right end-point / server cyber security defense solution.  45% of the audience furthered that their first investment in any next-generation AI-based cyber security tool would be on the end-point/servers. 

Why choose the Blackberry cyber suite?

Since its introduction on the market nearly 10 years ago (via Cylance, bought by BlackBerry for $1.4 Billion), the BlackBerry cyber suite has earned much appreciation and praise from its clients. 

In a recent interview, John Chen, CEO, and Chairman of BlackBerry highlighted a few of BlackBerry’s achievements over the last 12 months, including:

• The company is now organized around two business units: Cybersecurity and IoT.
• BlackBerry software has been embedded in over 195 million vehicles.
• 45% of Fortune 100 companies, 18 of the G20 governments, and 9 of the top 10 global banks have implemented our software
• Our software prevented over 165 million malware-based cyberattacks in one year, on desktops and laptops alone. 
• Frost & Sullivan honored BlackBerry with the Technology Innovation Leadership Award 2021.

John Chen says: "Innovation is the backbone of BlackBerry. We have been delivering transformative technologies to the market for over 30 years and continue to make considerable investments in R&D (last year we invested 24% of revenue in R&D).  Examples of BlackBerry’s technology innovations include, the development of the first smartphone, the first mobile enterprise email (enabling people to work from anywhere), the first mobile instant messaging, the most secure endpoint management software, the first prevention-first cybersecurity software, and more."

In addition to the above achievements, customers have continuously shared the below feedback about why they chose the BlackBerry Cyber Suite over other products on the market: 

1. Time in market advantage - simply put, BlackBerry has more years of experience than any of the other next-generation end-point vendors (since 2012) whilst offering the most advanced data science (AI/ML) capabilities. 
2. Prevention-first AI - helps to prevent known and unknown malware pre-execution on your network. 
3. Lightweight AI agent with no rules or signatures. 
4. Does not require a connection to the cloud/internet for updates or Threat Intelligence. 
5. Three of the top four auditing companies globally are using the solution to protect their employees, brand, and customers from malware/ransomware and give them cyber resilience. 
6. Has helped existing customers in 2021 to prevent the latest next-generation malware and ransomware attacks, including REvil, Darkside, Conti, Nobilium, Flubot, Hive, Lockbit 2.0, Magniber to name a few. 
7. BlackBerry currently holds 63% of all AI/ML cybersecurity patent families while the closest competitor only secures a 26% share of the cake.  

Are you ready to embark on a sophisticated cyber security journey?

If you are concerned about the levels of sophisticated ransomware attacks on your company, then Grove and BlackBerry are more than willing to talk to you on how to embark on this journey. 

“As an Emerald BlackBerry partner in EMEA, Grove is excited to deepen our partnership with BlackBerry so we can continuously and innovatively help our customers mitigate ransomware. As a preventative measure, Grove advises its global customers to venture beyond the use of “old paradigm rules and signature-based cyber tools” to protect themselves. Today, it’s recommended that customers add AI and ML-based cybersecurity tools to ‘fight fire with fire'. This will allow companies to have a better chance of fending off these advanced cyber-attacks as AI offers an “always on & continuous learning mode” of prevention”, emphasises Chad Bartlett, Director of Partnerships at Grove. 

From Blackberry’s side, Axel Conrad, Senior Director, BlackBerry, EMEA Channel Sales, concludes: “Grove has immensely contributed to the growth and promotion of BlackBerry in the region and its security specialists have proven they can address the challenges in today's complex and sophisticated business environments. Having recently attained the highest level of partnership with its Emerald Accreditation, Grove is in a fantastic position to deliver wider access to our leading suite of enterprise solutions with world-class support, helping advance their cybersecurity strategies.