Addressing the Philippines’ 2024 Threat Landscape: Kaspersky Launches KUMA Platform

To help Filipino businesses and organizations stay safe in cyberspace while embracing digitalization, Kaspersky announces today the launch of Kaspersky Unified Monitoring and Analysis Platform (KUMA), its integrated software solution that includes a set of functions for security information and event monitoring and management.

The Philippines is expected to continue its double-digit growth towards $35B by 2025, based on a report released by Google, Temasek, and Bain & Company. The projected high growth is seen to be fueled generally by e-commerce and the anticipated rise in the consumption of products and services across sectors of the digital economy.

Amid the positive economic forecast though, the country still faces the ongoing risk of phishing and cyberattacks which continue to affect every Filipino organization and individual.

In Kaspersky’s 2024 threat forecast in the Southeast Asian region, which includes the Philippines, experts predict that financial service outages, DDoS attacks, and website defacements will continue to persist.

Last year, Kaspersky’s detection systems blocked 26,164,698 web attacks (nearly 72,000 per day) and 22,731,157 local infection attempts (more than 62,000 per day) against its users in the Philippines.

To protect the country’s digital infrastructures, Kaspersky is highlighting the urgent need for organizations and individuals to prioritize robust cybersecurity strategies.

Businesses and organizations in highly-regulated industries in the Philippines, such as public utilities, financial services, and healthcare that are required to stay compliant and within regulations and be able to protect the data of their immensely large number of clients, are among those that would hugely benefit from staying one step ahead of evolving cyber threats.

One such powerful tool is a native security information and event management (SIEM) solution for security information and event management which is the Kaspersky Unified Monitoring and Analysis Platform (KUMA).

What is KUMA? Benefits KUMA brings to businesses and organizations

Back in June 2023, Kaspersky experts uncovered a mobile Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) campaign while monitoring the network traffic of its corporate Wi-Fi network using the KUMA. Upon further analysis, company researchers discovered the threat actor has been targeting the iOS devices of dozens of company employees, distributing zero-click exploits via iMessage to run malware gaining complete control over the device and user data.

“When it comes to cybersecurity, even the most secure operating systems can be compromised. As APT actors are constantly evolving their tactics and searching for new weaknesses to exploit, businesses must prioritize the security of their systems. This involves providing employees and technical teams with the latest tools to effectively recognize and defend against potential threats as well as timely remediation of incidents,” says Yeo Siang Tiong, General Manager for Southeast Asia at Kaspersky.

KUMA is a unified console for monitoring and analyzing information security incidents. The fundamental program includes the following components:

•  One or more Collectors that receive messages from event sources and parse, normalize, and, if required, filter and/or aggregate them.

•  A Correlator that analyzes normalized events received from Collectors, performs the necessary actions with active lists, and creates alerts by the correlation rules.

• The Core includes a graphical interface to monitor and manage the settings of system components.

•  The Storage contains normalized events and registered incidents.

Advantages of KUMA include:

• High performance: 300k+ EPS (events per second) per KUMA instance

• Low system requirements: Virtual or physical environment and up to 10k EPS AiO (all in one) on one virtual server

• Scalability: Flexible microservice architecture with HA support for each component

• Unified web console interface: Single fully multi-tenancy UI console for everything

• Out-of-the-box integration: With third-party products and Kaspersky solutions

• Low entry threshold: Does not require knowledge of special query languages or writing rules

Thanks to the integration with the Kaspersky CyberTrace platform, which processes reports from the National Coordination Center for Computer Incidents, the researcher can extract compromise indicators and use them to detect events in SIEM.

SIEM is a central element of most mature information security systems, hence, it must meet all relevant market requirements and take into account the changing landscape of cyber threats. KUMA expands the capabilities of analysts and allows businesses and organizations to optimize the budget for cybersecurity, providing protection at the optimal level.

“Threat actors increasingly use diverse tactics to launch sophisticated targeted attacks. Therefore, it is essential to use a platform that can provide a centralized view of security events in quickly identifying and responding to potential threats such as the Security Information and Event Management System (SIEM). A SIEM is commonly used for compliance support with internal security policies and external regulatory requirements, said Victor Chu, Head of Systems Engineering for Southeast Asia at Kaspersky.

He explained that the Kaspersky Unified Monitoring and Analysis Platform (KUMA) empowers cybersecurity teams’ efficiency in detecting, investigating, and responding to complex cyber incidents with the approach of XDR (Extended Detection and Response) capabilities.

Organizations, of different sizes and maturity, can deploy KUMA to receive security events from various third-party sources and security tools while correlating these events with contextual threat intelligence feeds to identify suspicious or anomalous activities thus providing timely notification of security incidents. By collecting security events from all security controls and correlating them in real time with advanced analytics, KUMA aggregates all the information needed for further incident investigation and response. Hence, using KUMA, helps organizations gain insights and intelligence by providing the visibility and context needed to understand their security posture and risks.

For more information about the platform, please visit https://support.kaspersky.com/help/KUMA/1.5/en-US/217694.htm. (MCN)