Keeping customers safe: responding to the Mimecast cyberattack

Keir Nolan, Cobweb’s Head of Managed Services, writes …

You may have read in the news that email security provider, Mimecast, recently suffered a sophisticated cyberattack. Hackers compromised the digital certificates that Mimecast services use to communicate with Microsoft 365 for a number of its services. According to Mimecast about 10% of the company’s customers use the services impacted by the attack.

At Cobweb, protecting customers from cyberattack is a top priority, ensuring that their businesses are protected with a layered approach to the security of their users, applications, data and devices.

Mimecast is the industry leader in providing email security, delivering a holistic approach to cybersecurity, to ensure that business information can flow uninterrupted through inboxes safely and securely.

But we know that incidents - such as the attack just experienced by Mimecast - do happen, and that’s why we deliver a layered approach to security, as well as having support teams available here at Cobweb 24*7 to be able to address issues if they do arise.

Once we were notified of the Mimecast attack, we were able to make immediate proactive contact with every one of our customers impacted by the attack, and for each customer, we carried out the necessary tasks to delete the compromised certificate and install the replacement certificate issued by Mimecast.

Mimecast described these measures as ‘precautionary’ and although we’d been assured that none of our customers had been affected by the crime, we take provision of security to be essential in providing IT for today’s business, and worked through the night to ensure that every one of our affected customers was updated.

The cyberthreat landscape is one that is continually evolving, and why we look to products such as Mimecast’s to provide the protection that our customers need to ensure the security of their business.

Remote working has created additional protection requirements, with the increase in cyberthreats seen since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic creating further challenges.

The articles listed below represent just some of the reports regularly hitting my inbox:

• NCSC defends UK from more than 700 cyber attacks while supporting national pandemic response (November 2020)
• UK sees a 31% increase in cyber crime amid the pandemic (October 2020)
• Cybersecurity: One in three attacks are coronavirus-related (November 2020)

Here at Cobweb, we have a team of security experts ready to support our customers, advising on the security systems and solutions to meet each business’s precise need.