At Check Point, we live in the same business world everyone else does, where we have to operate at the speed of our customers. In our case, though, one mistake impacts a lot more than just our own network. The speed of business and being responsive to customers and stakeholders is a key metric for most organizations. After all, it drives customer satisfaction and repeat business.

Zero Day is the popular term to describe the first day an IT department has when reacting to a previously unknown malware threat. With the speed of malware getting faster every day, we felt a better response time would be Zero Second. It’s all about protection. Zero Second doesn’t allow malware even one second on your network. In one second, an infected email can propagate to hundreds of hosts. Imagine how much damage could happen in a day, an hour or even as little as 30 minutes.

Security vendors have taken on this challenge to help organizations protect themselves. Over the past decade, the response time against malware has continued to shrink. It used to take days for malware to propagate and infect an organization before security measures started containing the threat, now it can occur in minutes.

The GameOver Zeus and Cryptolocker viruses, for instance, immediately propagate through a victim network looking for valuable data, locking down the infrastructure and presenting a ransom countdown timer to the user with payment instructions. They enter networks using very authentic looking emails encrypted with zip attachments. If your protection system is incapable of scanning encrypted emails or archive files, this malware would pass right into your network.

We were curious about what happens when the speed of business is overtaken by the speed of malware as infection rates have gone from hours to minutes to seconds. Given the unprecedented growth in the number of security threats that focus on stealing data, sabotaging business continuity and damaging a company’s reputation, we decided this was worth measuring. We created a Zero Second Test to evaluate how quickly a series of security vendors would protect a network. You should read what we found: Visit the Zero Second page.

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