Challenges

As an enterprise operating in several industry verticals, Xplor Technologies struggled with employing standardized cybersecurity practices across all the product teams within the organization. Without more organized processes, they couldn’t gain quick and effective threat insights. This left them with lots of manual work and exposure to potential risks.

“It would take an exorbitant amount of time to be able to figure out which threats mattered to us. Fletch offers us a curated view of our internal attack surface.”

- Daniel Boughton, Director of Cyber Threat Response at Xplor Technologies

Here are the key challenges Xplor Technologies faced:

• No easy way to track internal attack surface of entire company

• Too much manual research needed to understand potential threats

• Manual processes prevented them from moving fast, increasing the risk of incidents

Initial processes and tools

Before Fletch, Xplor Technologies had multiple processes in place which made it difficult to fully understand all their vulnerabilities. Each product technology team operated independently, aiming to mitigate vulnerabilities via patching. And when there were goals like remediating critical threats within a certain time frame, there was no easy way of communicating these quickly across the organization. This made redundancies in different areas of the company quite common.

As they were streamlining their operations, the security team were also trying to fit existing tools into ever-evolving requirements and finding it hard to do so with what they had. Their tech stack consisted of Microsoft Defender, Sentinel, and Tenable, which they found to be rigid and noisy. So, when they discovered Fletch, the platform’s flexibility and integrations stood out.

“Our process was inefficient. And we realized we needed something better. Fletch has helped us grow our processes by giving us the information we needed but were unable to easily produce ourselves. Fletch feels like an extension of our team, and  it makes it really easy for us.” 

- Daniel Boughton, Director of Cyber Threat Response at Xplor Technologies

To manage vulnerabilities, the security team initially tried to create a system to notify multiple engineering teams of vulnerabilities in their products, but this was difficult to implement and even harder to maintain. They tried to pull data from Microsoft Defender and score these but found the manual effort to be too much. Left with an inability to manage potential threats at the scale and speed they needed to, Xplor Technologies realized they needed a solution.

Objectives

As a company in a highly targeted industry, Xplor Technologies sought to address their vulnerabilities and ensure that their products were as safe as possible.

Like most companies with limited resources, Xplor wanted to be able to know that the threats they were working on were the right ones. They hoped to enhance team capacity by automating some of the manual processes that were bogging their team down.

“Fletch gives us the things that we need to focus on now. This allows us to start chipping away at them and we can rest easy knowing Fletch continues to monitor our threats for us.” 

- Daniel Boughton, Director of Cyber Threat Response at Xplor Technologies

Here were some of the key benefits Xplor Technologies was looking for in a tool like Fletch:

• Streamline operations: They aimed to improve their processes and enhance team capacity by adopting a tool that could effectively manage their vulnerability alerts.

• Improve visibility: They sought a solution to improve visibility into cybersecurity efforts across different parts of the company, ensuring they could better understand and prioritize threats.

• Enhance Focus: They wanted a tool that could help them focus on critical threats, saving them time from sifting through irrelevant threats and allowing them to allocate resources efficiently and effectively.

• Automating manual processes: They aimed to increase efficiency by automating threat research and reducing redundancies within the company's existing cybersecurity practices.

Solution

After Xplor Technologies’ Director of Cyber Threat Response, Daniel discovered Fletch, it was a simple approval process as the CSO agreed that this was a tool the company could benefit from.

From first impression, Fletch’s ability to process and simplify large amounts of data was instantly valuable. The feed of major threats would have taken the team weeks to compile. The centralization of information also made it easier for everyone to stay informed.

“I have seen lots of different cybersecurity and vulnerability management solutions. But never one that can ingest collected data and make it more intelligible for us. It was unique and exactly what we needed.”

- Daniel Boughton, Director of Cyber Threat Response at Xplor Technologies

Most beneficially, Fletch can distill actionable insights for Xplor Technologies. Meaning Daniel no longer thinks about the countless small but important tasks they need to stay on top of to remain safe. They now know what to patch, when, and how, earlier than before.

“Fletch gives us more insight, than, sifting through all the other data. It drew our attention to the fact that things could be remediated more easily.”

- Daniel Boughton, Director of Cyber Threat Response at Xplor Technologies

Most recently, they resolved urgent Microsoft Defender vulnerabilities in their products with simple patches as advised by Fletch. Rather than laboriously sifting through EDR or vulnerability management tools, Fletch's insights have underscored the potential for time and effort savings in remediation processes.

Results

With Fletch, Xplor Technologies relinquished of a large workload across multiple teams in multiple areas of cybersecurity. 

Firstly, they no longer need to worry about threat research, freeing them to focus on other things. Fletch provides a window into what matters and the threats that they didn’t know about across their internal attack surface. Above all else, Fletch doesn’t overwhelm, by focusing on what they need to know in the moment.

“Fletch highlights the areas we need to pay attention to. While allowing us to stay out of the weeds that bog our day down and leave us vulnerable. It’s less of a stab in the dark and more of a laser. It saves time in that sense. And it’s all about saving time.”

- Daniel Boughton, Director of Cyber Threat Response at Xplor Technologies

Secondly, they can depend on Fletch’s curated threats to prioritize cybersecurity efforts. By leveraging Fletch’s data, Xplor Technologies can confidently present key insights to the rest of the business. This not only enhances clarity and communication, but also helps bolster the profile of the cybersecurity team.

“We look at what Fletch curates to be our major threats and present these to the rest of the business, as these are the areas we want to focus on. Fletch is a tool which helps make our data and vulnerability team look good to the rest of the organization, by doing the legwork and manual effort in the background.”

- Daniel Boughton, Director of Cyber Threat Response at Xplor Technologies

Finally, Xplor Technologies enlists Fletch’s help in educating their stakeholders about cybersecurity. Without having to compile themselves, they can use Fletch’s artificial intelligence to generate updates for specific audiences, creating reports for product owners and executives.

Key Features and Benefits:

1. Alert Prioritizer: Fletch’s simplified vulnerability management allowed Xplor Technologies to easily get the insights they need to protect their business without spending hours sifting through countless alerts.

2. Forecasted threats: Fletch’s Forecaster feed served as a central hub for the whole cybersecurity team, giving visibility into threats and cutting down the manual research needed to scan and find threats.

3. Communications: Fletch’s communications capabilities allow Xplor Technologies to easily educate and report updates to different parts of the company.

4. Affordable: Fletch’s affordable pricing made it easy to convince higher-ups to try Fletch.

Takeaway

Despite using popular established security tools, Xplor Technologies' cybersecurity processes were laborious, time-consuming, and fragmented. But from the need to overcome this obstacle came a far more innovative platform, Fletch. By leveraging Fletch’s correlated threat intelligence and AI automation capabilities, Xplor Technologies has streamlined their processes, heightened team capacity, and transformed their day-to-day security vulnerability management processes. The result? Time and effort saved, and a strengthened reputation for the cybersecurity team.