Semperis Extends Active Directory Protection With Expansion Into Australia And New Zealand

New team in the region propels Semperis’ global growth of hybrid identity protection solutions and follows recent expansion into APAC

Semperis, the pioneer of identity-driven cyber resilience for enterprises, announced that it is expanding its comprehensive Active Directory (AD) protection, mitigation, and recovery solutions to Australia and New Zealand with a Melbourne-based team focused on bolstering the cyber resiliency of organisations of all sizes.

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Semperis brings on board Lou Talevski as Regional Director of Australia and New Zealand, following senior roles at Beyond Trust and CyberArk. Michael Choo, who has 25 years of experience in sales engineering roles, also joins the company as Senior Solutions Architect.

Ransomware incidents have increased in frequency and impact, posing one of the most significant threats to organisations in Australia and New Zealand. The ACSC received over 67,500 cybercrime reports in the 2020–21 financial year, an increase of nearly 13% from the previous financial year. The increase in volume of cybercrime reports equates to one cyberattack every eight minutes compared to one every 10 minutes in the previous year. No sector of the Australian economy was immune from the impacts of cybercrime.

The global impact of the Colonial Pipeline and JBS Foods attacks underscores the potentially debilitating and widespread impact of ransomware attacks. The average cost of remediating a single ransomware attack is $1.85 million, and the average downtime for a successful cyberattack is 21 days. As a result, solutions centered on defending identity stores such as Microsoft AD, often compromised in ransomware attacks, are vital for governments and organisations.

Lou Talevski explained, “The accessibility of cybercrime services — such as ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS) — via the dark web extends the threat landscape to a growing number of malicious actors. Yet, Gartner research estimates that more than 90% of ransomware attacks are preventable. Those that survive and thrive in the midst of the ongoing ransomware scourge will be those that invest in proactively bolstering their cyber resiliency.”

“Active Directory is the backbone of 90% of organisations globally, yet it is something of a treasure trove to cybercriminals,” said Talevski. “Compromising Active Directory spells critical losses in downtime for the organisation, disruption, revenue loss, compromised data and reputational damage. I am excited to join Semperis, which offers the most comprehensive Active Directory solution on the market, to harden organisations’ cybersecurity resilience at such a critical time in the war against cybercrime.”

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Semperis is also the company behind Purple Knight, a free AD security assessment tool that companies can use to uncover risky AD misconfigurations. Organisations that have used Purple Knight report overall security scores of about 61% — a failing grade — extending the risk of systemic cyberattacks.

Michael Choo said, “Active Directory is notoriously difficult to keep secure. Even large organisations with significant investments in security resources are failing to close critical gaps in Active Directory. Often the vital nature of directories is only realised after an attack. If critical systems like identity management become compromised, business operations can come to a standstill. Semperis exists because a traditional castle-and-moat approach to network security leaves organisations exposed because cybercriminals can easily compromise Active Directory. Organisations must be able to ensure their directory services are secure on a continual basis.”

With Semperis, organisations can continuously monitor their directories for security vulnerabilities, intercept cyberattacks in progress, and quickly recover their AD environments post-attack to a known-secure state.

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