Major European finance company saves $35.8 million with Helm.

A leading European financial firm serving millions of customers in the private, commercial, and corporate markets needed a cybersecurity solution to mitigate the rising threat of ransomware attacks. After their network of security solutions failed to protect them — costing critical downtime and millions of dollars — they turned to Helm. Leveraging Helm’s ransomware containment, the finance company quickly identified and neutralised security threats with minimal disruption to their operations. Over 5 years, the company has saved over $35 million using Helm’s solution.

Ransomware is a growing threat to organisations around the world. The financial service industry has been hit particularly hard with a 35% rise in attacks quarter-over-quarter in 2022, including a 13% increase in ransomware attacks on insurers (sources: Abnormal Security, 2022; BenefitsPRO, 2022). Finance companies handle a significant amount of personally identifiable information (PII), making them ideal targets for ransomware attacks. Seeking to protect itself against these growing threats, one leading European financial service firm adopted a collection of preventative solutions. It implemented a robust security stack from several leading vendors and hired a 24-hour IT Security Company to monitor their network environment for malicious cybercriminal activity manually. But when a ransomware attack occurred, the finance company was left scrambling to mitigate the damage.

Seeing that their current security stack had failed to identify or prevent the ransomware attack, the company’s CISO knew they needed another layer to their security stack. The company became aware of an innovative cybersecurity company, Helm, which developed a ransomware containment solution. Unlike other solutions, which focus on ransomware prevention, Helm detects and contains active ransomware attacks by monitoring the activity on file shares, cloud data storage, application servers, and database servers. Helm does not depend on outdated detection methods such as ransomware signatures, strains, patterns, or behaviour. Instead, Helm rapidly detects both known and unknown strains of ransomware by identifying malicious file activity. It does so without any network overhead or performance degradation.

Later that year, Helm was put to the test.

During a routine update, the email compromise tools were offline for 19 minutes. In that short time, three employees opened malicious email attachments that began to encrypt data rapidly. Within seconds, Helm automatically isolated the three users by disconnecting them from Active Directory to prevent widespread damage. Helm then alerted IT personnel, providing a list of all compromised users, devices, and data. This enabled the team to focus on restoring the network instead of manually investigating the incident, slashing their recovery time.

Thanks to Helm, the threat was contained before the IT Security Monitoring Provider had even detected the malicious activity. As a result, all data and endpoints were fully restored and operational within 24 hours. On average, companies hit with ransomware experience 24 days of operational downtime, costing $4.62M to recover (sources: Coveware, Q2 2022; IBM Cost of a Data Breach Report 2021). Since its installation, Helm has saved the company an estimated $35.8 million, reduced downtime from days to hours, and given them confidence that their data is secure across the organisation.