Real Estate Investment Trusts and Property Management

Growing cyber crimes are outpacing insurance coverage. How can GuardTower help reduce facility liability, exposure, and costs?

It’s not surprising for Real Estate Investment Trusts and property management firms to have less than adequate cybersecurity insurance, but liability is getting worse.

Typical Cyber Insurance Coverage Limits:

  • Cyber liability policies often have per-occurrence and aggregate limits. These limits can range from $1 million to $5 million for many businesses.  

  • For larger REITs or those handling a significant amount of sensitive data, coverage limits may be higher than $5 million. Some policies can go up to $10 million or even higher in specific cases.

However, the increasing tide of cyber crimes is going way beyond what organizations are prepared to handle.

General Averages and Trends:

  • Real Estate Specific Losses: While overall averages for REITs are scarce, the real estate sector has seen significant losses from cybercrime, particularly wire transfer fraud, with billions lost annually. Data breaches in the real estate sector have also seen increasing costs, with the average exceeding $4.3 million in 2022. One specific example mentioned a French real estate developer losing €35 million due to a BEC scam.

  • Beyond Direct Financial Loss: The financial impact extends beyond immediate costs to include:

    • Reputational Damage

    • Operational Disruptions and Revenue Loss

    • Legal and Regulatory Fines

    • Recovery and Remediation Costs

    • Increased Insurance Premiums

 

GuardTower helps you close the liability gap with proactive intelligence and alerting, buying your security teams time to thwart an attack before it has had the opportunity to destroy your systems and business.

GuardTower is designed to be part of your network to attract and capture attackers after the breach point but before the impact of the activity, providing valuable insights into their tactics and techniques, thereby stopping nefarious activities before they begin. GuardTower also goes beyond being a ghost in your network to leveraging distraction, deterrence, and countermeasures to keep attackers from critical systems, gathering intelligence, and even disrupting hacker operations

The GuardTower cybersecurity platform, also known as "The All In One Multi AI Decoy Platform," can offer significant protection to Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITs) and property management firms against cyber threats through its unique approach as an AI Decoy system. Here's how:

Threat Detection and Early Warning:

  • Mimicking Real Systems: GuardTower deploys a network of decoy container systems and services that mimic real-world IT infrastructure used by REITs and property management firms, such as web servers, databases, and network devices.

  • Attracting Attackers: These AI Decoys are designed to be attractive targets for cybercriminals, luring them away from the actual critical systems and assets of the organization.

  • Early Detection of Malicious Activity: When attackers interact with the AI Decoys, their activities, tools, and techniques are logged and analyzed in real-time. This provides an early warning of potential attacks targeting the organization's real infrastructure.

  • Identifying Attack Vectors: By observing how attackers attempt to breach the decoy systems, REITs and property management firms can gain insights into the specific attack vectors, vulnerabilities, and methods being used against them or their industry.

Threat Intelligence and Analysis:

  • Comprehensive Logging: GuardTower’s AI Strongpoint matches all attack patterns against the MITRE ATT&CK and NIST frameworks to review, track, and locate the source of the attack, the tools used, the vulnerabilities exploited, and the attacker's behavior.

  • Resource Efficiency and Reduced False Positives:

  • Focus on Malicious Traffic: GuardTower’s AI Decoy, Strongpoint, and Strikeforce only engage with malicious traffic, significantly reducing the noise of false positives that are common in other security tools.

  • Cost-Effective Solution: As a network agnostic, GuardTower can be a cost-effective way for REITs and property management firms to enhance their existing security posture and gain valuable threat intelligence without significant financial investment in proprietary solutions.

 In conclusion, the GuardTower cybersecurity platform can serve as a valuable tool for REITs and property management firms by providing early threat detection, actionable threat intelligence, and a cost-effective way to understand and defend against the evolving cyber threats targeting their industry. By luring attackers into a controlled environment, GuardTower helps these organizations gain the upper hand in the ongoing battle against cybercrime.