Video: 10 Minute IT Jams - emt Distribution on why the 'essential eight' is crucial for cybersecurity success

Cyber threats are relentless. For more than 25 years, EMT Distribution has stood at the forefront of cybersecurity product distribution, serving clients ranging from large enterprises to small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) across Australia and the broader Asia-Pacific region.

On today's IT Jam interview, Scott Hageness, Senior Sales Manager at EMT Distribution, offered insights into the company's evolving solutions for cyber threat mitigation and its ongoing efforts to support organisations navigating the ever-changing cybersecurity landscape.

Hageness began by providing an outline of EMT Distribution's core mission. "We are dedicated around cyber security," he said. "Essentially what we do is we look for solution sets that address the Australian Information Security Manual's mitigation strategies for cyber threats."

He explained that EMT's offerings align closely with the government-backed frameworks seen as best practice in the sector. "Key to us are things like the Top Four, the Essential Eight and the ISM 37," he said. "The reality is what they are is they are the best mitigation strategies to stop cyber attacks from actually happening effectively within your organisation."

Among these widely recommended practices, Hageness highlighted several key approaches, including "application white listing, patch management for third-party patching as well as operating systems, and privilege access management across the board". He described these as particularly critical, alongside the everyday pillars of cyber defence such as antivirus and vulnerability scanning.

Over recent years, the threat landscape has shifted dramatically, and EMT has worked to keep pace through continuous innovation. "We've had a few really cool additions recently around threat intelligence as well as a vulnerability scanning side of things and also from addressing the cybersec needs of the SMB and the MSP space," he said.

He pointed in particular to an integrated platform approach, stating, "One of the ones I really personally like is on the Stealthbits side. What I like about that is it actually addresses data access governance and Active Directory in one platform." For many organisations, he contends, it's not only about controlling privileged access but also ensuring the right people have access to critical-though-not-necessarily-sensitive data. "That's one of the big tickets," he said.

Discussing the current priorities in product development, Hageness emphasised EMT Distribution's commitment to making cyber defences not just effective, but also accessible. "The laser focus for us is actually around the Top Four mitigation strategies and around some of, not all of, the Essential Eight," he explained. "We really do concentrate on making sure that what we do is supply businesses and our partners with solutions that are easy to implement and easy to use that are highly effective...and are cost effective for the space they sit in, too."

For those less familiar with the technical terms, Hageness clarified their central importance: "The Top Four and the Essential Eight are essentially these mitigation strategies that are designed to pretty much knock out over 85 percent of all the sort of targeted attacks that happen."

He detailed the core aspects of these approaches: "Application white listing, patch third-party softwares, patch operating systems, restriction of privilege, and then from there it's things like making sure you've got backup, you're doing application hardening, restricting where macros can execute from." Some, he noted, are "more of an operational thing and not so much a solution set perspective, but for us on the EMT side, addressing those strategies is where we focus."

One solution Hageness kept returning to with enthusiasm was Stealthbits. "The efforts that Stealthbits have put in is in protecting the organisation's sensitive data and the credentials that are used to steal it," he said. He outlined how, in the typical cyberattack scenario, criminals begin by stealing credentials at a low level before escalating privilege to access data or disrupt business operations. "The target is always reasonably the same," he said, whether the activity is criminal, malicious, or state-sponsored.

"What I really enjoy about what they're doing is they've got a really, really, really laser focus on being able to address both the hygiene within the directory structure or the privilege structure...and then also addressing the hygiene around the actual data, the access to the data itself." Hageness was particularly impressed by Stealthbits' incorporation of "machine learning" for network behaviour analysis, enabling the system to detect and block evolving threats as they emerge.

EMT Distribution's reach extends well beyond Australia, as Hageness explained. "EMT Distribution is based in Australia, we also have a Singapore office," he said. "We are part of Rhipe, and Rhipe has offices all around South East Asia, into India and also up into Japan as well, so we cover a massive area within Asia, APAC and Japan as well."

For enterprise end users, channel partners or resellers wishing to engage with EMT Distribution, Hageness advised a straightforward approach. "They can pick up the phone, give us a call, they can email us, and in fact, through any one of our vendors that we support...if they're interested in a particular product, they can even go to their websites and fill in the contact forms and we will be the ones who end up contacting the customers," he said.

Hageness stressed EMT's partnership-driven ethos. "We're a channel organisation, but we're there to support the vendors as well and make sure that the end users actually understand the products and get the best experience they have with it...and that's how we help our partners as well," he added.

As the interview concluded, Hageness expressed his ongoing commitment to strengthening organisational security and support networks. "We're there to support the vendors as well and make sure that the end users actually understand the products and get the best experience they have with it," he said.