Stopping Cyber Threats Before They Happen: What Businesses Need to Know
With the advent of AI powered cyber-attack tools, cyber threats are only continuing to increase in Australia. While “detection first” tools like EDR (Endpoint Detection and Response) and XDR (Extended Detection and Response) play an important role in spotting attacks after they start, modern threats move fast and can evade detection before an alert is triggered.
At Area9 we’re seeing that a “Zero Trust Strategy” approach is increasingly resonating with customers and that's why we're helping bring this proactive security model to commercial and government clients with new services and leading cyber prevention tools such as ThreatLocker to stop ransomware and zero-days threats.
What’s Driving the Urgency?
Latest cyber incident data from the Australian Cyber Security Centre (ACSC) suggests that Australia is being hit harder than the global average, with higher rates of data breaches and increased attack frequency. This highlights just how active threat actors have become, and why traditional protection models need to adapt and simply aren’t enough on their own. Interestingly Queensland continues to report more cybercrime than any other State or Territory, with disproportionately higher reporting rates relative to the populations.
A Local Take on a Global Challenge
In our experience working with commercial and government clients across Queensland and the Northern Territory, it's clear that reactive tools alone aren't cutting it anymore. Combining Area9's popular User Support service with ThreatLocker's Zero Trust approach gives our clients confidence that their systems are protected from the ground up, that's a huge step forward in a threat landscape that's only becoming increasingly more challenging.
From Detecting to Stopping Threats
EDR and XDR tools are good at finding threats that have already started. They monitor endpoints and connect alerts from across your systems. But in today’s environment, that detection approach isn’t enough on its own, malicious activity can run and spread in seconds. Zero Trust changes how we approach cyber prevention by trusting nothing by default, so that everything must be verified before it’s allowed to run. That’s a gamechanger for organisations handling sensitive client data, financial information, or critical government systems.
Tools such as ThreatLocker's Zero Trust platform include smart, practical controls such as:
- Allowlisting so only approved applications can run.
- Ringfencing™ to limit what trusted apps are allowed to do.
- Just-in-time privilege elevation, reducing risk from user accounts
- Network & storage controls to stop lateral movement
These preventative controls work before anything bad happens, not just after.
Want to learn how Zero Trust Prevention complements your existing EDR/XDR setup? Check out the full ThreatLocker blog.