Customer
In 1905, Hermann Laue founded his spice trade in Hamburg. From buying, selling and refining spices, the focus over the years turned to spice blends for meat and sausage production as well as gastronomy. This was followed in 1963 by one of the company's most successful products: Hela spiced ketchup. Hela now operates at ten locations worldwide with over 600 employees.
Challenge
To protect itself from the consequential damage of a possible cyberattack, Hela decided to take out cyber insurance. One of the insurance company's requirements was a 24/7 service to reduce the time between compromise and attack detection. At this point, Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) or Security Operation Centers (SOC) usually come into play.
Therefore, the project managers at Hela looked for an external service provider for SIEM/SOC services and found a solution with their long-standing security service provider secion.
Solution
secion's Active Cyber Defense (ACD) service includes a 24/7 threat hunting and incident response service. This is supplemented by the activities of a SOC team, which secion provides through its own ACD team. ACD proactively and continuously analyzes the corporate network for anomalies, identifying attacker communications to Command & Control servers (C&Cs). If an actively running attack is registered in the network and action is required, Hela benefits from the ACD team of secion experts, which is available around the clock. The security experts provide Hela with a comprehensive situation picture and accompany the company in implementing effective countermeasures.
Result
Hela has already successfully closed security gaps before a compromise occurred, thanks to secion's Active Cyber Defense Service. For example, the company's IT staff were alerted to ongoing Exchange attacks in March 2021 and implemented all necessary security measures in good time.
Following the requirements of our cyber insurance, we initially planned to implement a SIEM. After a detailed evaluation, we initially decided on the 24/7 Active Cyber Defense (ACD) service of the Hamburg-based security company secion. We already know from the many years of trustful cooperation that we are relying on a very competent and experienced partner at home in IT security. After a short time, we saw for ourselves that the ACD service is a leaner, more cost-effective, and more secure solution compared to a comprehensive SIEM to detect anomalies in our network immediately. Since the beginning of the cooperation, secion's SOC team has already informed us about critical compromises and thus saved us from significant consequential damage.
Jürgen Lunow Team Leader IT System Support at Hela Gewürzwerk Hermann Laue GmbH