
Summary
Mondas is working closely with Porton Biopharma (PBL), a government-owned biopharmaceutical company who specialise in the development and manufacture of a range of critical vaccinations and treatments. With 24x7x365 SOC and SIEM services Mondas are leveraging the power of LevelBlue’s USM Anywhere SIEM for their user devices including laptops, desktops and virtual machines.
Mondas worked with PBL on the implementation and setup of the service, deploying on premises and using virtual sensors to capture and ingest logs from assets, including Azure’s cloud tenancy.
The Challenge
Without an internal security team, PBL needed to secure their highly sensitive medical and research data to protect the integrity of the business and their partners and supply chains. Furthermore, increasing government requirements in compliance and certification meant a path to Cyber Essentials Plus (CE+) became essential to continue securing and maintaining contracts within the healthcare industry.
The Solution
Mondas led technical workshops to gain a full understanding of PBL’s IT environment, infrastructure and operations, more importantly the context of this setup and its impact to operations. With this knowledge Mondas prioritised and tailored the deployment of our 24x7x365 SOC leveraging LevelBlue’s USM Anywhere SIEM. This provides PBL with detection and response to suspicious behaviour across endpoints, cloud, network and identity. In addition to this, Mondas runs and prepares critical vulnerability reports to PBL on an agreed schedule, which include remediation steps.
While the technical infrastructure can be monitored, it’s often the human element that causes a breach so Mondas set up regular phishing simulations and reported on the results to further increase the awareness of their PBL’s team. This meant assessing VPNs, active directories, Microsoft 365 and virtualisation alongside stolen laptop scenarios.
CE+ Certification
Mondas have ensured throughout our partnership with PBL that all our actions are in line with closing any gaps in accordance with CE+ certification. Our objective was to get PBL certified to further improve their reputation and allow them to secure new contracts and partnerships.
Our team at Mondas worked through pre-audit to gather all the necessary documentation and evidence in line with the requirements of the standard. Working closely with PBL to answer assessor queries meant they were fully prepared for audit interviews. Post assessment, Mondas followed up with the external assessor to ensure the certification was awarded resulting in not only a more secure IT infrastructure but a credibility boost.
The Outcome
Through our partnership, PBL now has a full suite of tools deployed and Mondas has allocated a team of security experts monitoring their estate 24/7/365 for any signs of malicious behaviours.
“The team at Mondas have been instrumental in supporting our strive for tighter controls on our data and our path to Cyber Essentials Plus certification. Their cyber consultants in Farnborough are always available for any queries and they quietly deal with and report on any breaches as they arise. Training our workforce has become increasingly important so we’ve taken full advantage of their phishing simulations to really demonstrate the importance of cynicism on taking any actions in emails, SMS or even phone calls and MFA.”
Mark Barlow, Head of IT, Porton Biopharma
All solutions have been built around PBL’s compliance requirements, centered around Cyber Essentials+, which has been certified for the past three years. Our Cyber Security Sales and Marketing Manager George Eastman said of the growing relationship with PBL, “It’s been a pleasure working with the team, their proactive approach to cyber security meant we could quickly deploy some powerful protective measures”.