Case study: FOX Corporation
Company overview
Fox Corporation is a leader in news, sports, and entertainment programming, achieving strong revenue growth and profitability in a complex industry environment over the past several years. Under the FOX banner, FOX produces and distributes content through some of the world’s leading and most valued brands, including: FOX News Media, FOX Sports, the FOX Network, FOX Television Stations, and leading AVOD service Tubi.
Business challenges
The company’s high-profile sports and entertainment programming and its extensive news coverage of elections, sociopolitical events, and public figures subject it to heightened cybersecurity risks. As a result, FOX sought continuous, real-time analysis of potential threats to the organization.
Recognizing that cybersecurity attacks can have a significant and negative impact on both operations and reputation, security leaders at FOX have a layered defense strategy to protect themselves against threat actors. “Sophisticated attackers are adept at evading detection systems,” says Dean Perrine, Deputy CISO at FOX. “Our strategy is defense-in-depth to continuously identify and close any gaps.”
Why Stairwell
FOX adopted the Stairwell platform because of its fundamentally different approach to automated threat analysis, detection, and incident response. With the Stairwell platform, they now have the additional layer of visibility and defense that they sought to augment their existing tools.
The FOX threat management and detection teams use Stairwell to review new findings and conduct threat hunts against their historical data. The team particularly appreciates Stairwell’s continuous retrospective analysis of all the files in their environment, past and present. Variant analysis of suspicious files at the click of a button is another key capability that helps the team significantly streamline their security operations.
Automatically identifying variants of a malicious file in a matter of seconds – instead of the months it could take to do it manually – is truly groundbreaking.
In fact, the FOX team is using the Stairwell platform to look for variants of every file that triggered an alert in the last year.
In addition to the alignment between their technology needs and the Stairwell platform’s capabilities, there is a business alignment with FOX and Stairwell. The FOX team believes in investing in early-stage companies that show promise and being part of the journey in bringing them to market. FOX was an early access design partner for the Stairwell platform and continues to provide user insights and shaped feature development along the way.
Benefits of Stairwell
The Stairwell platform delivers a number of benefits to the FOX team. They are now able to:
Enrich and automate threat data throughout their workflow: The FOX team has integrated the Stairwell platform into their ticketing workflow and uses it to enrich the data in their workflow.
Quickly identify how global threats impact their organization: The FOX team uses the Stairwell platform to determine whether the latest cybersecurity breach headline has impacted their organization.
Identify malicious files that traditional defenses miss: The FOX team credits the Stairwell platform with the identification of threats that were not detected by their firewall, EDR, or SIEM.
Improve their IR workflow with quicker, deeper analysis: The FOX team improves the quality and speed of their responses by enriching alerts from their security workflow with context from the Stairwell platform.
In short, the team is able to measure how the Stairwell platform is helping them achieve their goals of improved cybersecurity defense with quicker response times, more comprehensive threat identification, and deeper analysis of identified threats.
Looking ahead
The FOX team will continue to operationalize the capabilities of the Stairwell platform and continue to integrate Stairwell with their SIEM and their customized SOAR using the Stairwell API. Future integrations may also include third-party organizations.
In addition to their use of the Stairwell platform, FOX has enlisted Stairwell for its cybersecurity services at the national and international sports broadcast events that put FOX in the global spotlight.
