Bonanza Casino Bets on BlackFog to Prevent Cyberattacks

Like most organizations, protecting the weakest link when it comes to cybersecurity is a challenge for Bonanza Casino. When asked about the biggest threat at the organization, Reggie Charles, IT Director for the casino shared his belief that the biggest threat, no matter what, will always be the end-user.

“We all get tunnel vision when we are focused on accomplishing a task, often users don’t take the extra step to check the validity of an email, or before they click on something. What they often don’t realize is that those extra few seconds can actually prevent an attack and save the IT team countless hours cleaning up after an incident.”

In addition to the end user challenges, the gambling industry is a firm favorite of cybercriminals, Reggie continued, “the casino industry as a whole is looked at like a bank, attackers are trying to get into the network to access player accounts to steal personal data such as bank details. This means we must be extra vigilant when it comes to doing everything we can to protect our customers data”.

During an internal discussion about cybersecurity threats, the owner of Bonanza Casino shared his plans to take out a cyber insurance policy with leading cyber insurance provider, Evolve. With new legislation coming into play for the industry it made sense to get ahead and ensure compliance going forward. Evolve recommended the organization take a look at some leading cybersecurity solutions including BlackFog.

After reviewing some information and doing his research on BlackFog, Reggie decided to reach out to learn more. “I looked at some other solutions, but they seemed more geared towards larger organizations. The more I read about BlackFog and learned what the product was capable of, I was interested in moving forward with a trial. I was looking for a solution that not only protects our data, but also allow to me to manage activity across all of my endpoints.” said Reggie Charles, IT Director, Bonanza Casino.

Bonanza Casino started with a demo of BlackFog’s ADX solution before proceeding with a trial for over a six week period. During the trial Reggie was able to see first-hand what was going on in his network, Reggie commented, “during the POV I started to see hidden stuff going on in the network and I was able to take action and clean it up”.

“I had made up my mind, almost immediately. I wanted to have BlackFog up and running to maximize its capabilities, and I knew I wanted to buy it. The timing was perfect as the gaming control board had just come out with a new cyber requirement, and deploying BlackFog meant I was ahead of the auditors.”

The casino purchased BlackFog to run across all company devices and not long after were able to instantly run a report for a gaming audit, which the auditors found impressive. Aside from being able to manage all devices from a central console, Reggie shared his thoughts on other aspects of the technology.

“I realized I could address a lot of the concerns with BlackFog, if I am looking at the threat impact, like data frequency, I can see the machine name, date and time, when it happened and what the issue was. I can drill down and use the threat hunting feature to find out what is causing it”.

“The level of intelligence and reporting BlackFog provides allows me to make the right decisions and determine if I need to block a malicious threat. The worst thing is impacting users and not allowing them to do their job. I also find the breach reporting, geofencing and ransomware trend data really powerful”.

When asked if Bonanza would recommend BlackFog to other casinos, Reggie commented, “there are a lot of tools out there, but they take more bandwidth and budget. BlackFog is easily managed by one person, which is a huge benefit for smaller organizations. BlackFog is also blocking threats automatically, and I am so confident in this, that I can dig into events further on my own time and I know that no data has been exfiltrated. A solution that protects data at this level is pretty critical for all organizations but for casinos, with new regulations to comply with I’d highly recommend this product”.