Customer Story
Leading Eurasian Raw Materials, Building Materials and Ceramic Tile Producer Relies on Advanced Cloud-based IT Security to Protect Against Ransomware
The family-owned Lasselsberger Group is a Eurasian producer of raw materials, building materials and ceramic tiles. Clearly structured into the three divisions Ceramics, Minerals and Building Materials, the production sites in Central and Eastern Europe supply not only the local home markets but also many international markets — especially in Western Europe.
Thanks to the continuous expansion of product supplies to companies in a wide range of industries (such as fiberglass, paper or refractory), the Lasselsberger Group is becoming increasingly independent of developments in the construction or building materials industry.
Market leadership in many areas, combined with decades of production tradition and long-term secured raw material reserves, ensure the successful growth of the entire Group.
According to Mario Hinterndorfer, Head of Group IT Infrastructure, Lasselsberger faced various challenges in the area of IT security that called for urgent action: "Before CrowdStrike, we did not feel that we were sufficiently protected against ransomware and modern attacks. And of course, after the shift from a no-cloud strategy to an almost complete cloud-first approach, cloud security is a very important issue for us."
To address these challenges, Lasselsberger set out to find a new security solution that took a modern approach and was optimized to defend against advanced attacks. "We were no longer happy with our old solution,” Hinterndorfer said. “The signature-based protection was simply not up to date and we spent a lot of time trying to close gaps with new configurations, which is now easily done with the push of a button thanks to CrowdStrike. In addition, we didn't have endpoint detection and response (EDR) before, which is why we didn't see a lot of things, but we've since been able to fix this."
Hinterndorfer and his colleague René Hochberger, Group IT & Process Solutions IT Support, noticed early on that the administrative workload has also been significantly reduced. Where previously at least one day per week had to be spent on managing the old product, the time required is now limited to one hour per week. Lasselsberger is now also detecting significantly more behavior-based threats that previously remained hidden.
"First we had to learn that CrowdStrike works differently than our previous product, thanks to signatureless next-gen AV, and yet we can still rely on everything to work,” Hochberger said. “We now see a lot of things, like lines of code executed through the browser, that we didn't see before."
Lasselsberger Relies on Cloud Security to Defend Against Modern Threats
"The rollout and switch from our old product to CrowdStrike went smoothly,” Hinterndorfer said. “Initially, we had both products running in parallel, which also worked smoothly. Then, at the push of a button, we were able to activate CrowdStrike and uninstall the old product, all without rebooting." CrowdStrike's lean agent was also one of the key reasons for Lasselsberger to choose CrowdStrike. The agent now runs on all of Lasselsberger's systems without exception, including production systems that previously had no security product installed for fear of a client disrupting production. Another point that positively surprised Lasselsberger in live operation was the greatly reduced number of antivirus exceptions. Where Lasselsberger previously had to configure hundreds of corresponding exceptions, this number has been reduced to five to 10 with CrowdStrike.
Lasselsberger Relies on Falcon OverWatch to Support Its Own IT
To be truly protected against all the dangers of a modern threat landscape, Lasselsberger does not rely on technology alone. To complement its protection, it has opted to leverage CrowdStrike Falcon OverWatch™ managed threat hunting. The expertise of the OverWatch experts, who are available to Lasselsberger around the clock, complements the technology and ensures that the company can look to the future without worry. In total, Lasselsberger Group has chosen four different CrowdStrike products to be prepared against current and future threats. In addition to Falcon OverWatch managed threat hunting, the company has Falcon Prevent™ next-generation antivirus and Falcon Insight™ EDR in place. It has also opted for Essential Support. The latter is also highly praised by both Hinterndorfer and Hochberger:
