Peer-to-peer fintech partnering with global businesses to offer bitcoin as payment option

Paxful, the leading global peer-to-peer fintech, today announced Paxful Pay, an e-commerce solution that allows businesses worldwide to receive bitcoin. The service is available today and allows customers to pay with almost 400 payment methods – exchanging into bitcoin that is sent to the merchant’s digital wallet. Businesses can register now to add Paxful Pay as a purchase option to their online checkout process.

Through Paxful Pay, businesses have the ability to manage their earnings and convert bitcoin into their local currency on the Paxful Marketplace using almost 400 payment methods. Merchants will also have control over the configuration of the solution on their Paxful Merchant Dashboard and can track every transaction. The company expects to expand to other digital currencies and also plans to introduce automatic conversion into stablecoins such as Tether (USDT). Further down the line, Paxful Pay will allow merchants to automatically convert bitcoin into their local currency within their bank account.

Consumers can expect the typical e-commerce flow — but will now have the option of selecting Paxful Pay as a payment method. This will prompt users to create a new profile or login as an existing Paxful user. Users can then use almost 400 payment methods to complete their purchase. With their Paxful login, users can also take advantage of Paxful’s other products such as Paxful Marketplace and Paxful Wallet.

Ray Youssef, CEO and co-founder of Paxful, said: “In many regions across the globe, we see people use bitcoin as a financial tool for purchasing goods and services. Bitcoin has several different use cases that we’ve only begun to leverage and e-commerce is a great example. At Paxful, it’s imperative that we give users and businesses around the world the opportunity to take advantage of the power of bitcoin to gain financial freedom.”

Artur Schaback, COO and co-founder of Paxful, said: “We’re thrilled to bring Paxful Pay to our global community. There is a clear need to offer local options for bitcoin and this product is a culmination of our efforts to deliver on that demand. By offering users the ability to complete purchases using almost 400 payment methods, they will now have an even stronger financial solution at their fingertips. We cannot wait to expand this offering to encompass as many merchants as possible.”

Currently, Paxful has over a hundred merchants on Paxful Pay. As the company ramps up the service, it expects to onboard a select number of new merchants in the coming weeks. From there, Paxful Pay will expand more generally.

Founded in 2015 and completely bootstrapped since then, Paxful is headquartered in New York with offices in Estonia, the Philippines and Russia. The team has doubled in size over the last 12 months, growing to over 400 people.

SonicWall today announced three new high-performance firewall models for enterprises and large organizations — NSa 4700, NSa 6700 and NSsp 13700 — designed to accelerate network throughput, stop advanced cyberattacks like ransomware, and securely connect millions of users. Featuring some of the highest port densities in their class, the new appliances help enterprises keep pace with the speeds of their growing networks — all while drastically reducing total cost of ownership (TCO).

“The growing volume of ransomware attacks has enterprises and government agencies moving quickly to evaluate their mitigation capabilities and strengthen their security postures,” said SonicWall President and CEO Bill Conner. “The recent string of highly publicized cyberattacks has catapulted security to the top of the priority list. We’re there to help by delivering multiple options to cost-effectively protect even the largest environments. With higher port densities and more capacity, the new offerings dramatically disrupt the traditional cost structure as organizations need fewer appliances to secure the same environment.”

New NSa Firewalls Disrupt Cost Expectations by Tripling Throughput, Expanding Port Densities

The new SonicWall NSa 4700 and NSa 6700 next-generation firewalls deliver 18 and 36 Gbps of firewall throughput — three times the previous comparable SonicWall appliances. Both also support critical TLS 1.3 encryption standards.

The NSa models boast some of the highest port densities in their class; the NSa 6700 even offers both 40G and 25G connectivity, delivering multi-gigabit threat protection for large environments. These higher port densities, coupled with hardware redundancy and high availability, allow distributed enterprises to purchase fewer appliances while supporting more secure connections as their networks grow.

The NSa 4700 and NSa 6700 provide up to 115,000 and 153,000 connections, respectively, per second. They also support up to 2 million or 6 million concurrent DPI connections, and up to 4,000 or 6,000 site-to-site VPN tunnels.

High-Performance NSsp 13700 Firewalls Designed To Protect The Fastest, Most Complex Environments
The new SonicWall NSsp 13700 is an advanced next-generation firewall for high-speed threat protection designed for enterprise-class networks and MSSPs that supports millions of encrypted connections.

The NSsp 13700 next-generation firewall delivers elite speeds for threat prevention throughput (45.5 Gbps), IPS (48 Gbps) and IPsec (29 Gbps), and include scalable hardware architecture with high port density. Like SonicWall’s other new offerings, the NSsp 13700 supports the latest TLS 1.3 encryption standard.

New Capture Labs Portal Delivers Research Tools, Centralized Repository
Information-sharing and collaboration is a critical component of an organization’s defensive posture. SonicWall is consolidating access to threat research and security news through the Capture Labs Portal, a free and centralized repository of research tools available to the public where visitors can track malicious actors and remain up to date with latest zero-day vulnerabilities.

To help expedite remediation, the Capture Labs Portal offers a single repository to look up threat signature, CVE details, IP reputation, and URL reputation, making it effortless to do your threat research from a single interface. SonicWall PSIRT advisories and Capture Labs threat researcher blogs with news regarding the latest vulnerabilities can be easily and quickly found      out to take actions in response to emerging threats, attack vectors or vulnerabilities.

Simplify Secure SD-WAN Deployment, Management with New Orchestration and Monitoring Capabilities
Enterprises, service providers, government agencies and MSSPs can efficiently manage large-scale deployments with SonicWall’s cloud-native Network Security Manager (NSM), which delivers a single, easy-to-use cloud interface for streamlined management, analytics and reporting.

With NSM 2.3, network infrastructure teams can quickly troubleshoot and resolve issues as they monitor secure SD-WAN landscapes in real time. Administrators can monitor the health and performance of complete SD-WAN environments to ensure consistent configurations and drive optimal application performance.

SD-WAN environments are now easily organized using SonicWall’s new and intuitive self-guided workflow as well as the use of Templates that allow the provisioning of thousands of remote firewalls efficiently.

Enterprises also can leverage the NSM wizard-based setup process to ensure proper configuration for site-to-site VPN connectivity, and use the monitoring tools to track the connections and ensure optimum performance.

Optimize Productivity with Enhanced Network Visibility, Monitoring and Reporting
Managing employees’ internet utilization and behavior can be a substantial challenge for organizations. SonicWall has enhanced network visibility and reporting capabilities across security devices, users, VPN connections and more.

SonicWall Analytics 3.1 delivers Productivity Reports to provide insights into employees’ internet utilization and behavior. Generated snapshots and drill-down reports can classify users’ web activities into productivity groups such as productive, unproductive, acceptable, unacceptable or custom-defined groups.

Drill-down capabilities enable analysts to easily and quickly pivot and investigate data points of interest at the user level, and establish evidence-backed, policy-controlled measures for risky users and applications as they unfold in the discovery process.

New VPN Reports allow organizations to summarize what company resources are being accessed inside VPN tunnels, how much bandwidth they are consuming and by whom. Network admins can leverage this information for monitoring business-critical applications, controlling or shaping traffic, and planning for capacity growth.

Zero-Trust Security Offering Expanded to Include More Granular Control

SonicWall also introduced Device Posture Check with SonicWall Cloud Edge Secure Access 1.1, and the addition of new Network Traffic Control that enforces access control to the resources based on user groups, IP addresses, ports and network protocols.

By-Ronen Shpire, Director CSP Solutions Marketing at Fortinet

5G has been a particularly hot topic lately, sparking significant debates and being considered as polarizing to some extent. However, countries all over the world are rolling out their 5G networks, considering this evolution in mobile connectivity as a strong game-changer for end users, the mobility ecosystem, and many industries.  

Two Takeaways that Make 5G Unique 

5G differs from 4G and previous mobile generations in two significant and interdependent aspects. 

First, 5G breaks away from the gradual evolution from one mobile generation to the other by redefining its technology foundations, to support and drive the ongoing digital transformation businesses, consumers, and even whole societies are undertaking. It means that most of the legacy nature of the mobile network, such as the use of specific protocols and interfaces, is replaced by common IT protocols, APIs, and cloud technologies. 

Second, 5G brings customized mobile connectivity and added value services both for industrial organizations and mobile network operators (MNOs). Thanks to 5G capabilities, such as increased bandwidth and low latency, organizations can develop new products, services, and most importantly, best practices, such as significant safety and efficiency in production floors, greater automation in industry 4.0, better proactive maintenance and so much more. This wasn’t possible in the days of wired networks or Wi-Fi networks.

When it comes to MNOs, 5G represents a significant growth opportunity. Traditionally, their revenues were heavily dependent on SIM/package sales, as a basic service for a mobile provider. With the 5G capabilities and ecosystem, MNOs can now better address the business segment and deliver added-value services beyond cellular connectivity to their customers, creating new revenue streams and improving margins.   

5G Impacts on Cybersecurity 

5G “uniqueness” in the mobile generation evolution has had major impacts on many areas, including cybersecurity. With the use of common IT protocols and interfaces in the infrastructure, such as HTTP and API calls, combined with its open and distributed nature, as well as the expanded attack surface, 5G is an attractive target for hackers.

The 5G technology impact on security is multi-faceted. While the use of cloud technologies and architectures throughout the 5G infrastructure (RAN, core, and edge) enables enhanced agility, scalability, efficiency, and customization, securing that environment is also a key element to consider. Security must be integrated into the virtual infrastructure as well as the orchestration layer and embedded into the end-to-end network to ensure both security and business continuity.

Hyperscalability, ultra-low latency, support for machine communications, predictability, agility, and high precision are some of the capabilities that will drive 5G adoption and use cases in vertical industries and for consumers. It is mandatory that the cybersecurity approach and solutions will support, and not hinder, these capabilities. 

Security visibility, automation, threat intelligence, and control are critical to protect the 5G infrastructure and the 5G-enabled use case ecosystem (OT/IIoT/IoT devices, 5G public and private networks, MEC and public cloud environments, applications and APIs).

Cybersecurity: A 5G Enabler for Widespread Adoption 

5G is the most natively secured mobile generation. But the security foundations laid out in the 5G standards can only be a starting point for a security blueprint that secures end-to-end 5G-enabled innovation and use cases. 

In 2020, Fortinet conducted a survey around security in enabling 5G adoption in business verticals, and the results are very clear:

Almost 90% of respondents stated that the MNO’s security capabilities are either critical or very important for success in vertical industry use cases. More than 80% consider native 5G security features as important, but only a baseline for the security needed to serve the 5G market. 

Another interesting data point arising from the survey is that 54% of respondents believe operators should offer a shared responsibility model. However, nearly all those who support this approach believe that a shared responsibility model should be offered as an option alongside the alternative of comprehensive, full-stack, end-to-end security. True to the traditional telco business model, fully 86% of respondents believe operators should offer full-stack security.

In previous mobile generations, security was all about protecting the network itself, creating a walled-garden environment for the core of the network by securing all external exposure points, such as the internet/PDN, roaming, RAN to core access, external partners, etc. This is also valid to 5G, with the appropriate integration and compatibility to 5G technologies and architectures. But the unique nature of 5G and its role and criticality in the business segment means that security’s role is changing and expanding, and should encompass the following main roles: 

• Protect the 5G mobile infrastructure from attacks to ensure service continuity and availability. This is similar to the traditional security role in previous mobile generations.
• Protect the larger 5G ecosystem required to deliver 5G-enabled use cases for enterprise verticals to meet security and regulatory requirements. 
• Enable monetization via a wide range of 5G security services to organizations through managed security services as part of service/use case offerings. 

The Success of 5G

The benefits of 5G far outweigh its potential risks—but only when security is an integrated part of the process and solution. Although 5G has some built-in security, organizations will still need to integrate a larger cybersecurity strategy to confidently move to 5G applications. They need a solution that will provide comprehensive protection at 5G speeds without compromising end-to-end visibility, automation, and enforcement throughout the ecosystem’s attack surface. And to do that most efficiently and securely, the solution must also be part of a coherent, integrated, and self-healing security platform. This will enable organizations all over the world to confidently distribute 5G services from the core of their network out to its furthest reaches, while allowing them to continue developing and deploying critical digital innovation. 

Cybereason, the leader in future-ready attack protection, today released research findings from a global ransomware study of nearly 1,300 security professionals.

In the United Arab Emirates (UAE), 37 percent of surveyed companies reported that they had bit hit by a ransomware attack in the last 24 months. A staggering 84 percent of these companies (24 percent higher than the global average) chose to pay the ransom but what is interesting is that of those, 90 percent suffered a second ransomware attack, often at the hands of the same threat actor group. The research also divulged that of the organizations who opted to pay a ransom demand to regain access to their encrypted systems, 59 percent reported that some or all of the data was corrupted during the recovery process.

“Our survey findings underscore why, with the exception of cases where there is a threat to life, it does not pay to pay ransomware attackers. Paying a ransom demand does not guarantee a successful recovery, does not prevent the attackers from hitting the victim organization again, and in the end only exacerbates the problem by encouraging more attacks,” commented Lior Div, CEO and co-founder at Cybereason. “Getting in front of the threat by adopting a prevention-first strategy for early detection will allow organizations to stop disruptive ransomware before they can hurt the business.”

Key UAE findings include:

• Ransom Demands Increasing: 63 percentof businesses (28 percent higher than the global average) that paid a ransom demand shelled out between US$350,000 – US$1.4 million, while 10 percent paid ransoms exceeding $1.4 million.
• Loss of Business Revenue: 63 percentof organizations reported lost business (19 percent higher than global average) as a result of the ransomware attack and 42 percent reported significant loss of revenue.
• Brand and Reputation Damage: 54 percent of organizations indicated that their brand and reputation were damaged as a result of a successful attack.
• C-Level Talent Loss: 50 percent of organizations (19 percent higher than global average) reported losing C-Level talent as a direct result of ransomware attacks.
• Employee Layoffs: In line with the global average, 29 percentreported being forced to layoff employees due to financial pressures following a ransomware attack.
• Business Closures: A startling 42percent of organizations (16 percent higher than global average) reported that a ransomware attack forced the business to close down operations entirely.

“Ransomware attacks are a major concern for organizations in the UAE and across the globe, often causing massive business disruptions including the loss of income and valuable human resources as a direct result. If we look at the recent Colonial Pipeline ransomware attack as an example, disruptions were felt up and down the East Coast of the United States and negatively impacted other businesses who are dependent on Colonial’s operations,” added Lior.

Other key findings included in the full report reveal the extent to which losses to UAE businesses may be covered by cyber insurance, how prepared regional organizations are to address ransomware threats to the business with regard to adequate security policies and staffing. In addition, the report provides actionable data on the types of security solutions organizations had in place prior to an attack, as well as which solutions were most often implemented by organizations after they experienced a ransomware attack.

The full report can be found here: Ransomware: The True Cost to Business.