Customer Story: MECE Credit Union

MECE Credit Union

MECE Credit Union has been serving rural electric cooperative employees and their immediate families since 1975. They provide a range of banking services, including savings accounts, access to statements, and friendly service.

The Challenge: Security to Support Small IT Team

Ray Smith, VP of IT at MECE Credit Union, mainly juggles all of IT and cybersecurity on his own, with help from President Randy Marks. Responsible for making sure MECE Credit Union’s networks are up and running, while keeping everything as secure as possible, Smith needed a solution that would work as a force multiplier and give them greater visibility across their environment.

“Since Ray is a one-man show, we needed help with log monitoring and wanted to have 24/7 eyes on our internal network and traffic to make sure we are secure,” Marks said. “With a small team, that was important.”

Previously, MECE used SecureWorks for intrusion detection and prevention that would send a daily high-level summary of their security insights, but they had to call them to get more information about issues and how to fix them.

MECE was recommended to Blumira by their IT provider, Member Driven Technologies (MDT) to provide 24/7 network monitoring, detection and response. After approval by their technology committee and board as well as vendor due diligence, they chose Blumira for its affordability, ease of use and breadth of security capabilities.

The Solution: 24/7 Network Monitoring & Response With Blumira

With Blumira, MECE can extend the capabilities of their 1-2 person IT team with a solution that continuously and automatically reviews their logs around the clock for signs of attacker activity.

“I like that Blumira is watching over the network 24/7,” Smith said. “I do like the portal that we log into; for me - it’s easier to read and navigate through some of the things that we do. If we have a finding, going through the process of answering the questions and determining if this was a bad thing or a false positive is very easy.”

Blumira’s incident detection engineering (IDE) team powers the platform with detection rules that are intentionally designed to look for signs of real attacker behavior within their environment. These managed detection rules are sent to customers with a set of playbooks that walk them through how to respond quickly and accurately.

Deployment in Hours & Around-the-Clock Threat Response

When it came to deployment of the Blumira platform for the credit union, Smith was able to easily set up log ingestion for their cloud applications, including Duo Security, Mimecast and Cisco Umbrella.

“For our servers, it took about 30-45 minutes to set up. For each computer, once kicked off, it took about 3-5 minutes, multiplied by 22,” Smith said. “For us, we’re a smaller shop so it took very little time to install, and it was pretty easy from start to finish.”

For their sensor setup, Smith was able to lean on a dedicated Blumira Solution Architect to help them quickly and easily set up the virtual server that allowed them to send logs to Blumira’s platform for detection and response.

Using Blumira Agent, MECE now has around-the-clock monitoring and immediate responsive actions that will identify a priority level 1 threat and isolate any endpoints associated with it, blocking the spread of malware or access by an attacker from the rest of the network.

“I feel better now that I’m on Blumira’s platform - previously, if something happened in the middle of the night, all I got was an email,” Smith said. “Now that I have Blumira’s host isolation, I feel better. It doesn’t prevent someone from clicking on something, but I feel better that it will isolate the endpoint from the rest of the network. Even if something happens at 3am in the morning, it will be contained.”