Kernel is the world’s largest producer and exporter of sunflower oil, accounting for about 8% of the world production. The company supplies products to more than than 60 countries. Its main markets include India, Egypt, Turkey, and many European Union countries.

Kernel’s eight factories possess a processing capacity of 3.5 million tons of sunflower seeds per year. It produces 1.3 million tons of sunflower oil and 1.2 million tons of sunflower meal. Each year, Kernel supplies international markets with approximately 4 million tons of corn, wheat, barley, soybeans, and rapeseed, while purchasing agricultural products from more than 5,000 producers.

Since 2007, Kernel has been listed on the Warsaw Stock Exchange and successfully debuted at the Eurobond market in 2017.

Although most modern companies face daily threats in the form of phishing attacks, Trojans, and malware, Ukrainian organizations like Kernel need to pay special attention to cryptoware threats after the disastrous events related to the country’s crypto attacks in 2017.

That is why the timely detection of potential threats, effective management and scaling capabilities, and their ability to detect and neutralize unknown attacks have become extremely important factors for Ukrainian businesses when choosing cybersecurity solutions.

Based on the company’s massive scale, Kernel stores a large number of electronic payments and valuable financial documents. Huge resources and software packages— optimized for group operations with security policies—are required to assist Kernel’s IT division with protecting the company’s many endpoints; including servers, employees’ workstations, and mobile devices.

"Trend Micro was built taking into account the peculiarities of our business—a distributed structure with a large number of divisions—and supports seamless scaling as the organization grows."

Konstantin Khalabarchuk
Assistant Information Security Administrator
Kernel

Kernel considered several security software and service providers. To help make the decision, Kernel’s IT division required the solution provide them with the fast detection of threats, scalability, and flexibility, ease of administration, and centralized management. Finally, Kernel chose Trend Micro, as they had been effectively using some of Trend Micro’s solutions over the past seven years.

Trend Micro OfficeScan solution was used to defend Kernel’s group operations in three main areas; server protection, workstation protection, and mobile device protection.

To protect servers and workstations, the company uses a firewall to restrict incoming connections along with a suspicious network connection detection service configured to operate in alert mode.

To protect the company’s mobile devices, Kernel chose Trend Micro Mobile Security. The iOS and Android™-based solution creates “blocklists” and “safelists” of contacts and wireless network connection points, blocking the installation of suspect applications to help avoid information leaks and device infection.

Kernel also uses Trend Micro SmartScan solution. This real-time scanning tool consumes minimal system resources to protect against malware and viruses. SmartScan’s web reputation check service blocks workstation users’ inquiries to blocklisted resources. Kernel also uses this solution to block unknown threats, including the work of cryptominers.

"I would like to applaud the convenience, efficiency, flexibility, and the timeliness of threat identification demonstrated by Trend Micro’s products."

Konstantin Khalabarchuk
Assistant Information Security Administrator
Kernel

Since the introduction of OfficeScan, Kernel saw a reduction in costs for managing information security and an increase in its efficiency. In 2018, more than 10,000 attacks on workstations and company servers were repelled with the use of Trend Micro software. All Trend Micro products are easily scaled, which allowed a flawless increase Kernel’s licenses from 800 in 2011 to its current number of 5,800.

At the moment, Trend Micro software works with all PCs and servers in the company’s domain, as well as with the devices outside this domain.

In the future, Kernel plans to include the expansion of Trend Micro’s endpoint protection and Mobile Security modules to the BYOD segment to enhance their overall level of information security. While the company is considering introducing other Trend Micro solutions, continuing Kernel’s fruitful partnership with Trend Micro.