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Cybersecurity
Explained
Before we tell you what we do, let’s first go over some cybersecurity basics and how it relates to businesses with 20-250 employees.
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So what exactly are hackers after?
Cybercriminals break into your systems to steal data, install ransomware, act as a bridge to pivot to other systems, interrupt services, or gain unauthorized access to sensitive data.
Ransomware is typically the most talked about in the news, followed by data breaches
In the United States, the FBI Handles Internet Crime through the IC3 Division
Below is page 5 from their 2020 Annual Report
As we can see Cybercrime is going up…way up
Many Small Businesses think they are not a target
This is in fact an incredibly dangerous way of thinking. In reality, while we often hear about the Home Depot’s and Pipelines in the media, small businesses make up the majority of victims due to their limited budgets and resources.
You got to think a company as large as Target has a whole IT Security department, yet they were compromised for millions of pieces of PII.
We act as your outsourced IT Security Department and help to lower your risks
We do this with a variety of tools and tasks, some of which are outlined below:
Security Assessments
We often start out by looking at your IT infrastructure, assessing vulnerabilities, and potentially coordinating penetration testing
In addition, we figure out the business side of the decision, which is how much downtime can you afford, and how critical is it that company data be kept private.
Inventory & Access Control
Many devices (including printers, scanners, security cameras, fax machines, smart appliances, HVAC controllers) and being hacked every day. We work with you to track every device that is on the network and segregate your network into different VLANs so this way should an IoT device get popped it can’t affect the rest of the network.
Cybersecurity Awareness Training & Phishing Drills
90% of data breaches occur due to phishing; where someone clicks a link in an email unknowingly often being tricked into it.
We start by training your staff on how to spot these attacks and how to report them to IT. Then we send simulations to test people.
Patch Management
Every day hackers are discovering new vulnerabilities and exploits, while software developers release updates to fix those security holes. We work to keep all of your software, hardware, and applications up to date so that you are protected. This requires specialized tools to track all of your software/devices, and testing of patches before pushing them out.
Email Filtering
We work to set up email filtering for our clients to carefully examine all emails, remove spam, phishing, viruses, and provide impersonation protection. Often it takes some tweaking to achieve a balance so that too much information is not blocked. We use tools like Mimecast for this.
Next-Gen Anti-Virus
We work with standard anti-virus protection as well as next-gen products like SentinelOne. These new tools work like traditional anti-virus except they are super sensitive (often returning false positives) and are able to power off a device if ransomware is suspected. We configure these tools to report back to us, and work with them constantly fine-tuning and whitelisting every updated application.
Firewalls
Your firewall is the doorkeeper to the network; controlling everything that goes in and out. We typically set up firewall security appliances for clients; we are a big fan of Meraki with their Intrusion Prevention System and ability to blacklist entire countries/regions.
MFA, VPN & MDM
We work with clients to set up multi-factor authentication(MDM) into applications (i.e. Duo, Yubikeys) so in the event a password is compromised, hackers still cannot get in without a code or token.
In addition to that, we set up and support VPN’s for encrypted access to the corporate network from home, and Mobile Device Management (MDM) to be able to remote wipe lost/stolen phones and encrypt company data.
Cyber Risks Insurance
If you can’t eliminate risk, transfer it! We suggest all businesses carry cyber risks insurance. We can work with your broker on any compliance questionnaires as well as assist with policy review to ensure your business is completely covered in the case of an unforeseen incident.