82,000 NEW malware threats are being released every day— and they are targeting you, your business and your bank account.
These days, every business is under cyber-attack. Every day, every business. Think you are too small, think again.
Cyber-attacks are big business and they are targeting small and medium sized business more and more. You (and your staff) make it easy pickings for a simple ransomware attack, that without a good business continuity plan, can leave you out of business and left with no choice but to pay the ransom they are demanding.
The best defense is a good offense. Don't wait around to be a victim— instead take a few proactive steps to protect you, your business and your bank account.
It does not cost a lot of money to put protective measures in place, and it is almost always cheaper than the costs of getting hacked. Beyond down time, there is damage to your reputation, fines, lawsuits and costly litigation.
Our approach to protecting you involves:
- Education— First step is to understand how these breaches occur.
- Layered Protection— Simple virus software is no longer enough. You need a more sophisticated approach with multiple layers of protection
- Business Continuity— These days, the most common breach is a Ransomware attack. The best way to recover from this is to use your data continuity solution, restore to before the attack and get back to business (this can be done in minutes instead of days)
- Network Monitoring— Often the suspicious activity will throw up red flags that our monitoring systems will catch, giving us a crucial head start to stopping things before they get started.
We offer a security assessment of your network. It checks over 56 different aspects of your network, inside and out to identify weakness in your setup that could be exploited. We provide you with a compreshensive report with all the details, as well as a summarized action plan to get those issues fixed.
If you have not had an security assessment run on your network within the last 6-12 months, please contact us so we can help you get this done. It is a critical step to keeping your business safe and protected.
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AndroPedia Tech Library
As part of our service, it is important to keep our client-partners well informed on IT developments, news, and best practices. Here is just a sampling of typical items from our AndroPediaSM library archive:
Securing your data and your network is a bigger job in 2018 than it has been in years past—and if you're looking at trends or the news, you can probably guess that network security is only going to get more important and cumbersome in the future.
Cybersecurity is now a common household term and that's a good thing. The page has been turned on data security and people regularly recognize that we need to protect ourselves both personally and professionally from cyber crime and related threats.
To illustrate where the cybersecurity and cyber crime industries are moving here are a few stats:
- Cyber crime damage costs are predicted to hit $6 trillion annually by 2021
- Cybersecurity spending to exceed $1 trillion by 2021
- Global ransomware incidents are predicted to hit a rate of one attack every 14 seconds by 2019
The threats to data and networks are clearly going nowhere so it is important that you have a plan in place to protect your business (and yourself).
Different software applications and hardware solutions are designed to address specific security concerns. This means that while one solution may give you complete protection from one threat, it may not be suited to protect you from another.
The solution for these weak points is to "layer" your security and design a solution that covers and protects your network to the best of its abilities.
What You Should Expect From A Layered Network Security Solution
A good layered security solution for your network is going to include the following components:
1. Professional Firewall Solution:
Your firewall is designed to help protect your network from external threats. It does this by blocking access to your network while allowing your users to communicate outside of the network. While a firewall is a great way to protect your network from intrusions, it can only protect your system from outside activity. A firewall cannot prevent one of your users from giving unauthorized permissions or access to programs or other users.
2. Professional Antivirus Software:
Antivirus software is a standard security solution designed to detect and block malware, viruses and other bugs from taking action against your network. An antivirus solution typically depends on a predefined catalog of known issues. The software uses this catalog to block those known issues from impacting you. The issue with this is that new viruses, malware, spyware and bugs are produced daily. If your solution is not actively updating and monitoring the internet for new incidents, it won't be able to protect you from new threats in real time. Antivirus solutions also cannot always block a user from disregarding a warning and downloading a bad file/clicking on a bad link.
3. Email Spam Prevention/Filters:
Spam is more than just an annoying thing filling up your inbox. A majority of viruses and bugs that get through your firewall/antivirus do so by hiding in email messages. Cyber criminals know that if they send enough emails, somebody is going to click a bad link or download a compromised attachment. By filtering out spam, you dramatically decrease the opportunity for someone to accidentally introduce a virus to the network. Again though, spam filters don't catch everything so they cannot prevent a user from making a mistake.
4. DNS Filtering/Protection:
DNS stands for Domain Name System. This piece of your network controls email delivery and is the component that allows you to browse websites. When configured, a DNS filter can prevent your employees from accessing specific types of sites. For example, a DNS filter can be set up to prevent employees from accessing social media or other blacklisted sites. This security also helps keep malware or other viruses from spreading throughout your network by masking your devices and server. This is one element of your network security that isn't heavily impacted by regular users but if it is not set up properly and managed properly it can't protect you from much.
5. Employee Training & Education:
You may have noticed that almost any of the security layers mentioned above have specific strengths and weaknesses. Additionally, each component had a weakness related to human or user error. The fact is that users and honest mistakes are the root cause of the majority of data breaches, viruses, downtime and incidents on your network. That doesn't mean your employees and coworkers are intentionally breaking protocol or doing things wrong. Most of the time these are honest mistakes like clicking a link in an email, downloading a file with a hidden virus or visiting an infected/malicious site and unknowingly giving cyber criminals usernames & password information.
And That's Just The Beginning!
These are just five common pieces of a layered network security setup. They all work together to help cover different vulnerabilities and behaviors. There are many other software and hardware solutions that can increase your layered network security and reduce vulnerability. Some of those include:
- Encryption
- Dark Web Monitoring Services
- Dual Authentication
- Password Management
- Data Backups
- Disaster Recovery Planning
- Scheduled & Regular Patches/Updates
- Security Protocols for Remote Devices
- VPN
- Network Security Assessments (at least once a year)
The most important part to a successful layered network security setup is to take your individual needs and environment into account. There is no "One Size Fits All" solution and there is no one solution that is going to guarantee 360 protection for your network. Be wary of any vendor who tries to sell you something like that.
The goal should be to protect your environment to the best of anyone's ability and to educate/train your staff adequately to mitigate risk.
You will also want to make sure and take any specific compliance requirements or regulations for your industry into account. Most any business that has data needs to maintain certain standards for data protection.
To discuss any of the layers for a layered network security solution listed above or your environment, please reach out to our IT consulting services team serving the Chicagoland area: 815.836.0030
For more information on employee data security training, see our WeNetwork.com/tech/pii-protect-program/ page.
This post appeared first on Andromeda's WeNetwork.com/tech/ats-blog/ web page.
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