How To Protect Your Company Using A Cybersecurity Service
How To Protect Your Company Using A Cybersecurity Service
Do you know how a cybersecurity service can protect your company?
There are many tools involved in a well thought out cybersecurity strategy. An antivirus solution is one, but business owners should think of cybersecurity as a layered approach. There’s no one silver bullet solution for ultimate protection that keeps everything else safe. It’s more about the little things you can implement by layering different tools on top of each other.
What Tools Does a Good Cybersecurity Service Use?
There’s much more to cybersecurity than just antivirus programs. In the CopperTree cybersecurity stack, we have about 10 different tools we use to provide a high level of protection. We have documented standards for keeping systems locked down and infrastructure secure. We review our best practices and standards every month, along with staying up-to-date on the latest cybersecurity tools and implementing them in our standard process.
Every month we see each of our clients in order to evaluate their systems against our best practices. We look for risks in infrastructure and anything that should be addressed, updated, or changed.
Securing People and Processes
It’s not just about technology. It’s also about people and processes and making sure that your employees are familiar with the risks. For example, people should understand that when they receive an email, they should make sure it’s coming from a legitimate trusted source before clicking on any included links.
There are different layers to ensuring your company’s cyber security:
- People layer
- Technology layer
- Process layer. That’s where we make sure that we’re doing all the proper maintenance, keeping the systems up to date, and properly patching your systems so they are secure.
Why Do Organizations Need Cybersecurity Service?
Being proactive with your cybersecurity is vital to your business. Hiring an IT security team AFTER a cybersecurity incident unfortunately will still have a significant impact on your business.
One organization we worked with recently went through a cyberattack at the beginning of the year. Someone got admin access to their system, which was fully compromised by ransomware.
The ransomware encrypted their data and their backups. They weren’t able to get their backups running and they lost about a month’s worth of data.
The disruption to their business ended up costing them a lot of money. Their systems were down for days. It took a good deal of time to get back and running. They had to bring in an incident response team and go through a cleanup process. And because they were so reliant on their systems they were unable to serve their clients during that time, and their clients were impacted. Some of them ended up leaving for another organization.
Obviously, that’s a worst-case scenario that every organization wants to avoid.
What is the Likelihood of My Business Being a Target?
The size of an organization isn’t exactly a factor when considering cybersecurity risk because any organization is susceptible, regardless of its complexity or value of data.
Unless you’re a very large company, it’s unlikely that you’ll be specifically targeted. It’s more likely that you’ll get caught up in an automated attack. It could be ransomware, a phishing email, or something of that nature.
The biggest cybersecurity incidents that we see tend to be email-based. Someone may send an email with a malicious attachment that will compromise your systems. When an employee clicks the link, your system will be infiltrated by ransomware.
Phishing emails are another common but less technical tactic. We’ve seen a lot of emails to finance people that appear to be from their CEO, for example, asking them to transfer money to a questionable account.
Educating End-Users to Avoid Attacks
Generally, the more sophisticated the attack, the less likely somebody is to notice it. So we make sure to educate our people so that they know what’s out there and what to look for.
One common strategy is social engineering, or when somebody pretends to be someone they’re not, in order to get you to do something. This would be considered a phishing attempt. Impostors will send an email to gather information, and then they’ll use that information in their social engineering attack. They may send an email to the finance person, pretending to be the CEO for bank account transfers.
In that case, we want people to think critically. Is this a request that could logically come from the CEO, or is this a little strange? Most of the time, when people are alert, they can identify these attacks.
Here’s an example. We worked with a client where an employee in finance got an email that appeared to be from the CEO. The employee just walked over to the CEO’s office and said, is this really you? And it wasn’t. The best thing you can do is to educate your people.
Physical Cybersecurity Services
One aspect of security that can be overlooked is physical cybersecurity services. You can have all your systems locked down as tight as can be in the digital realm, but if somebody can walk through your front door and straight into your server room, you still have a significant gap in your security layer.
We start addressing physical concerns by verifying the security of the server rooms. All of the core infrastructure should be safely locked away and behind some kind of access control mechanism.
Part of your vCIO’s job is to make sure that your organization is covered from a cybersecurity perspective. They’re constantly looking for ways to improve your cybersecurity status, which includes trying new technology for an added level of protection.
There’s a sweet spot for every organization where you’re spending enough to be secure and you’re not overspending or limiting how you use technology in your organization.
Adapting to New Threats
Our team stays on top of new threats by continuously monitoring your cybersecurity. We will immediately adjust our systems and processes to accommodate new security risks.
For example, various technical organizations issue news releases with the latest cybersecurity threats. We will check into those for validity. We’re always asking if there is something else we should be doing, or that our clients should be doing within their organizations, to stay on top of things and stay safe.
Compliance Requirements & Tests
Sometimes our clients will ask us if they should be getting regular penetration tests on their system. Unless you have a regulatory requirement, that isn’t something that we do on a regular basis. That said, we do have some clients that need to meet specific security requirements like ISO 27,001, a SOC 2, or some other compliance requirement.
In those cases, we’ll bring in a third party to do a quarterly or annual penetration test, and do an assessment against those controls. We work with a third party because, even though we do everything required on a day-to-day basis, you can’t check your own work. So we always recommend a third party’s involvement if there is a regulatory requirement.
Insurance as a Cybersecurity Service
If you think your organization has been penetrated or compromised in some way, we’ll bring in the incident response team immediately. If you have cyber-insurance, which is a critical part of security, the insurance company probably has an incident response team. They’ll handle the initial cleanup. They’ll look into what happened, who did it, and what systems were compromised.
The role of a cybersecurity service is to coordinate with the incident response team. We give them access to the infrastructure to do that initial cleanup and figure out what happened.
Once the incident is contained, we get involved again to help rebuild the infrastructure and whatever changes need to happen.
Cybersecurity Service Standards
There are several different cybersecurity standards depending on your industry and compliance requirements.
One of the standards is ISO 27001, and another common one is SOC 2. Most organizations won’t put that in place unless they’re required to, either because of their clients or the industry they’re in.
If you require any of those standards, implementing will consist of a moderate amount of non-technical work as well as you updating your policies, procedures and any other internal changes. Here at CopperTree we can assist with both.
Cybersecurity Service Across Industries
CopperTree works across a broad variety of different industries, and it doesn’t matter what industry you’re in. The technology that supports the companies we work with is all fundamentally similar. They have servers, networks, endpoints, backups, email, Wi-Fi, and all of those standards.
The primary difference between organizations is the software that they use. Every business has its own unique applications that work in their organization. Our best practices around security, however, can be applied to any industry and any organization.
CopperTree takes a holistic approach to IT security. We look at where the data lives and how it moves within the system. We use both on-premise server and cloud server approaches to secure your information. You want to be secure in every scenario.
Remember, if you’re connecting to your system through an unsecured public Wi-Fi network, you will need to secure your data against threats that arise from an unsecured network.
CopperTree strives to maintain that holistic perspective. We look at all aspects of IT security, whether it’s on-premise, in the cloud, in a SaaS application, on your desktop, or wherever it might be. We make sure we’ve always got you covered.
