Cyber threats are a constant worry for all organisations and if you are a business that is not concerned currently, we would urge you to consider the threats that you and all organisations face. There are ever-evolving cyber threats targeting us all, whether that is with our personal accounts and data or where we work.
On average, a threat actor spends around 16 days inside an IT infrastructure before being detected, which will of course vary, but its scary to think about how our personal and business data is being accessed and used during this time. Gone are the days where threat actors immediately made themselves apparent and harmed our systems. It’s now about undertaking reconnaissance, understanding systems, copying data and altering financial information.
The weak point in any IT infrastructure is us, the users and the devices we use. Phishing attacks, social engineering, credential theft and the exploitation of software vulnerabilities are some of the most common ways a threat actor will force their way in, and this is where all organisations should evolve their security layers to reduce the likelihood of falling victim to a cyber attack.
Simply installing an anti-virus agent and occasionally updating operating systems is not good enough, so improving the protection for our endpoints and identities is key to identifying and stopping threats.
Here are some of the ways to achieve this:
- Implementing an EDR (Endpoint Detect Response) which drastically improves the capability of what a traditional anti-virus provided. Instead of scanning for a known set of threats, an EDR will analyse software, process and user behaviours, looking for anomalies so acts such as sudden mass data copying or the execution of many command sets can be halted. This vastly reduces the likelihood of a threat actor executing malware, or laterally moving to other areas of your IT infrastructure.
- Managing devices with an RMM (Remote Management Monitoring) is essential to ensure device health, but also to manage operating systems and third-party application security patching. This helps to protect against those software vulnerabilities that threat actors can leverage.
- Identity protection and monitoring is a key area to protect. The protection can be as simple as enforcing MFA (Multi Factor Authentication) which has been shown in studies to block over 99.9% of account compromise attacks. Further to this, undertaking dark web monitoring for your email domains can identify any stolen credentials for your organisation, allowing you to address these proactively.
- Phishing is one of the most common cyber threats and are prevalent because they exploit human psychology and can be carried out on a large scale with relatively low effort. Implementing additional email security layers is key to protect against that entry point for threat actors and the weak link in us as humans.
These key layers of protection will help your organisation against the ever evolving landscape and although you may have never experienced a cyber event, it will happen at some point and building your defences is essential to keeping your data safe, your business trading and your important reputation intact.
