The Core Components Every Cybersecurity Program Needs
Oct 14, 2020
Fall is just around the corner, and that means one thing: cybersecurity. Why? Because every year, October is recognized as National Cybersecurity Awareness Month. NCSAM is a great reminder to review your organizational cybersecurity posture and reflect on where you are on the cybersecurity journey. Let’s start with some simple questions:
- Have you thought about your security posture in the new world of COVID?
- Do you know what security threats have evolved during this shift of working from home (WFH) for this new wave of the remote worker?
- Are you questioning the strength of your security?
- Are you wasting REM cycles at night worrying if your system is secure?
Whatever your answers to these questions, we have some simple guidance for the basic components of every cybersecurity framework.
- Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA): Cybersecurity best practice is to MFA for ADMIN and remote access. We recommend it on ALL accounts; basically, everything and everyone. On a personal note, if you have not yet MFA’d your banking and email accounts, stop reading and do it now!
- Secure Email: Protect your company’s biggest surface area of attack from phishing and malware. Train your employees to recognize threats from external emails and how to identify phishing attempts. Deploy software to scan external documents and website links from external senders. Enough said.
- Endpoint Protection: If you have been using you the same old AV (anti-virus) for the last couple years, it may be time to upgrade your tool kit. The AV market has converged and matured, including the integration of EPP (endpoint protection) with EDR (endpoint detect and response). The next generation EPP improves the ability to identify indicators of attack, investigate with real-time forensics, sophisticated visualizations and perform remediation.
- Threat & Vulnerability Management: This is all about the arms race -- from identification of vulnerabilities to the ability for hackers to exploit before your Security team can identify the threat and fix it, or even know about it. Scanning, threat hunting and subscriptions to security intelligence about your IT technology products and their patch or configuration availability/cycle is essential.
- Configuration & Patch Management: This is the other side of the coin of your Threat and Vulnerability Management program. Monthly or pro-active patching, with the ability to immediately implement security patching, is mandatory! Make sure vendor security and product patches are applied expeditiously to both those IT systems that are internet facing, as well as internal. IT solutions that are no longer supported by the vendor create a huge risk. We can help with that.
- Internet Protection: The internet is the playground for hackers seeking to lure you into a trap while you are surfing the internet at work or from your home -- you need to be protected. If someone clicks on a bad link from a website, it’s game over without proper protection. Hosting a company website introduces another set of threats in protecting unauthorized access to sensitive information or availability of your website and we can help also help with that.
- Backups: The importance of backups and protecting them from cyber attacks cannot be stressed enough. Ransomware alone validates the need for secure backups. Without them, you are wide open to bad actors looking for easy targets.
You may be doing all these things already, but what about your partners? That’s why it’s beneficial to take some time and commit to a stronger security posture. These seven core areas above are just the first step in building a robust cybersecurity framework.
We look forward to sharing more and taking you on this journey.
Contact us today if you are looking for help in strengthening the foundation of your cybersecurity framework.
Author:
Erich Escobar 2020
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