Cyber threats are sharks and every business a bleeding fish. A comprehensive defense became an even taller order when businesses were thrust into work-from-anywhere (home, hotels, Starbucks) environments and attackers got more time, more targets, and more tenacity for hunting.

What is Cybersecurity?

Cybersecurity is the practice of protecting your networked systems, applications, data, and team members from digital threats. Whether breached internally or externally, by intention or accident, the endgame remains the same—compromised data, extorted money, and frozen operations.

To identify and control the breach, recover lost downtime and revenue, and rebuild the long-term damage to brand trust costs your team more than just money. Unnecessary system complexity and lack of expertise both exacerbate costs, so add those to the $8.64M already in your shopping cart if you plan to pay the average data breach cost in the US (IBM).

The good news? A coherent strategy of safe user practices and advanced security infrastructure can take your business from Bruce Wayne to Batman. Automated analytics and artificial intelligence in expert hands will better equip you to reduce the length and impact of disaster, downtime, and damage to your bottom line.

Types of Cybersecurity Threats

Development in advanced security applications and industry compliance has brought a lot to the table for modern business in 2021. A free iPad in your inbox is not among that, but the ever–persistent attempt to spy on, hold ransom, or destroy your sensitive personal and company information is. 

There are many flavors both cyber threats—and the protective measures to identify and subdue them—come in, so awareness is vital to guide your defensive strategy.

Phishing

Phishing is a form of social engineering in which seemingly reputable sources send counterfeit messages to coax sensitive information out of a victim or deploy malicious software like ransomware on their system. Phishers can build trust or manufacture urgency by text message or phone call but usually hunt through wide-net or targeted email approaches.

With attacks increasing in sophistication and frequency, it is crucial your organization educate your users and implement the necessary infrastructure to avoid vulnerability to identity theft, financial loss, or an entirely compromised network.

Ransomware

Ransomware is malicious software designed to obstructs access to or threaten to expose a user’s files, applications, or databases until a set ransom is paid. The attacker will usually provide instructions to pay the sum by a deadline for an organization to avoid total data loss or compromise.

A breach through just one gateway could turn a computer hijacking into network paralysis. More advanced ransomware programs make sidestepping the payment as difficult as tracing the perpetrator.

Malware

Malware is any invasive program or file designed to infiltrate a computer, network, server, or entire system. Attackers usually leverage malicious programs like trojan horses, ransomware, spyware, and more to encrypt, steal, or delete sensitive data for financial gain or identity theft. 

Depending on the type and design of malware, an attacker might monitor your users’ activity, mine cryptocurrency, or even hijack core computing processes and launch denial-of-service attacks against your other networks. 

A common strategy to prevent a breach is a secured perimeter, but without continuous monitoring, malware might slip in undetected. Therefore, a well-rounded defense requires multi-layered safeguards in conjunction with high network visibility and intelligence.

Social Engineering

Social engineering is the craft of manipulating a victim into performing suspicious actions or revealing sensitive information, typically for identity theft, financial gain, or data and system compromise. Once you’re breached, attackers can deploy malicious software to access confidential files or even hijack your computer.

While these actions go against our better judgment, attackers often employ trust, fear, and urgency to impulse victims into revealing passwords, installing malware, transferring money. A human is usually easier to exploit than security vulnerabilities are to penetrate, so it is imperative both your technology and your team are equipped to identify, respond to, and control these threats.

Cybersecurity Services

vCISO Services

Technologies and regulations update every year, cyber threats develop every day, and businesses are breached every minute (Cobalt). Equipping your organization to navigate these waters without forking the cash for a full-time executive created the need for vCISO services—seasoned IT guidance adapted to your objectives and flexible with your resources.

A Virtual Chief Information Security Officer has the technical skills to prevent, detect, and respond to cyber threats, and implement the security policies, practices, and infrastructure to streamline your team productivity and protect your critical processes.

Compliance as a Service

CaaS, or Compliance as a Service, is an agreement framework designed to simplify your organization’s privacy, security, and data by holding your compliance to industry-mandated regulations. Whether housed on-premise or in the cloud, your information assets are still at risk of cyberattack.

The CaaS model offloads the internal burdens of navigating regulatory compliance and improving your security posture to a dedicated third party.

Cybersecurity Insurance

Organizations often perceive cyber insurance to be characteristically pricey, ambiguous in coverage, and unnecessary because of a seemingly low likelihood of cyberattack, and don’t insure as a result. With data loss, downtime, network damage, and your bottom line at stake, the realizable value of optimized insurance investments guided and managed by third-party experts is too lucrative to ignore.

Managed EDR 

With more sites and more Starbucks joining remote workforces, organizations suffer less control of perimeter security and drag more time and money managing multiple, non-integrated security tools. Add poor password hygiene to the mix and, without advanced security in place, you might as well wait for a disturbance in the force to alert you of breach.

Managed Endpoint Detection & Response (EDR) defends all your endpoints from attacks at every stage in the threat lifecycle and collects and analyzes security threat information to identify breaches as they occur. As your network grows, MEDR yields visibility into an increasingly complex range of endpoint controls and reduces the time needed to see the full context of an attack. 

With several EDR functions consolidated into a single cloud platform and console, your automated and centralized threat management simplifies your security stack, minimizes your expenses, and eases your internal team burden.

Security Operations Center (SOC)

A Security Operations Center employs people, processes, and technology as your organization’s central command post to identify and respond to threat incidents in your network. Often at the core of a cybersecurity program, a SOC improves your security posture and enables your team while prevention, detection, analysis, and response are managed automatically. 

From one central location, analysts monitor your network and process incident and context data fed to the SOC from your devices, applications, and networks. The extra buck toward SOC will grant your organization the visibility to more quickly and effectively respond to threat incidents or suspicious activity. 

Zero-Trust VPN Optimization

A VPN has been a must-have for users needing private and unrestricted internet access, but if your organization is stuck with slow speeds and vulnerable to breach, you’re not milking all this cow has to offer.

Zero trust network access (ZTNA) encompasses a set of technologies that operate on the adaptive trust model, in which authorization is never implied and access is only granted on a need-to-know basis, with the least-privileged basis defined by specific policies.

ZTNA splits network and application access to limit the risk of compromised device intrusion. Your team can seamlessly and securely connect to private applications without exposing your network, or confidential files to the internet.

Password Vault

With 15 billion leaked in 2020, credentials are proving potent vulnerabilities to organizations of all sizes. With a cybercriminal methodology favorite—email compromise—infiltrating inboxes and networks alike, strong and regularly updated passwords are key to protecting against data loss (Forbes).

Password Vault is a centralized credential storage system that allows your team to store and share access to your organization’s services, sites, and applications across devices. Zero-trust protocol replaces inefficient or unsafe methods like multi-vault or unencrypted storage to reduce the risk of compromise and time spent recalling changed passwords. 

Benefits like real-time password quality and compromise assessment and secure auto-fill functionality ease user experience so your team can stop rethinking ways to make their first pet’s name unhackable. 

Cybersecurity Awareness Training

Cybersecurity awareness refers to end-user knowledge and practices to protect your network and organization from cyber threats. A risk-aware team understands what cyber threats abound, how breaches impact business, and what measures resume and enable secure operations.

Risk-averse practice alone does not eliminate the potential for cybercrime, though—in fact, it’s likely two or three organizations have suffered ransomware attacks just in the time you’ve been reading about cybersecurity awareness (DataProt).

As malware strains and cyber schemes multiply like rabbits, your end-users, or the human element of your digital defense, become an increasingly vulnerable chink in your armor. A cohesive strategy demands your users employ security diligence in conjunction with advanced infrastructure and current policy.

Secure Access Service Edge (SASE)

Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) is a networking approach that converges network and security point solutions into a unified architecture to simplify secure networking in a cloud-delivered service model.

Point solutions solve business challenges with a complexity that is costly to own and manage. With your IT team slowed, critical tasks can’t be addressed as quickly or effectively as the risk landscape demands. With SASE being cloud-native, identity-driven, and universally distributed, your organization can securely unify all its edges—mobile, WAN, cloud, and IoT).