Digital transformation can be a real challenge, especially when it comes to security. And a multifaceted and fragmented technological landscape increases the challenge to secure critical data, intellectual property and brand image – your most valuable assets – safe.
Your environment requires a strong defense line
Tackle the threats and secure critical data
Everything valuable must be protected while ensuring availability to the organization and third parties as defined by you. Any downtime could have a direct impact on revenue and a negative effect on your brand image. Detection and reaction to threats in real-time is as essential to your organization as your managed security infrastructure.
Evaluate your options and your choices
Your growing cloud applications and critical data must be as secure as your on-premise equipment. The diversity of technologies within your infrastructure, from mobile to broadband, makes it hard to ensure the appropriate levels of security. It’s essential to protect your activities from Internet attacks and your internal network at the perimeter. Being tied to any one particular vendor or technology can be hazardous in the fast-paced environment of security.
Never forget the human factor
Security solutions should be user friendly with no impact on anyone’s productivity. They should be easy to manage for your IT security teams and provide secure access to your corporate resources and cloud applications. Your mobile fleet needs protection from the many emerging forms of attack that only an advanced detection mobile solution can provide.
If you’d like to learn more about cyber-threats and how to protect your business and to secure critical data, contact us here at Demakis Technologies.
Has your organization ever had to deal with ransomware, malware, virus infections, or cyberattack? This attack may have seen important services fail and meant employees couldn’t do their work for hours or even days.
It could even have blocked customers from accessing your digital or physical services. There’s a good chance this has already happened to you, given that the number of reports of cyber incidents has never been as high as it was last year.
The damage cyberattack does to organizations ranges from unauthorized access via a relatively simple hack to large-scale theft of sensitive data, resulting in prolonged downtime. Effective recovery costs a lot of money and damages the confidence of your customers and investors. Whatever happens, don’t let a cyberattack destroy your organization. Prevention is better than cure, but if it does happen, it’s important to act quickly and limit the consequences.
The Challenge for Companies
As an organization, you must always be able to count on having structurally secure access to all customer data and business-sensitive data, while at the same time respecting all market-related regulations, legislation, and company policy. Reducing costs also often plays a major role, especially at a time when IT teams need to do more than ever in terms of innovation, security, and optimization. That is the number-one challenge that CTOs, CIOs, and IT managers face today.
Affected by a Cyberattack?
If something does go wrong and your organization falls victim to a cyberattack, the often already overloaded IT staff work overtime to get the affected services and security back up and running as quickly as possible. These sorts of situations can be a frightening wake-up call, suddenly making everyone aware of the organization’s unexpectedly high vulnerability to cyberattacks.
This is when people start asking: how can we better secure our organization, employees, and customers against cyberattacks? And what’s the most cost-effective solution?
Managed Security Services Providers (MSSPs) provide structural security solutions against cyberattacks, including always up-to-date expertise in the latest cyber threats and appropriate solutions.
What is a Managed Security Services Provider (MSSP)?
Because security threats are becoming increasingly common, many organizations are partnering with a Managed Security Services Provider (MSSP), often in addition to their existing security program. MSSPs provide professional monitoring and management, protecting hardware and data from potential cyberattack.
A Managed Security Service Provider is a third party that manages and implements network security and other forms of security for organizations. This could include:
Blocking viruses and spam;
Managed Firewalls;
Detecting intrusion attempts;
Setting up and securing a virtual private network (VPN);
Implementing system changes or upgrades.
In addition, MSSPs continuously monitor the security devices and systems in the organization. Most MSSPs offer a wide range of services, including:
Device management;
Log monitoring and management;
Vulnerability management;
Consultancy services.
Managed Security Service Providers generally offer their services in a software-as-a-service (SaaS) model. This means that your organization doesn’t need any extra hardware or staff – and this has a number of major benefits! We’ve listed the eight main ones for you.
Eight major benefits of having an MSSP
1. MSSP lowers costs in many areas
Reduced training costs
Working with an MSSP results in major cost savings on training and ensures IT teams have up-to-date knowledge of cyber security and threats. You benefit directly from the expertise and experience of the MSSP.
Lower staffing costs
You also save on staffing costs. Using an MSSP means you don’t incur any costs for hiring one or more full-time InfoSec professionals. In addition, MSSPs continuously monitor security systems – 24 hours a day, 7 days a week! You can’t even expect that from your best employees.
Lower investment costs
An MSSP spreads the fixed costs of investments in technology over a broad customer base. And as a customer, you benefit directly from these savings. With an MSSP, you save directly on the costs of your own hardware, applications, and experts.
No unexpected costs
An MSSP is the solution to a lot of your concerns, and it makes it clear what you have to do as an organization. After all, managing everything in-house means new rules and guidelines can come as a surprise, resulting in high unexpected costs when you need to hire industry and compliance experts.
2. More time to focus on your business
An MSSP frees up time, so you can work on the things that really move your business forward – no more continuously having to resolve incidents. Your IT teams can reclaim time to focus on developing things, such as new services (innovation), network-related optimisations, business roadmaps, and more.
3. Access to unique expertise and tools
Are your IT staff experts in cyber security? Do they know all the latest developments, techniques, and technologies that guarantee safety? IT security is a unique expertise area that requires continuous training and education. For many organizations, experienced and dedicated staff for IT security are not only expensive, but also difficult to find.
Gaining access to the best cyber security solutions and technologies is a key asset and incentive to start working with a Managed Security Services Provider. An MSSP also provides independent cyber-security advice; this isn’t the case for suppliers of hardware and tools.
One of the main benefits of working with a Managed Security Services Provider is the broad cyber-security expertise it offers, something that many companies don’t have in-house. Outsourcing this to a Managed Security Service Provider means you can be certain that a security expert will protect and manage your data properly. The certified employees of good MSSPs are always aware of developments in industry and in modern cyberattack.
Organizations that place their trust in an MSSP are often more effective at protecting their own organizations than when they rely on their own security teams alone. Of course, this doesn’t alter the fact that both teams have to make proper arrangements about how they communicate with one another.
4. Direct cyber security
IT teams themselves often don’t have time to keep up to date with the best next-generation firewalls or cyber-security topics, such as endpoint protection, phishing, and advanced threat prevention.
The good news is that as a partner of your company, an MSSP always has that knowledge at hand and applies it directly. From the moment an organization chooses a good MSSP, that expertise is immediately accessible: your MSSP is dedicated to ensuring the security of your network, endpoints, and data 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. This is intelligent, always-on cyber security expertise!
5. Automatic detection and fixing of vulnerabilities
An MSSP takes a lot of work off your hands when it comes to detecting and fixing vulnerabilities. An MSSP can:
Structurally detect and reduce vulnerabilities in critical systems;
Proactively predict threats, especially and specifically for targeted cyberattack;
Automatically detect important offensive tactics and methods in critical systems;
Respond effectively and quickly;
Reduce the likelihood of an attack succeeding and becoming an ‘event’ that takes a lot of time to control.
6. Increase action-oriented insight and reduce alert fatigue
Day in, day out, IT professionals have to deal with countless security alerts originating from various security tools used within the company. Research by the Cloud Security Alliance shows that more than 31% of IT security specialists do not respond to these alerts, as most of them are false positives.
In short, alerts often fail in their purpose: they’re either not usable or don’t contain information that could be used to take action. This form of alert fatigue increases the likelihood that actual cyberattack will go unnoticed.
‘Over 31% of IT security specialists don’t respond to security alerts, due to the high number of false positives.’ – Source: research by The Cloud Security Alliance
Many cyber-security solutions cause integration problems when exchanging data, resulting in inefficient and ineffective data silos. MSSPs usually have integrated technical solutions that fully focus on action-oriented alerts.
So if your MSSP sends you alerts, these are hardly ever redundant or unusable.
Most MSSPs use technology of all types and sizes that in-house specialists have integrated over time for businesses. The MSSP therefore offers solutions that avoid situations where IT staff receive endless alerts, while at the same time increasing response efficiency. Moreover, thanks to the insights provided by an MSSP, you can set easily measurable goals for cyber security.
7. Scalability
Another benefit is that MSSPs can be scaled perfectly to your needs, and the required security IT infrastructure can be easily adapted. So if you temporarily need extra capacity, you simply scale up. Resources automatically grow with your capacity needs. And if you need to scale back at a later time, you can. MSSPs respond quickly.
8. Good guarantees and fast response times
Good MSSPs offer Service Level Agreements (SLAs) alongside their 24-hour, 7-days-a-week, 365-days-a-year support An SLA contains guidelines for customers on incident response times and guarantees in the event of security incidents.
In short, all potential risks associated with cyber threats are shifted from your organization to a specialized third party, the MSSP.
Conclusion
Cybercrime is evolving at an incredible pace, with even the largest international companies discovering vulnerable points in their security systems. Without proper protection, tracking these threats would take an awful lot of time and energy, not to mention manpower and salaries for qualified in-house IT specialists.
Today’s threat landscape poses a real risk to your sensitive data, profitability, and reputation. IT security is an ongoing activity that requires a clear understanding of how users, customers, and applications access data and how devices are configured. An MSSP is the solution and also provides Regular Cyber Security Assessments.
Cost savings
It’s often the cost that prevents a company from hiring MSSPs. But that’s a misconception. Hiring these providers usually saves your organization a lot of money:
Reducing costs after a cyber-security incident;
Fewer costs for hiring in-house experts and further training staff;
24-hour protection prevents intrusion and avoids costs;
No high investment costs;
Good prior insight into costs;
The insight an MSSP gives into cost savings is crucial.
An MSSP for your organization
Cyber security should support rather than hinder innovation and change. Manageable, flexible, resilient, and responsive protection gives your organization what it needs. If you are looking for best IT solutions for your company, be free to contact us at Demakis Technologies.
What was the driving force behind your company’s digital strategy in 2020?
Was it your CEO? Probably not. Your CTO or CISO? Perhaps.
In reality, for most organizations, it was COVID-19. In 2019, one company after another said: “work-from-home isn’t an option for us” or “we aren’t interested in shifting operations to the cloud.”
Then everything changed. The pandemic drove a massive shift towards remote work. For many companies, this wasn’t even an option — it was a case of ‘do or die.’
By April 2020, almost half of the American workforce was working from home. As organizations and employees become more comfortable with this, we shouldn’t expect a full return to the traditional in-office model anytime soon, if ever. Work-from-anywhere is the new way of doing business, with employees accessing cloud services, collaborative tools and remote systems from home and public networks – and not always through the safety of a VPN.
This rapid shift brings a host of security challenges for companies, and we think five trends will dominate the cybersecurity landscape in 2021.
1. Yesterday’s Cyber-Threats, Evolved
First off, it seems clear that ‘known’ cyber-threats such as phishing, ransomware, Trojans and botnets will remain prominent. Such attacks are increasingly automated and tailored with personal info, often mined from company websites and social networks. As trends towards automation increase, these sorts of hazards will keep growing in number and frequency.
Current events can shape these cyber-threats as well. We saw a surge in phishing emails during the pandemic, taking advantage of victims’ unfamiliarity with remote work applications or purporting to contain details of much-needed stimulus checks.
As malware and social engineering campaigns are industrialized, cyber-criminals can assess and fine-tune their attacks based on the results achieved until they have a truly dangerous threat with a considerable success rate.
2. Fileless Attacks
As the name suggests, fileless attacks – a subset of ‘living off the land’ (LotL) attacks, which exploit tools and features already present in the victim’s environment – don’t rely on file-based payloads, and generally don’t generate new files either. As a result, they have the potential to fly under the radar of many prevention and detection solutions.
A typical fileless attack might start with an emailed link to a malicious website. Social engineering tricks on that site can launch system tools, such as PowerShell, which retrieve and execute additional payloads directly in system memory. Detecting malicious use of built-in system tools, as opposed to their many legitimate automation and scripting uses, is a real challenge for traditional defenses.
Fileless attacks aren’t new, exactly. The use of system tools as backdoors has been around for decades, but owing to the tactic’s considerable success rate – and the fact that leveraging existing system processes can shorten malware development cycles – they’re rapidly trending upwards. Also, fileless attacks aren’t limited to individual organizations: we see attackers increasingly targeting service providers, abusing their infrastructure and management tools to compromise their clients.
3. Cloud and Remote Service Attacks
The COVID-19 pandemic forced companies to quickly adopt new cloud services, remote access tools and collaboration apps. However, many organizations lacked IT experts with the relevant training to properly configure these solutions – not to mention lacking the time to properly vet available tools or the budget to work with proven vendors rather than gravitating towards free alternatives of questionable quality.
Server applications, containers and cloud storage aren’t always well-protected, and are seen by cyber-criminals as prime targets with a large attack surface. Compromising one service may expose scores of organizations downstream – a variant of supply chain attack, which sidesteps organizational security by infiltrating higher levels in the supply network and deploying payloads through the tools you rely on and trust. Misconfiguration only raises the risk, exposing more services to attackers. Such scenarios will inevitably lead to data breaches.
4. Business Process Compromises
Sometimes, cyber-criminals identify vulnerabilities not in applications, but in the process flow of business operations. We’re seeing an increase in business process compromises, in which threat actors take advantage of systemic operational weaknesses for financial gain.
Attacks on business processes demand considerable knowledge of the victims’ systems and operations. They often begin with a compromised system on the target network, through which cyber-criminals can observe the organization’s processes and gradually identify weak links.
These attacks are often quite discrete, and impacted organizations may not detect them in a timely fashion – especially if the compromised process continues to work ‘as expected’ despite producing different results. As an example, attackers could siphon funds by compromising an automatic invoicing tool and changing the bank account number that’s populated into each future invoice.
5. Customized Payloads
As we’ve seen in the contrast between phishing and spear-phishing, targeted attacks, while requiring extra effort on the threat actors’ part, are considerably more effective at compromising systems and data. This approach is starting to get much more sophisticated.
Cyber-criminals can discover a lot about your network from company websites, social media and, of course, by compromising individual systems on the network. Pervasive, dual-use tools like PowerShell and WMI allow attackers to learn more about the tools and services your company relies on without setting off red flags. Armed with knowledge of these tools and the vulnerabilities present in each, they can construct payloads specifically designed to bring down not just a network, but your network.
Approaches for 2021
As cyber-criminals continue to evolve their technologies and attack strategies, organizations must adjust their approaches to cybersecurity and data protection. System-level anti-virus software isn’t enough to combat modern cyber-threats. Nor is file backup alone enough to safeguard against digital disruption by malicious actors.
Businesses need to protect all their workloads, data and applications across multiple domains, and that requires integrated solutions that automate the system monitoring, vulnerability assessments and endpoint protection required to stop emerging threats.
Let’s face it: 2020 has been a challenging year for cybersecurity and IT pros. Most have successfully navigated the massive changes, but unless they start preparing for the next wave of threats, 2021 may be just as rocky.
If you’d like to learn more about cyber-threats and how to protect your business in upcoming year, contact us here at Demakis Technologies.
The Cyber World or the Internet is a vast place where the sharing of data has its pros and cons. We all know the pros as our lives are now much easier, thanks to the Internet. However, not many of us are aware of the external cyber threats that go hand in hand with data Cybersecurity Threats.
There are certain common Cybersecurity Threats that we can avoid in order to achieve a secure and safe atmosphere for the growth of our business or any sort of activities that require shared knowledge and the transmission of data.
Cloud Jacking
Cloud Jacking is one of the most prominent types of attacks in recent times where certain code injection is being done to hamper and modify or take control of sensitive information stored in the cloud, and this is a very dangerous kind of data security threat.
The threat to IoT Devices
IoT or Internet of Things is a rapidly growing industry, and it will grow to $1.1 trillion by 2026. Since this is a new technology, it is vulnerable to cyberthreats and not much has been developed, in terms of cybersecurity, in this field.
Deepfake
Deepfake is the manipulation of an existing image or video through the help of machine learning and artificial intelligence. And this is a major threat in terms of hampering the image of someone influential running an organization which will unfortunately, become a very common cyber threat to businesses.
Mobile Malware
As more and more people are moving from laptops to mobiles and tablets, mobile Malwares are being developed to specifically target mobile phone operating systems. And in the near future, it will be one of the external cyber threats to the cybersecurity of Mobile Devices.
5G-to-Wi-Fi Security Vulnerabilities
With 5G rolling out across expansive public areas like airports, shopping centers, and hotels, the voice and data information of users on their cellular-enabled devices gets communicated via Wi-Fi access points. While mobile devices possess built-in intelligence to silently and automatically switch between cellular and Wi-Fi networks. Security researchers have already identified a number of vulnerabilities in this handover process. It is very likely that new, critical 5G-to-Wi-Fi security vulnerabilities will be exposed in 2020, and hence the importance of managing cybersecurity threats like upgrading security protocols in public Wi-Fi is needed.
Insider Cybersecurity Threats
Insider Cybersecurity Threats not only involve malicious attacks, but also the negligent use of systems and data by employees.
To protect against these threats, organizations need to quickly and accurately detect, investigate, and respond to issues that could be indicators of insider attacks and this underlines the impact of people on cybersecurity.
Application Programming Interface (API) Vulnerabilities and Breaches
Application programming interface (API) security readiness typically lags behind web app security across the majority of organizations today. Additionally, more than two-thirds of the organizations readily make APIs available to the public to allow external developers and partners to tap into their app ecosystems and software platforms.
As the dependence on APIs increases, API-based breaches will become more prominent in 2020. This will trigger adverse impacts on high-profile apps in financial processes, messaging, peer-to-peer and social media. As more organizations continue to adopt APIs for their applications, API security will be exposed as the weakest link, which could lead to cloud-native threats and put user data and privacy at risk.
Email Initiated Infections
Email Initiated Infections occur when a user clicks on an email attachment or a link in an email, either in error or thinking they’re clicking on a legitimate link/attachment. The most sophisticated attacks are nicely formatted emails, looking like they’re from a legitimate source. Links in legitimate-looking emails contain an attractive and enticing link that either collects personal data, downloads malware or deploys a small “dropper” file that calls back to the command server for more instructions. If there is a layer of protection that stops this dropper from interacting with the server, downloading the malware, or completing the infection, the chances of the infection spreading become much more limited.
User-Initiated Website Visit
When a user visits a website and inadvertently downloads malware it infects their endpoint system. This may also have implications for the network to which the device is connected to. Sometimes even “safe sites” can be the conduit of malware-laced links. However, a clear majority of the time, this type of cyberattack is caused by an unprotected endpoint device visiting a known unsafe site. This can happen even on known safe sites in a variety of situations such as website hijacking or URL poisoning. And this is one of the most common cyber threats to a business.
DDoS
Distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks leverages the power of hundreds or even thousands of infected computers with the intent of crashing websites or entire networks. These groups of infected computers are known as a botnet or bot network. Typically, the target is businesses, but personal computers can be used en masse to execute a DDoS cyberattack without the innocent individual even knowing it. And this is one of the most common cyber threats to a business.
Conclusion
It is clear that growing businesses must make on-going cybersecurity training a priority for all employees while establishing a multi-layered security strategy because everyone should have a personal goal pertaining to cybersecurity to avoid digital threats. Proactively keeping employees safe online and using the latest threat intelligence to stop threats before and after they have entered the company network is more important than ever and we must always move towards developing modern technologies on how to mitigate common cyberattacks.
If you’d like to learn more about Cybersecurity threat mitigation for your business, contact us here at Demakis Technologies!
Phishing is a type of social engineering attack in which a fraudster masquerades as an organization in an attempt to gather sensitive information such as login info or credit card credentials. Phishing attacks are hence used for stealing credentials. It is one of the most common types of email attacks.
The sender usually tricks the recipient by sending a legitimate-looking email. The users think they are typing the information on the official website while actually, they are typing it on the attacker’s phishing site.
Everything the user typesis then received by the attacker. This is how Phishing works.
When a recipient falls for this trick and all his credentials are collected by the attacker, the recipient is said to be phished.
Types Of Phishing Attacks
There are various types of Phishing attacks where spear–phishing and vishing are the most common. Spear phishing vs vishing is explained below:
Normally, phishing emails are sent to hundreds of users at once but in spear phishing, an individual target is selected.
The fraudster will send you an ostensible mail from a known sender to trick you into believing that you know him and hence reveal all the information.
In Vishing, on the other hand, the fraudster will call you or send you a voice message purporting to be from a reputable company to trick you.
Whaling phishing is another type of Phishing but it is specific for high-level employees such as CEOs.
These are the types of Phishing attacks that target particular individuals.
Tailgating
Another type of engineering attack is tailgating. It causes a physical security breach by an unauthorized person. This type of attack is unlike any of the phishing techniques.
Another phishing technique can be the drive-by phishing technique in which malicious programs are downloaded in your system, without your consent. These are also spread via emails.
Another type of hacking may be ransomware.
It is a malware that blocks users from their system and data. Ransomware allows the hacker to collect ransoms in exchange for their system to be unblocked.
Corona Virus Phishing
Amidst the Corona Virus outbreak, hackers are taking advantage of the situation and are sending fraudulent emails and texts to users around the world asking for donations.
It has also been put into notice by the WHO (World Health Organization) and people are advised to not fall for it.
How To Protect Yourself From Phishing?
How to stop phishing emails
One can very easily stop receiving phishing emails and spam by using a good email gateway. If the email contains anything malicious it will be removed by the gateway.
Is there a way to identify if an email is spam?
There are various ways to identify spam emails. Some are :
Antiviruses: they prevent malicious content from entering your system
Not opening emails from unknown addresses
Avoiding unfamiliar or suspicious links
All these are points of email safety and can help you identify spam emails.
Though one cannot tell when he/she might fall victim to phishing, it is always advisable to take the necessary precautions to avoid a very unwanted and difficult situation which may include loss of finances and property.
