Phishing scams: Attempts to trick individuals into giving away sensitive information (like usernames and passwords) through emails or websites that look like legitimate businesses.
Ransomware: Malware that encrypts data and then demands payment to get the decryption key. In many cases this doesn’t work and data can be lost forever.
Advanced Persistent Threats (APTs): These are sophisticated and targeted attacks that are designed to gain access to a business's network and steal sensitive data. Many times these are state-sponsored.
Denial of Service (DoS) and Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks: Attempts to overwhelm a business's website or network with traffic making it unavailable to legitimate users.
Insiders threats: Employees or contractors who intentionally or unintentionally cause harm to the organization. These are more common than most people think.
Hacking: Unauthorized access to a network or system.
Social Engineering: Tricking individuals into giving away sensitive information. This is very common.
Insider Threats: Employees or contractors intentionally or unintentionally causing harm to the organization. This is very common and often overlooked.
Physical Theft: Stealing hardware or paper documents containing sensitive information.
Malware: Software that is intended to damage or disable computer systems.
Implementing a firewall to block unauthorized access. Make sure to include this at both the perimeters for all traffic in/out and also for individual systems which is much of the bad traffic comes into.
Regularly updating software and operating systems to address known vulnerabilities. Very critical but be careful on this one because some updates can cause problems. Make sure to test first.
Installing and maintaining anti-virus and anti-malware software.
Using a virtual private network (VPN) to encrypt communications over public networks. This is becoming more important than ever and can be done in a variety of ways including next generation.
Creating a strong password policy and implementing multi-factor authentication. Very critical and make sure this enforced with policy.
Regularly backing up important data to minimize the impact of a successful attack. Backups are always the most critical piece. Nothing is 100% but a good backup will always have your data.
Educating their employees about the dangers of phishing scams and how to recognize them.
Using spam filters to block known phishing emails. Make sure to use a good reputable vendor to catch most of these.
Implementing a policy that requires employees to double-check the authenticity of any unexpected or suspicious emails.
Regularly conducting simulated phishing tests to test employee's knowledge.
Immediately contain and isolate the affected systems. Stop it before it continues to spread.
Conduct a thorough investigation to determine the scope of the breach and what data may have been compromised. This means everything because all it takes is one critical file on a laptop which could compromise and entire company.
Notify any affected individuals and comply with any legal notification requirements.
Review all security measures and build out improvements to prevent similar breaches in the future.
Work with a professional incident response team (3rd party) and also legal counsel to manage the incident and any recourse.
Always backing up data no matter how important it is to minimize the impact of an attack.
Implementing a good and established vendors software that detects and blocks suspicious activity. Another good way to implement is through a reputable service which monitors and takes action 24/7.
Regularly updating software and operating systems to address known vulnerabilities.
Educating employees about the dangers of clicking on links or opening attachments from unknown sources.
Having a incident response plan in place. Very critical and many companies lack this or not complete. This should also be updated at least quarterly.
Implementing strict access controls and monitoring for unusual activity.
Conducting regular background checks and security clearance for employees.
Regularly reviewing and monitoring privileged user activity, and implementing least privilege access controls for sensitive systems and data.
Providing employees with a clear and well-defined process for reporting security incidents and concerns.
Having an incident response plan for internal threats
Regularly conducting internal audits and risk assessments to identify and address vulnerabilities.
Implementing data loss prevention (DLP) solutions to detect and prevent the unauthorized exfiltration of sensitive data.
Educating employees about the risks and warning signs of insider threats, and encouraging them to report any suspicious behavior.
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