The 5 Things That WILL Protect Your Company From Cyber Attacks

Hi there, Tom Kirkham, CEO and founder of IronTech Security, I am frequently asked, give me the down and dirty just tell me what I need to do to protect my company and myself from ransomware and other attacks. I’m going to tell you what that is. It’s, sort of like an elevator pitch. This is down and dirty. Okay, the five things. Number it in no particular order, by the way, five best practices, you’ve got to have a skilled security team in place. That means an InfoSec specialist or cybersecurity expert to monitor, respond and stop cyber attacks. The automated tools, the enterprise grade, automated tools can only do so much we have literally stopped attacks because a human being an InfoSec, specialists responded within minutes to an event.

Got to use multifactor authentication everywhere that you can, especially remote desktop access, if you’re remoting into your company computer, from your home computer, you’ve got to protect that with a third piece of information that’s time sensitive username and password is simply inadequate these days. But you can also turn it on on Facebook, and Amazon and a lots and lots of other places that you probably aren’t aware of. And I encourage you to do so. All it takes a good password manager will manage your multi factor authentication token for different websites, as well as you can use Google Authenticator. Deploy an EDR, what’s an EDR stands for endpoint detection and response. It is an entirely different class of security product that will replace your antivirus or your Internet Security Suite. Basically, if you can buy it off the shelf in a box or download it from Amazon, it’s not adequate, it’s not good enough to stop modern day attacks.

The classic product known as EDR, or MDR, it goes by various names. It uses artificial intelligence, machine learning, it’s a it’s a neural net that looks at what the user and the computer is actually doing in real time. And based upon what it has learned over the years and year and continues to learn over years and years and years, it knows how to identify the storyline of an impending attack. So it knows that if a user opens a file attachment site, it’s an Excel spreadsheet. And that Excel spreadsheet calls a macro that in turn calls the windows disk encryption service. It knows that’s a ransomware attack, and it quickly, automatically in milliseconds freezes the disk encryption service.

The best ones can even roll back files that have been encrypted, return it just like nothing ever happened. Next, as you have to turn on disk encryption, if you’ve got an Apple product, good, it’s on by default, but you need to double check all your other devices, Android, Windows, whatever you may be using. And make sure that the data that’s on that device. And that disk that it’s stored on is encrypted. You don’t want to donate a computer or sell a computer or lose a computer that has unencrypted data because there are hackers that will gather up these old used hard drives and mined them for data and either sell it on the dark web or give it to WikiLeaks or whatever they can do to make a buck. And finally, you’ve got to continuously incorporate new threat intelligence into your defenses. You need to stay on top of geopolitical events because those can impact us, all of us. From a cyber standpoint, you know that the next wars and battles are going to have cyber elements to them.

You got to stay on top of new threat technologies and adjust your defenses needed new threat actors, their tactics, their techniques and their procedures. Whenever new procedures that are criminals are using or discovered, you’ve got to review all your defenses and make sure that those defenses adequately addressed the changes that’s happening in the criminal hacking industry. So that it’s really that simple. Those are the five things. So don’t wait and do it now. Every day you wait is another day you could be hit with a ransomware attack.