To begin with, we can agree that “the good, the bad, and the ugly” are growing even faster in this digital era. Specifically, cybersecurity and cyberthreats. For instance, during this pandemic alone, FBI has reported a 300% increase of cybercrimes.

Accordingly, it’s true that cybersecurity tools have been evolving even quicker than we’ve ever witnessed before. However, the rising question is, if such tools are getting more sophisticated, how do cyberattacks keep on rapidly growing in numbers each day?

Sometimes, the problem does not lie within the tools. What most people don’t realize is that it happens due to lack of proper workflows, processes and experienced workers who understand remediation. In other words, it is an operational issue and operational issues require operational solutions.

That’s why you need Security-Operation-Center-as-a-Service.

What is Security Operation Center?

Security Operation Center (SOC) is a unit consisting of cybersecurity specialist and professionals that deal with high-quality IT security operations. On everyday basis, not only SOC monitors and manages all cybersecurity tools, but also responsible in conducting IT security tasks appropriately.

SOC works as the first line defense in an infrastructure to detect and prevent any cyber incident from happening. Besides that, SOC team will analyze, respond, report, and come up with solution on how to prevent or handle cyberattacks.

Why do we need Security Operation Center?

Company with SOC will more likely be able to proactively fight cyberthreats even before the company’s higher-ups know about the issue. For instance, here are several benefits that you can get for having SOC.

Maximum prevention with minimum cost

By continuously monitoring and analyzing the IT-related activities, the SOC team becomes greatly effective in preventing and responding incoming cyberattacks. This way, it will significantly reduce the risk of having financial loss caused by cyberattack with affordable recurring costs. Looking from a financial standpoint, it is more cost-friendly rather than having to invest a huge capital in building your very own team from the scratch.

Improved trust from employee and client

SOC teams offer a real-time and high data protection against any potential cyberattack. Therefore, by having them in your company, it will indubitably increase your company’s credibility to gain trust from your clients, business partners, and employees.

Enhanced Collaboration

SOC team is a group of IT security experts. They will continuously monitor your IT tools and ensure their upmost performance. Especially, during this pandemic, where most of people are working remotely, having a secure IT infrastructure will be an advantage. So, every department in your company will be able to collaborate without having any restless anxiety about any possible cyberattacks.

How Wowrack can help?

Wowrack’s value is to give a maximum support for our clients. Thus, we keep on providing the necessary services for our clients, so they can develop their business without having to worry about their IT needs.

Because of that, we are happy to announce that we will provide more cybersecurity services, including SOC. We are ready at your disposal.

To help us understand your IT needs better, let’s schedule a free consultation with our team, so we can figure out what your actual needs are and how we can help you.

The post Security Operations: The Solution for Modern Cybersecurity Needs appeared first on Wowrack Blog.

In this article, we will address how ransomware works, and then follow up with ways to address each scenario.

Email Links & Attachments

Employee interactions with emails that appear to be legitimate have been an issue for over a decade and continue even today to trick individuals into thinking as such.  The two main ways a hacker tries to infect a host is via links within the email and attachments.

1. Email Links – Typically this is the most threatening. The reason being is that a user clicks on the link and at the time the site loads, the user visiting could be immediately infected without having to fill out any other details or interact further with the website.
2. Email Attachments – Anti-virus software may be able to detect this but often times, a user is allowed to open the file, even with anti-virus software, and the payload is able to do its intended job – to hijack your information and demand ransom. For this reason, it is important for a company to be able to stop these attacks before they are able to go down the pipe to end-users (employees).

Relaxed Password Policies on Server Infrastructure

While there are many sub-subjects related to addressing relaxed password policies, there are two primary ways a hacker can gain access themselves and deliver a payload that can potentially spread to your overall infrastructure.

1. Brute Forcing an Administrator or Root account – If you have weak passwords associated with your Administrator (Windows) or Root (Linux) accounts, it may be very easy to brute force and gain access this way.
2. Standardized Password Formatting – Some organizations have unique password formatting where much of the password is the same with a few predictable variables. This gives the opportunity for a former vendor or employee to gain access.

The 3 Ways to Combat

Hosted Email Security Gateway – One of the most crucial ways to combat ransomware attempts is to have protection in the infrastructure layer before emails are delivered to the end-user.  One great way is a hosted email security service.  Such as service is built for the enterprise and is constantly updated with new threats. It also provides a host of other benefits that every organization should consider.

Disable Administrator/Root Accounts – This is a very easy step for organizations to take and adds another layer of guess work for a potential hacker.

Establish Specific Password Policies – There are many software’s built for the enterprise that you can utilize to help manage your passwords in addition to providing other security features for your infrastructure.  This software can help enforce policies and provide a number of benefits including:

• Resetting certain device passwords every so often
• Randomized complex passwords, as per any policy you have established
• Monitoring/recording of RDP and console sessions for certain critical devices (or all devices)
• Can establish approval workflows and real-time alerts on password access
• Helps meet security audits and regulatory compliance for such standards as HIPAA, PCI, and SOX.

Other Important Considerations:

If all else fails, have siloed backups

An organization can only do so much to protect themselves. However, even with all the measures mentioned, there is still a chance of intrusion.  When this happens, never pay the ransom!  Instead, you should rely on your managed backups to restore from.  In either case, you will need to reimage the infected hosts to get rid of any backdoors the hackers could have created.

Employee Training

Employees should be trained on how to identify threats and properly report any suspicious emails to the IT department.  By reporting, the IT department can then feed it to the hosted email security platform so that it learns and improves so that the threat stops before showing up on another employees inbox, who may not be able to identify it as an intrusion attempt.

Wowrack’s managed security team can help guide your organization to see what you currently have setup and make recommendations, free of charge, to what you can do to improve.  Contact us today for your free consultation!

The post 3 IT Strategies to Combat Ransomware appeared first on Wowrack Blog.