As a DPD Champion, we’re working towards the common goal of improving consumer and business consciousness while also encouraging and empowering people to be more aware of their privacy. As an award winning Managed Security Services Provider (MSSP), data security and privacy are of the utmost importance to us.
With the annual global damage from cyber attacks being counted in hundreds of billions of dollars, there has never been a more critical time for organizations to take appropriate action to prevent theft of their data and harm to their reputation.
We have first hand knowledge how many attacks are attempted on business daily. Regardless of size or industry –healthcare, financial services, utilities – hackers are always in search for the next opportunity.
We recommend the following steps to keep your information private:
- Monitor your security events on a 24×7 basis. Cyberattacks can happen at any time of day or night. Contributing to the statistic that the average time to detect a breach is 243 days, many organizations miss critical alerts that occur outside business hours.
- Understand your risk profile. Not all assets are of equal value. Security events affecting databases with personal information or confidential data should be prioritized.
- Develop a security plan and monitor compliance your policies and controls.Many security breaches happen despite the best intentions of an organization. Monitoring and analyzing behavior based the user, time of day, and assets can reveal attempts to circumvent security policies.
- Make your employees privacy ambassadors. There are many things you can do to ensure security starts with your employees. Tips on becoming cyber secure can be found here.
- Go beyond the standard. Many SIEM and other security solutions come packaged nicely and do a decent job of protecting your network. However, this often isn’t enough, as cybercriminals know how to workaround standard systems. Cross-device correlation and alert prioritization can help you avoid this risk.
- Streamline your vulnerability remediation process. The process of cleaning and patching systems with every new update can be confusing and time-consuming, giving cybercriminals time to get in before you patch. Find a team to work with on this process and give your IT the much-needed help.
2016 is expected to be a challenging year for cybersecurity. We encourage you to take the extra steps to safeguard your company and to consider using outside experts for 24×7 security event monitoring and advanced threat detection.