Cyberattacks have become so common that it’s no longer a matter of “if” but “when” your business will be hit. And when it comes to identifying and remediating cyber threats, you need to know what you’re facing. But selecting, deploying, and managing multiple technologies, particularly amid the current cyber skills gap, is time-consuming and expensive. How can you improve your cyber posture despite all of this? By incorporating an experienced and highly trained professional services team with extensive technical knowledge, you can protect your business against ever-evolving threats. So where do you begin?
On-demand incident response
A data breach can cause widespread disruption within your organization. The average downtime a company experiences after a ransomware attack is 21 days, and each hour of this downtime costs businesses an average of $88,000. Operational disruption is not only expensive, it can affect your standing in your industry and impact your customers’ health and wellbeing. To reduce the damage done to your business by a cyberattack, whether it be financial, operational, or reputational, Incident Response (IR) can help you recover as quickly as possible. An IR team identifies cyber incidents, contains attackers, eliminates re-entry opportunities, restores systems, and improves future defenses. An IR team should be monitoring your organization’s network 24/7 to assess, contain, and resolve threats as they arise. In addition to minimizing operational downtime, IR helps to reassure your customers that their information is safe, particularly if your business collects Personally Identifiable Information (PII) like social security numbers or financial information.
While some businesses opt to handle IR internally, nearly 40% aren’t confident that their internal teams can handle a data breach. And if you are a smaller organization struggling to cope with the ongoing cyber skills gap, outsourced Incident Response is the most effective way of alleviating the cybersecurity burden from your in-house team. Outsourced IR provides you with a higher level of technical expertise, allowing your business to leverage the latest host and network-based digital forensics. It also gives your business network monitoring on-demand and around-the-clock, with the IR team assessing and responding to incidents remotely on your behalf.
Penetration testing
The methods cybercriminals use are always evolving. Hackers can now launch attacks from anywhere in the world, collaborating as a group to attack infrastructure from multiple entry points. Automation has also been adopted by hackers, for example the recent rise of Meris, a DDoS botnet which can generate a massive volume of requests per second. To successfully protect your network from these types of threats, you need to be able to upgrade your defenses at the same rate.
A penetration test, or pen test, is a simulated cyberattack designed to identify exploitable vulnerabilities within your business’ network. A pen test involves mimicking hackers’ strategies to uncover any number of issues within your systems, including application flaws, improper configurations, or risky end-user behavior. By conducting a pen test, your business validates both the efficiency of the organization’s cybersecurity solutions and end-user adherence to security policies. By using skilled ethical hackers, you’re able to have your finger on the pulse and identify where your network is susceptible to emerging hacking techniques. And with the average compliance fine per PII record being around $150, using ethical hackers is an effective way to test your adherence to regulations such as the GDPR, HIPAA, FISMA, and PCI-DSS.
Security awareness training
Human error is the root cause of at least 95% of security breaches. Whether it’s through an employee clicking on a malicious link, failing to install a critical update, or choosing a weak password, your business is put at risk by your staff every single day. This risk is exacerbated by the growing prominence of social engineering, where hackers exploit human trust to gain access to confidential information or get your users to download malware.
Security awareness training educates your employees on cyber hygiene and the security risks associated with each person’s role. Your training should cover topics such as malware, phishing, device security, cloud security, and password training. By combining topical training with regular security simulations you help to build and maintain a culture of security within your organization, priming your employees to act as the first line of defense against attacks. This reduces cyber risk and therefore decreases the loss of PII, revenue, and brand reputation. For your security training to have a lasting impact, ensure it’s designed to fit each employee’s schedule and delivered by experts that can field all questions and concerns. By encouraging team collaboration through training, cybersecurity becomes part of every employee’s role, rather than the sole responsibility of just the security staff.
How we can help
Our Professional Services strengthen, test, and maintain your cybersecurity posture. On-demand incident response leverages the latest technologies and malware analysis to assess, validate, and respond to threats. Our penetration testing services identify vulnerabilities in assets before providing comprehensive remediation instructions to your staff. And to complement these strategies, our end-user awareness training provides engaging educational content that is continually updated to include emerging and zero-day threats.
Best of all, these services are provided by highly qualified and certified professionals, who have decades of combined cyber experience securing some of the most sensitive networks at the DoD, the NSA, the CIA, and the White House.
Learn more about our professional services here.
