MFA or multifactor authentication was important even before a large group of us moved to working remotely.  Now that we are there, we are being targeted even more.  Brute force attacks have increased significantly targeting RDP as people moved themselves to their home offices.  Very targeted phishing campaigns have also increased as bad actors are using the COVID-19 situation to take advantages of our vulnerable state.  One option we can use to help mitigate a portion of that risk is deploying multi-factor authentication.

A lot has happened so far in 2020. If you are like most companies, you have quickly deployed a remote workforce. As we pivot into our new normal, we are having a lot of conversations about their Business Continuity Plans (BCP). In many instances, they simply didn’t exist or they need some work.  Let’s explore that a bit below.

I’ve spoken with some companies that implemented their existing Business Continuity Plan (BCP) and it went relatively well for them. They had the right policies, procedures, and stake holders in place and things for the most part were rolled out as planned.

Tech Elite 250, MSP 500, and Security 100

Navigating the Remote Workplace: VPN Assistance and Teams Assistance 

Cyber Advisors is ready to help you make the shift to a more remote workplace during this time of need. We are here to answer questions, provide licensing assistance and arm you with the knowledge your organization needs to maintain productivity while working remote.

As the impact of COVID-19 continues to unfold, Cyber Advisors Inc. has activated it’s pandemic plan in accordance with our standard business continuity practices. The intent of this plan is to provide for the ongoing health and safety of our employees, partners and our clients while ensuring seamless service throughout this outbreak as well as compliance with governmental regulations and public health guidance.

At Cyber Advisors, we believe the Primary Engineer is one of the most crucial roles we use so you have a great experience with our Managed IT Services. Yet, the value of having a Primary Engineer working with you is not always well understood before a Managed IT Services agreement begins. There are other Managed IT Service Providers that do not provide a dedicated Engineer-level resource to their customers. Instead, they provide a technician who is ready to serve when they are available, which may be a person the customer has never seen before. Without a complete understanding of their role and their value, the significance of the Primary Engineer may be overlooked.

As a kid there was nothing more I loved than playing sports and competing.  Now, as an adult and father of two, there is not much more I enjoy in my life than coaching.  Initially, I was thrilled introducing my kids to the sports that brought me so much joy child and about teaching the basic skills of each sport.  As my son has grown older and the skills and competition become more advanced new elements to coaching youth sports start to emerge.

According to a report from the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center, financial losses from cyber-crime grew 90% from 2017 to 2018, while the number of complaints only grew 16%¹. These numbers indicate that cyber criminals are getting more effective at siphoning large sums of money when they do succeed in compromising systems. This is likely due to the higher levels of sophisticated methods and tools they leverage to bypass traditional security measures such as next generation firewall and antivirus solutions. IT and Cyber Security Professionals in turn must also implement more sophisticated methods and tools to protect their organization’s digital assets.

As companies prepare their budgets for 2020, financial leaders across the world are often looking at IT as one of their biggest annual costs. Additionally, each year seems to bring on steep increases depending on the type of organization and how they invest in technology. The expense is not necessarily predictable either- the more an organization has workloads in the cloud, the more likely the final expense becomes a moving target. 

A Security Breach Can Happen To Anyone: Small or Large

Many in the cyber security industry are aware of the Equifax breach. It was one of the largest and most well- known data breaches to date, affecting 143 million personally identifiable information (PII) records of U.S. citizens. Perhaps the most alarming detail about this breach was that Equifax did indeed have a robust security program. Hackers were able to circumvent security controls by exploiting a vulnerability in the open source component, Apache Struts, which is an open source web application framework used to develop Java web applications. During that same year, WannaCry ransomware was released into the wild and there were a record breaking 14,000 vulnerabilities reported to US-CERT, according to CVE details¹. In 2018, that number jumped to over 16,000. The lesson every organization should learn from this event is that a breach can happen to any business, small or large.