Cyber Advisors has been named by CRN on the 2021 Solution Provider (SP) 500 List. The Channel Co. puts together this annual CRN list to recognize and rank the top IT channel partner organizations in North America by service revenue. The SP 500 list is widely acknowledged as the industry standard for identifying the highest-performing technology integrators, strategic service providers, and IT consultants.

The Department of Defense is implementing the Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification (CMMC) to regulate cybersecurity preparedness across the federal government’s defense industrial base (DIB). Below, we will review the CMMC certification, the DIB, CMMC levels, and how Cyber Advisors is available to prepare you for this critical certification.

Cyber Advisors is an approved Registered Provider Organization (RPO). The RPOs and RPs in the CMMC ecosystem provide advice, consulting, and recommendations to clients to help you navigate the CMMC. Cyber Advisors helps prepare our customers for CMMC readiness but does not conduct Certified CMMC assessments ourselves. Please find our profile below: https://cmmcab.org/marketplace/cyber-advisors-inc/

Cyber Advisors has once again made the annual CRN MSP 500 list in 2021. CEO Shane Vinup states, “I am extremely proud of the Cyber Advisors team and we are delighted to be recognized by CRN as a top 500 provider in the country. I am also thrilled to be named to the Security 100 category again. We continue to invest in security for ourselves and our customers.” Cyber Advisors recently attained SOC 2 certification and have drastically expanded our security offerings over the last 3-5 years.

Cyber Advisors is proud to announce that we have achieved our SOC 2 certification. Cyber Advisors has always taken our security seriously, but we felt that it was vital that this be validated by an outside organization. Cyber Advisors provides managed services, project services (including robust security services) and an extensive list of hardware, software and cloud solutions to our clients. As a managed service provider (MSP), we are sought out to help entities create and maintain a strong security posture - we don't want to introduce more risk to our clients' environments.

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.

Customers that have met with me over the last 6-12 months have heard me talk about the need to protect your Office365 investment by backing up their data outside of Microsoft.  For any user who relies heavily on their email, the cost is a no brainer insurance policy.  Below is a great article by Andy Rouse, Author at Spanning (a Dell EMC company), that highlights why I have been so strongly encouraging our customers to put a solution in place.

Internet attacks targeting the US and Ransomware have not slowed down. Last week, we saw major websites and services shut down. The attacks were well planned and executed, coming from tens of millions of IP addresses. Please read more on this story. 
 
Cyber Advisors is currently scheduling appointments to perform security audits consisting of running an executable on your network, gathering data, compiling all data, and putting together a report which we will review with you in detail. From there, if necessary, we will recommend remediation steps. We are also able to provide self-paced end user awareness training to your users on how to avoid phishing and other attacks. We are able to actively perform phishing techniques on your users before the training and then over time to confirm that our training is working.

• Per Michael Mimoso at Threatpost, Cryptowall has gotten a minor, but important facelift that might make it more difficult for researchers to tear apart and for victims to recover their encrypted data without paying a ransom.

  Spotted within the last week, the latest update to the ransomware has begun not only encrypting data on victims’ machines, but also file names, a first according to independent researcher Nathan Scott, who examined the code along with researchers from Bleeping Computer.

  - See more at: https://threatpost.com/updated-cryptowall-encrypts-file-names-mocks-victims/115285/#sthash.cdbqqsx4.dpuf

About this time each year, I sit down and take a moment to think about what we have accomplished during the previous year.  From there, I quickly turn my attention to the future.  I ask the question - "What makes Cyber Advisors unique?" 

At the Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC) in Florida, Microsoft showcased the future of Cortana, its smart digital assistant.  It is interesting how Cortana will interact with us and be an integral part of how we gain access to our data and tasks.  This will all be done via the intuitive power of our voice.