When talking with IT leaders at our customers, a common theme is keeping up with IT Security. If you are a smaller business with less technology complexity, this can become even more difficult, as your resources to hire security specialized employees is little to none. 

Threat actors now use OneNote attachments in phishing emails that infect victims with remote access malware which can be used to install further malware, steal passwords, or even cryptocurrency wallets.

If the amount of new Crypto currencies and the up and down nature of their value isn't dizzying enough to financial institutions, they now have a new worry concerning the world of crypto.  According to the recently released '2022 SonicWall Cyber Threat Report' the finance industry is now often a target for cryptojacking with the financial firms rarely even aware.  

Wayzata High School (Wayzata, MN) has a unique "Compass" program that students can apply to for specialized, profession-based learning opportunities. Their Cybersecurity and Applied Mathematics coursework gives students real-world experience and helps prepare them for careers in the cybersecurity and business fields. Cyber Advisors has partnered with this program for five years and hosts a Compass project team project annually. Our CISO, Paul Beasley, leads the assigned team through the project from start to finish.

SOC 2 (System and Organization Controls for Service Organizations) is essential on many levels.  Cyber Advisors received its SOC 2 Type 1 certification in early 2021.  In 2022, Cyber Advisors executed our SOC 2 Type 2.  This audit was successful, and Cyber Advisors received compliance in Q2 2022.

Cisco Breach

Summary – A recent vulnerability (CVE-2021-1459) found in the web-based management interface of Cisco will have a large impact to small business routers. The vulnerability allows an unauthenticated, remote attacker to execute code on an affected appliance.

Cisco will not have a plan to fix the critical vulnerability, and instead will urge customers to replace the devices. The affected devices are RV110W VPN firewall and Small Business RV130, RV130W, and RV215W routers.

After a recent Fortinet breach, it is critical to understand the approach your organization needs to take to remediate. A successful exploit could allow the attacker to access critical information.

Fortinet Breach

Summary – European companies’ Fortinet VPN devices have been targeted in more recent attacks. In the most recent attacks, a production site was taken down. The attacks happened in the first quarter of 2021.

On April 6^th, 2021, a reported 500+ million LinkedIn accounts were leaked online. The accounts include email addresses, phone numbers, and links to other social media profiles. Information found in LinkedIn can be used to build a profile for their future victims. With LinkedIn’s recent breach, and the other recent social media (e.g., Facebook 533 million profiles) breaches, it is important to utilize a unique password for each site you visit in order to minimize your complete data from being exposed in the dark web.

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.