Joe Moline is joined by Brandon Kuehn, the Cyber Advisors Project Coordinator. Cyber Advisors is headquartered in Maple Grove, MN and proudly serves clients all over the United States, many who have locations across serval states. Our dispatch capabilities enable clients to rely on a superior quality of service no matter where they are located. With a network of trusted techs, Cyber Advisors is able to reelevate stress from clients, oversee services and provide technical expertise no matter where the job is located.

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 country’s largest fuel pipeline was breached resulting in shutting down operations for multiple days. An estimated 100 gigabytes of data were stolen which was used for ransomware. The total effect has yet to be calculated but a surge in gasoline price was in effect in the eastern seaboard after operations were shut down. The FBI confirmed that a threat actor group in Russia identified as Darkside was behind the ransomware.

A new ransomware strain called "Qlocker" is targeting QNAP network-attached storage (NAS) devices as part of an ongoing campaign and encrypting files in password-protected 7zip archives. But it appears that “Qlocker” is not the only strain that's being used to encrypt NAS devices, what with threat actors deploying another ransomware named "eCh0raix" to lock sensitive data.

Check out more info on Qlocker Ransomware on our reference link, The Hacker News:

• https://thehackernews.com/2021/04/new-qnap-nas-flaws-exploited-in-recent.html

Verizon’s annual data breach investigation report (DBIR) released their report for 2021. A total of 29,207 quality incidents were reviewed, of which 5,258 were confirmed breaches.

The importance of penetration testing and vulnerability scanning are frequently confused for the same service. Business owners often purchase one when they really need the other, but each are important on their respective levels. Our team of security experts are diving into the differences and how they should fit into your organization's security practices.

“Effective listening is more than simply avoiding the bad habit of interrupting others while they are speaking or finishing their sentences. It's being content to listen to the entire thought of someone rather than waiting impatiently for your chance to respond.”

~ Richard Carlson, Author of “Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff”, MacMilian Publishing Company

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.

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.