How to navigate the future of work: the hybrid workplace

As you may know, either from watching the news or through experience, Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks, and more recently DDoS-based ransomware attacks, should be a top concern for enterprise organizations. Over the past year, organizations saw a 125 percent increase in DDoS extortion attacks, according to the NETScout Threat Report. Recent global events have heightened concerns, but protecting against cyber threats and fraudsters is something that organizations need to be considering on an ongoing basis.

As a result of all of the above, I’ve been fielding questions from concerned business leaders across various industries. And while their businesses and needs are all very different, there is one basic question I’ve been hearing repeatedly. People want to know what security-conscious organizations are currently doing to defend against cyberthreats and malicious attacks.

Start with cybersecurity best practices

My first response is to provide the recommended best practices, according to the CyberSecurity Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), which is part of the Department of Homeland Security. They regularly issue recommendations, which organizations should implement to improve their overall cybersecurity efforts.

The CISA, in a recent article, reiterated some of the key actions that companies should be taking. It outlines the importance of assuring your organization has firewalls, making sure you've implemented good policies for them, and that they’re kept up to date. One key best practice is to have regularly scheduled complete system backups and to store them offline.

Storing system backups offline can help safeguard a business from another type of attack often employed by cybercriminals and hackers called a data wipe attack. In 2017, one data wipe attack took out major corporations all over the world. The best way to recover from this sort of attack is to always have a complete backup kept securely offline.

Ensure your network teams are taking action. Such as validating that router ports are closed and only opened for deliberate purposes. Hackers will scan for virtual ports hoping that one has an application they can exploit. Next, traditional firewalls are a start, but you need to consider more protection. I recommend considering an enterprise-grade security solution that accommodates advanced protection depending on the type of traffic evaluation they need to perform.

Organizations need to look at their entire cybersecurity infrastructure and double down on their vigilance. Make sure that all of their users are recognizing their responsibilities in keeping the company, and themselves, safe. Remind them to not open attachments that they’re not certain of and never click on suspect links. And as a company, make sure that antivirus, antimalware and applications are up to date and there are regular backups of all files that directly impact the business.

Assess your foundation: you need a modern network design

The next step is assessing your current network to ensure it has a secure design, above and beyond a firewall. This starts with having a modern network to support all your traffic and applications. A modern network uses current technology, that cyber criminals do not have experience exploiting. The design should ensure that your most sensitive data is never routed anywhere other than over a private network connection to a private data center. I also recommend that when traffic is routed over public networks that it is delivered using encrypted sessions with Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) or Transport Layer Security (TLS) protection.

Cybersecurity is not something you can address and then forget about.

It is one of the most critical elements of your network, and as such cybersecurity must be maintained rigorously. It can’t be addressed once and then left unattended; it’s an everyday task. Most enterprise IT organizations have limited staff, especially these days, and if they're also trying to manage strategically important initiatives for the sake of the business, as well as address security issues, both tasks will suffer. Technology partners like Spectrum Enterprise excel at offering these security precautions as part of a managed service.

Security as a service takes on the most complex issues, as well as the seemingly mundane, but essential, tasks. Organizations can enlist firewall security services and a DDoS service. DDoS attacks are a favorite tool of rogue state actors, hackers and criminals. Globally, for those organizations who need to ensure their internet services and related systems are accessible and secure, now is not a good time to be without that level of protection.

How to select an enterprise cybersecurity solution

When selecting an enterprise cybersecurity solution, or opting for managed security, you want to start with an offering that includes a managed next-gen firewall portfolio that provides proactive mitigation, including intrusion protection services (IPS) capabilities. It should also include unified threat protection, content filtering and website blocking.

These services should be updated automatically with signatures and identifications of new malware and viruses from a threat protection organization on a two to four-hour basis. This means that your organization’s firewalls will have been updated with this new information as soon as it was available. These automated updates, as well as the automated responses and reactions in crisis situations are so critically important in most cybersecurity breaches.

When you are configuring these cybersecurity services and solutions, you can set it up so you will be notified when you are attacked and before your provider starts mitigation, which is called reactive mitigation. Or you can set it up with proactive mitigation, where the mitigation will trigger immediately and you will get an email telling you that you're under attack.

Most organizations can’t dedicate the resources necessary to be watching the incoming traffic to their website, notice that it is spiking, and manually filter out the bad traffic. The best solutions have automatic processes that are used for updating cybersecurity threat prevention information, such as that used in IPS. As cyberthreats are constantly under development and emerging from places around the world 24/7, automated updates with the latest information are critical. It's all happening at digital speeds, not human speeds, and that's why modern networks with intrusion prevention services and DDoS protection are increasingly important.

Go here for more information on fully managed solutions to protect against cybersecurity threats.