Top Cyber Threats and Must Have Tools to Secure You and Your Firm
As we reach the last week of Cybersecurity Awareness Month, it’s important that we continue to stay on our toes against cyber threats that are lurking out there. Firms must invest time and money if they want to keep up with new threats in the landscape and update defense practices accordingly.
Understanding the types of cyber threats facing your organization will allow you to implement the right layers of defense as well as training your employees.
Here are some top threats facing alternative investments firms and biotech companies today:
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Physical security attacks: These are breaches or incidents compromising a firm’s physical assets. For example, a data center, office breach, or in the biotech space - a medical lab breach.
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Malware/ransomware: Malware itself is short for malicious software and is intended to damage, disrupt or disable computer operations. Ransomware on the other hand takes things to another level by holding data hostage and requiring users to pay a ransom to get their files back.
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Social engineering: The idea behind social engineering is essentially trying to trick users into divulging personal or company information. Phishing is probably the most common social engineering tactic we see today. Be sure to think before you click.
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External hacking: This attack occurs when an outside hacker tries to either infiltrate or disrupt a company's network or connection either as a means to steal information or to simply prevent the firm from conducting business.
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Insider Threats: This can either be malicious or unintentional threats caused by a firm’s employees.
With Halloween upon us, it is important to ensure your organization is safe from frightening cyber criminals. Since the beginning of Coronavirus, 91% of companies have fallen victim to cyberattacks and ransomware attacks have increased by 72%. To be one step ahead of cyber criminals, Investment Firms and Biotech Companies are advised to educate employees and implement regular managed phishing and training, a fully-managed cybersecurity training solution. Each should also implement a Managed SIEM to obtain real-time security analysis of data to proactively identify potential security risks.
To further protect you and your firms’ information from hacks and hackers, be sure to:
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Back up: Backups are the only way to successfully recover your data. Ensure you leverage a secure and reliable backup and recovery tool that will de-duplicate, compress, encrypt and securely transfer your data to an offsite data center.
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Detect: For security-advanced firms, consider taking a step further and employing continuous security information and event management (SIEM) systems with a 24x7x365 intrustion detection and prevention.
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Patch: If you rely on a managed service provider (MSP) for cloud services, you may already have this covered. If not, consider leveraging a patch management service to stay ahead of the latest bug and security fixes and reduce the risk of malicious exploits.
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Phish: Leverage phishing simulations to test users’ knowledge and information security awareness on a regular basis.
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Scan: Vulnerability assessments scan for malware, viruses, backdoors, hosts communicating with botnet-infected systems, known/unknown processes and web services linking to malicious content.
Implementing the right layers of security across your organization will help to mitigate risk. In fact, it takes a pretty heavy arsenal of security measures to combat the ever-growing threats targeting your firm from both the inside and the outside.
If you haven't already, check out our Cybersecurity Resource Center in honor of Cyber Awareness Month!
