If a company asks this
question it is highly possible that it is already being attacked, security in
companies at the level of computer and technological assets is not a game that
we must leave time. If we consider which the most valuable asset of any company
is, we can say that it is without doubt:
So several questions
arise to ask ourselves:
a) Are we
completely sure who accesses what information within my company and can I give
testimonies to my clients that their information is not seen by people or
employees who should not have access to it?
b) Are the
procedures clear enough that define where confidential information is stored
and how it could be accessed by third parties?
c) Do I have a
trained technical staff (consultative or permanent) who has mastered computer
security issues and who supports me in the most relevant aspects of how to keep
information safe?
d) Are my
company's operations assured by resilient processes?
e) Is anyone
responsible for the data and how is it handled within my company?
f)
In the event of a data breach, do I have alternative mechanisms
that would protect data from being read by unauthorized third parties?
g) Are all my
employees trained in basic security and how to treat data due to its level of
confidentiality?
If you have answered
"Yes" to all these questions we congratulate you, you participate in
a company with a very clear vision of how to manage your IT security. But if on
the contrary you have answered "No" to at least one of these questions,
do not be alarmed, you are in the right place to know what to do, and take
immediate action.
What are hackers looking
for when attacking our company?
There is only such a
valuable asset within a company for any hacker who decides to tie us up as the
information we handle about our clients, our operations or the brand as such.
Computers can be reset to their default state after an attack, employees can continue
working in another location or on other computers after an attack, and even
operating machinery can be restarted to continue working normally after an
attack. But the only thing that is completely lost is the credibility of a
company when information on products or services, client folders, business
strategies, confidential files are completely erased or encrypted by a hacker
after an attack and even worse if they are published in the internet by way of
informational leak.
Attacks can be more
shocking for several of the following reasons:
The deleted or encrypted
information is irrecoverable unless a ransom is paid or is backed up, this
could imply the total loss of information for the business, and therefore a
collapse of the credibility of the same, cases such as Facebook in In 2018,
Uber in 2016, or iCloud photo leaks in 2014, these may not be the most recent
cases of leakage, but they are cases of companies that you would think are not
going to have the luxury of being vulnerable. However, the reality is that
there is no such thing as a non-vulnerable company.
When there is no
contingency or resilience plan that supports this situation: In security, it is
customary to say that nothing is secure enough so that it is not compromised,
therefore, in computer security there are two branches that contribute after an
attack: forensic part of an episode and the resilience that is how we react to
that episode. It is highly important to be prepared and never consider anything
like a safety "RMS Titanic" , since as experience gives us even the
most resistant ship in the world was sent to the bottom of the sea by a piece
of ice.
For not contacting an
adequate technical staff that idealizes the protection of data and
technologies, or simply having a technical staff that is not prepared for these
situations. Information gaps are the most macabre type of situations that any
company could be involved in. How these issues are handled is crucial to the
future sustainability of the company's reputation.
Operative or administrative
personnel with little training in how to react to an IT breach could be a
catastrophe for the company, since as we could observe in recent events in the
country about fires and explosions in companies, the way in which employees
handled the information and It was processed abroad through social networks,
negatively affecting the companies affected in these incidents. Therefore,
there must be a clear plan for evacuation, protection of human life,
safeguarding of information and continuity of well-documented company assets
and that staff receive constant training on these documents.
What Steps Should I Take?
Let's start from the
basics to the advanced:
Get an antivirus or its equivalent for the whole company,
you will be surprised that many companies rely on free antivirus to protect
their company. Without knowing that free antivirus are marketed by antivirus
companies for the sole purpose of obtaining statistics and intelligence with as
many users as possible, at no time do free antivirus offer the protection of
their paid counterpart. Therefore, if you do not have a Protegent360 antivirus,
get one right now.
Now you can take a break
knowing that all your machines have at least one antivirus installed. Well, not
really, for an antivirus to be completely effective it must be monitored by an
expert who identifies the threats that have entered and criticizes, classifies
them and can give advice to users on how to avoid getting infected. This is
very simple, there are Zero Day Exploit threats. These threats have a common
objective to detect vulnerabilities in systems that have arisen before the
manufacturer could have time to apply a patch or solution to it, in the time
elapsed between the developer being able to write the necessary code to resolve
that vulnerability and the distribution to all users, hackers take advantage of
this vulnerability; in this period we are all vulnerable, even we have an
antivirus. For this and many other reasons it is important to have an expert
staff that can support us by identifying and trying to solve these
vulnerabilities. It is important to note that, depending on the situation of
your company and the evaluation carried out by the security expert, you may
require additional protection devices and solutions such with firewalls, VPN,
among others.
Excellent, now we
have antivirus software and an expert (consultant or fixed) who supports
us with all security issues, we already believe that we can rest a little and
forget about the security issue. Of course not, impossible. Now the work
begins, this expert must make a survey of each of the systems used by the
company, identify the update levels, what risks a failure in systems that
support the operations of the company imply for the operations of the company.
At the same time that an information backup plan is developed in alternate
locations (outside the company or in the cloud), an effective data risk and
resilience plan.
One of the most
important points in the equation and one that has produced excellent results in
practice is training users on how to protect themselves from intentional hacker
attacks. For example:
·
Identify identity theft emails.
·
Safety when browsing the Internet.
·
Avoid downloading personal or unknown files on corporate
computers.
·
Including creating a communication work plan with clients and
suppliers that make it impossible for another person to impersonate them, or
vice versa.
·
Among other high impact aspects.
·
Create and effectively implement a backup and restore plan for
your tested data.
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