Let’s learn the remote security best practices with the cyber security expert, Robert Capps, VP of Marketplace Innovation at NuData Security
As we know, 2021 is just few days away, much awaited time of the year. What is going to happen in New Year? What will be the landscape of the tech world? What will the landscape of cyber security look like for enterprise? What is going to be the main focus, risk and considerations for the upcoming year for cyber security leaders and professionals?
During 2020, enterprises faced wide-ranging challenge including COVID-19 and fires – which increased the reliance on distributed workforces. Accelerated digital transformation strategies simply means that multiple organizations found themselves adopting new technologies to maintain business continuity. Plus due to less time during acquisition and deployment, organizations lacked the time needed to invest in deep due diligence.
Let’s see a list of best practices and predictions that will affect enterprises and cyber security leaders:
1. Numerous number of Phishing Attacks during Pandemic
From on-premises operations to cloud-based services and off the premises, security leaders should be unsurprised with this prediction.As per, Microsoft report, cybercriminals aligned their phishing attacks to local interest and news. So apparently, worldwide phishing attack numbers mirrored COVID-19 events. And the data says, it’s a series of different countries across a variety of geographic regions, showing that phishing attacks focused on local issues.
2. Ransomware Attacks on C-Suite personnel’s’
During the pandemic 2020, we all have seen or heard about lot of ransomware or malware attacks, we have heard that cyber security firms got hacked by cyber criminals. Malware attacks tend to block the user access rather than silently stealing data in background. And the ransomware attacks take control over the database and block user access. And then ask for ransom.
As we are aware about the new normal, our workforce member productivity relies on the ability to access cloud-based resources, cyber criminals will keep on continuing to advance these threats and increase their usage. As per the survey done by Metro, 46% of surveyed consumers wanting businesses to pay a ransom if their financial data is involved.
3. Adopting upgraded cyber security solutions
During the COVID, organization understood and proactively prevented employee’s physical health problems, but did you proactively mitigate cyber security risk associated with them? Are you allowing your employees to work from their own devices? Is the security check done? Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning solutions with rich data sets will make sure that whether organizations are appropriately analysing threat patterns or not.
As per the IBM’s Cost of Data Breach Report 2020, either you invest in technology for the sake of saving the technology or the average breach would cost around $259,354.Let’s learn what Rober Capps, VP, Marketplace Innovation at NuData Security has to say on the same.
As we move into 2021, organizations managing home based employees must ensure that all company owned devices are configured with up-to-date security tools that detect and prevent viruses, malware, and network level attacks. Beyond that, the management of corporate data should also be required, as should be the deployment of data loss prevention tools that manage and audit the movement of company data to USB data storage devices, non-owned or managed computing devices, and local printers in the home office.
– Robert Capps, Vice President, Marketplace Innovation at NuData Security
4. Enhanced cloud security monitoring
Work from home is going to be there for a longer period of time. Securing the assets, however means that organizations will need to focus on improving and enhancing their cloud security programs. According to the research done by SC Magazine, misconfigured storage services in 93% of cloud deployments contributed to more than 2000 breaches encompassing more than 30 billion records since 2018.
We agree with what Robert has to say here, organizations need to make sure that employees’ home network are safe and secure. The employees should be given the fraudulent emails training.
“Organizations must also work with their employees to make sure that their home networks are safe and secure, and to train their staff to identify fraudulent emails, phone calls and text messages that may target home-based workers to steal their credentials or compromise their corporate computing devices. With a majority of the business world operating remotely now and through the next year, safe data handling and privacy training should be offered to remote employees to raise awareness of the security and privacy concerns of managing private company data in a home environment.”
– Robert Capps, Vice President, Marketplace Innovation at NuData Security
5. Cybersecurity testing across application, network, and device security
2020 proves to be the year where organizations will need robust security controls for applications, networks and devices. Organizations need to be more prepared to secure the remote workforce. Moving towards 2021, analysts are saying that the security testing market is set to grow by 22.3% between 2020 and 2025, up to an expected $16.9 billion.
As rightly said by Robert, all the data management tools need to be configured and should keep on sending the real-time alerts, where IT team can always be on their toes to help the organizations solving the issues in real-time.
As remote work becomes the norm, and continues to evolve into the New Year, all security and data management tools should be configured to send real-time alerts to the information security team when threats are detected, for follow-up and action as needed. All company owned computing assets should be configured with an always-on VPN connection that tunnels all traffic through the VPN, to the corporate network. Split-tunnel VPN, which routes corporate communications over the VPN while allowing internet traffic to go directly to the internet, can leave corporate computing assets vulnerable to internet-based attacks that are traditionally mitigated by corporate security products such as content filters and security proxies.
Robert Capps, Vice President, Marketplace Innovation at NuData Security
Conclusion
As organizations are planning their financials and budget for 2021, they also need to find the solution which will help in mitigating the most pressing and serious risks. In a constantly evolving digital and physical threat landscape, keeping the security in check is the most important than ever before. Enterprises will need to find the agile solutions which will give them to continuously monitor, detect and mitigate the risks in real-time or at least quickly. And on the other hand, organizational leaders can lie CISOs, CIOs and the senior leadership team can focus on protecting their IT stack by looking back at 2020 and bridge the communication gaps created by accelerated cloud-first or cloud-only strategies.
