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Cybersecurity Awareness Month

by Rupert Davey
October 2024

For Cybersecurity Awareness Month, I'd like to talk a little bit about cybersecurity fundamentals and how they can apply to your business.

Risks and mitigations

In the 12 months to June 2023, 80-90% of all successful ransomware compromises originated thought unmanaged devices and 70% of organisations encountering human-operated ransomware had fewer than 500 employees.1

If you fall victim to a phishing e-mail, these risks are real. The risks are out there, and they can lead to data breaches, financial loss, reputational damage, operational disruption, competitive disadvantage and compromises of personal privacy.

So what can we do to mitigate some of these risks?  Well at ctm, we have the following in place as part of all our cybersecurity products:  

Intentions

The bad actor is trying to compromise the confidentiality, integrity, or availability of the data.

This is called the CIA Triad.

Confidentiality is protecting the data from an authorised access. Integrity, is protecting the data from an authorised change and availability is ensuring the data is only available to authorised users.

But why does an attacker do this?

They do this for money. They do this to disrupt you. They do this to steal your intellectual property. They might have a vendetta, but they might just do it for fun. So let's look at the things we can do now to defend against typical attacks.

What to do?

You need to identify all the assets in the business.

Do you know how many laptops you have? Or desktops? Or servers, switches, routers? Mobile phones, iPhones, Android devices.  Possibly.  

Do you know what software is running on those devices... and the version of that software?  Is the software vulnerable?  Is it up to date?

Probably not.  Knowing what you have running in your organisation is the first step in securing your organisation.

Once you have an understanding of your assets within your business, you can then begin to look at threats and vulnerabilities posed to those assets. 

What we're looking to do here is identify the high value assets, the crown jewels, and put our resources into those high value assets. This can include pre and post breach activities.

How to do it

At ctm Information Technology, we have tiered managed service solutions that cover:

If cybersecurity is at the top of your mind there are simple, easy things that can be done to harden the security stance of your business. 

More information is available on our cybersecurity product page but please contact us and we can talk about the details.

Rupert

 

1. Microsoft 2023 Digital Defense Report