5 Biggest Cybersecurity Threats That Small Businesses Face

Large enterprise and small businesses are at risk from cybersecurity threats. However, a lot of people think that small businesses are too small to be targeted by hackers. But that’s not the case.

As cyberattackers automate their tasks more, it is very easy for them to set eyes on hundreds and even thousands of small businesses all at once. Small businesses tend to have less stringent cyber defences, are less aware of potential online threats, have less resources and time to spend for cybersecurity Wilmington NC. All these make them easy targets for hackers compared to bigger firms.

However, at the same time, they are also lucrative targets. Even the smallest business can provide large sums of cash, or have access to a lot of customer data, which under GDPR or other regulations, they need to protect. Small businesses tend to work with bigger firms, and so they could be used by cybercriminals as a way to target all those companies.

Small business have a lot to lose if they get hit with a cyberattack. A report showed that companies with below 500 employees tend to lose around $2.5 million for every attack. Losing this amount of cash in a cyberbreach is going to be devastating for small businesses, not to mention the damage to the reputation, which comes from getting hit by a cyberattack.

That’s why small business have to be aware of the threats and how you can stop them.

Top 5 Security Threats and How To Avoid Them

Phishing Attacks

The most widespread, damaging, and biggest threat that small businesses face are phishing attacks. They account for about 90% of all the breaches faced by organizations. They have increased by 65% over the past year and they are responsible for more than $12 billion in business losses.

A phishing attack takes place when an attacker pretends to be a well-known and trustworthy contact, and encourages a user to download a malicious file, like, or provide access to confidential information, credentials, or account details.

You need to have a strong email security gateway to prevent phishing emails from getting to the inboxes of your employees. You can also add post delivery protection to secure your small business from phishing attacks. These solutions will let you report phishing emails and then permit admins to get rid of them permanently from the inboxes of all your employees. Security awareness training is the final layer of security against phishing attacks. With this, you can test and train your employees on how to spot phishing attacks. They will also be informed on how to report the incident.

Malware Attacks

The second biggest threat to small businesses is malware attack. It includes different cyber threats like viruses and Trojans. It is a varied term for the malicious code that hackers make to get access to steal data, get access to the network, or to get rid of data on the network. Malware may come from spam emails, connecting to other infected devices or machines, or from malicious website downloads.

These attacks can be very damaging for small businesses since they could cripple machines, which needs expensive fixes or replacements to repair. They could also provide attackers access to data, which could put employees and customers at risk. Small businesses tend to take advantage of people who use their own computer or devices when working, because it helps to save cost and time. But this boosts their chances of facing a malware attack because personal devices are more at risk from malicious downloads.

You can prevent malware attacks by setting up strong technological defenses. Web security is crucial as well as endpoint protection solutions.

Ransomware

Another common type of cyberattack that hits hundreds, and even thousands of businesses every year is ransomware. They have grown more common lately, because they are lucrative types of cyberattacks. Ransomware will encrypt company data and can’t be accessed or used unless the company pays the hacker a ransom. The company will be left with a hard choice. Will they pay the ransom and lose a lot of money or be forced to shut down their services because of data loss.

Business have to set in place strong endpoint protection across all of their devices. These will help stop these ransomware attacks from encrypting data. You should also set up an efficient cloud back-up solution because it could help mitigate data loss. There are many different ways of data back up for businesses, so it is crucial to research the best method for your organization.

Weak Passwords

Another major threat that small businesses face is employees using easily guessed or weak passwords. Several small businesses use several cloud based services that need various accounts. These services may contain financial information and confidential data. You should consider using business password management technologies to make sure that your employees always use strong passwords. This can also help your staff in managing passwords for their accounts, recommending passwords that cannot be cracked easily. You should also implement multifactor authentication technologies.

Insider Threats

The insider threat is caused by actions of current and former employees, associates and business contractors. They could access crucial data about your company that could lead to harmful effects through malice or greed, or just carelessness or ignorance. Insider threats is a growing problem. It can put your customers and employees at risk or cause financial damage to the company. As small businesses grow and have more employees, the insider threats also grow.

In order to block these insider threats, small businesses have to make sure that they impose a strong security awareness culture within the company. This can help prevent insider threats that are caused by ignorance and assist employees to detect early on if an attacker if an attacker is trying to compromise your company’s data.

There are countless threats facing small businesses these days. The way for your company to protect against these online threats is to have a set of security tools in place. Call SpartanTec, Inc. now and let our team help improve your company’s cybersecurity.

SpartanTec, Inc.
Wilmington, NC 28412
(910) 218-9255
http://manageditserviceswilmington.com

Cities Served:
Wilmington, Silver Lake, Sea Breeze, Carolina Beach, Eagle Island, Leland, Wrightsboro

All About Security Risk Assessment

Cyber Threat Risk Webinar

Identify security risks and understand general network usage.

July 21st  11:00 am EST
Register Here

A security risk assessment will identify, evaluate, and execute important security controls in applications. It concentrates on the prevention of application security vulnerabilities and defects.

Performing a risk assessment lets an organization check the application portfolio as a whole, from the perspective of the cybersecurity attacker. It will support manager when creating a well informed resource allocation, tooling, as well as decisions concerning security control implementation. Therefore, performing an evaluation is an important part of the risk management process of an organization.

Understanding The Process Involved In Security Risk Assessment

Factors like resources, growth rate, size, as well as asset portfolio will have an effect on the depth of the models for risk assessment. Organizations will perform generalized assessments when time or budget constraints are encountered. But generalized assessments do not offer the in-depth mappings between associated online threats, identified risks, assets, impact, as well as mitigating controls.

When generalized assessment consequences do not offer sufficient correlation between these aspects, a more detailed evaluation is required.

Security Risk Assessment Model: 4 Steps To Ensure Success

1. Identification – figure out all technology infrastructure’s critical assets. Then evaluate sensitive data that’s been created, stored, or sent by these assets. Don’t forget to make a risk profile for every one of them.
2. Assessment – use a method to evaluate the identified risks for critical assets. Once in-depth assessment has been performed, find out how you can efficiently and effectively spend resources and time for risk mitigation. The assessment method should evaluate the correlation between threats, assets, mitigating controls, and vulnerabilities.
3. Mitigation – create a mitigation approach and execute security controls for every risk.
4. Prevention – execute tools as well as processes to lower the vulnerabilities and threats from happening in the resources of your firm.

The Common Problems Solved By A Security Risk Assessment

An organization will be allowed to do the following thanks to a comprehensive security risk assessment:

• Come up with risk profiles for every asset.
• Identify assets within the company.
• Know what data is stored, sent, and created by these assets.
• Evaluate asset criticality in relation to business operations. This involves the general impact to reputation, revenue, as well as the possibility for the exploitation of the organization.
• Assess the asset’s risk ranking and prioritize them for evaluation.
• Apply specific mitigating controls for every asset according to the assessment results.

It is crucial to know that a security risk assessment Wilmington is not a single security project. Instead, it is a regular activity that must be performed at least once every two years. It will provide a firm with an updated snapshot of the risks and threats to which they’re exposed.

Call SpartanTec, Inc. for more information about security risk assessment or if you need to help of IT experts to secure your network against potential online threats.

SpartanTec, Inc.
Wilmington, NC 28412
(910) 218-9255
http://manageditserviceswilmington.com

Cities Served:
Wilmington, Silver Lake, Sea Breeze, Carolina Beach, Eagle Island, Leland, Wrightsboro

Powering Security at the Speed of the Business

Cyber Threat Risk Webinar

Identify security risks and understand general network usage.

July 21st  11:00 am EST
Register Here

Why the FortiGate Next-Generation Firewall Is at the Apex of the Industry

Executive Overview

Stolen data fuels a highly profitable cyber-crime economy, one where organizations are under constant attack. In response, network engineering and operations leaders are in search of network and security solutions that increase network visibility, enable immediate threat intelligence sharing, and unlock automated threat protection at all network edges. Fortinet FortiGate next- generation firewall (NGFW) provides real-time and intelligent protection against malware and emerging threats. As part of the Fortinet Security Fabric, FortiGate NGFWs integrate with other Fabric-Ready partner security solutions to improve network visibility and control while simplifying network infrastructure.

Trends Driving NGFW Adoption

In the third quarter of 2018, almost 34,000 new malware variants were detected—a 43% increase over the second quarter and an 129% increase over the first quarter of the year.1 This trend has continued into 2019, and it poses a serious problem. As threats evolve to become increasingly sophisticated, the risk of a data breach is nearly inevitable at many companies. The median organization in one survey experienced 20 breaches in the past 24 months.2 Morever, 68% of breaches are not discovered for months or longer.3 In terms of impact, a 2019 report from Ponemon and Accenture recorded an 11% increase in the number security breaches last year—yielding a 12% higher average cost of cyber crime per company (reaching $13 million USD in 2018).4 To reduce both exposure and damage caused by a data breach, organizations must re-evaluate their network security strategy.

Network throughput is critical to operational success. Enterprises need security designed to keep up with the digital growth and direction of their network traffic needs. By 2021, global IP traffic is expected to show a five-year compound annual growth rate (CAGR)

of 26%, while interconnection bandwidth (for the private exchange of data between businesses) is expected to jump by 48%.5 Furthermore, encrypted traffic recently hit a new all-time high of over 72% of all network traffic—nearly a 20% increase year-over- year.6 At the same time, encryption technologies such as secure sockets layer (SSL) and transport layer security (TLS) hide up to 50% of cyberattacks, making inspection of encrypted traffic a non-negotiable feature.7

Network Security Challenges

IT executives consider network security a critical priority, but they also need to reduce the complexity associated with supporting multiple disparate security products. More than three-fourths (77%) of organizations rely on non-integrated point security solutions to some degree—which leaves network defenses vulnerable to cyberattacks.9 New and evolving compliance requirements further complicate network management in terms of manual workflows for reporting and auditing.

External threat vectors are not the only problems that need to be addressed. With 34% of breaches now attributed to trusted internal users,10 it has become imperative to segment users, devices, and applications for greater control. With granular access control, a compromised user credential or infected device can easily be isolated, quarantined, or blocked to prevent unauthorized access to sensitive content.

Key NGFW Deployment Requirements

Network engineering and operations leaders need to improve compatibility and shared intelligence across their security solutions. They also need a high level of reliable network performance and open application programming interfaces (APIs) to coordinate and automate responses. Beyond these broader requirements, NGFW evaluation should focus on the following areas:

Highly effective security. A NGFW solution should leverage global threat research and artificial intelligence (AI) as well as local zero-day threat intelligence to reduce the risk of data breaches. A fully featured NGFW solution goes beyond intrusion prevention, application control, and user identity. It should also support capabilities such as web filtering, IP reputation, SSL/TLS inspection, anti-malware protection, and sandboxing to help break the kill chain of attacks.

Visibility and control over network traffic. Establishing transparent visibility across all parts of the distributed organization is essential to securing increasingly complex and distributed networks. A NGFW should use deep inspection to identify applications, users, devices, and threats and then deliver better protection through context-aware policy controls. It should also inspect both clear-text and encrypted traffic to discover things like hidden malware attachments. An effective NGFW solution should also come with single-pane-of-glass management, advanced visualization components, and rich reporting to inform strategic security decisions.

Performance and reliability. NGFW capabilities are only useful if the platform’s performance can keep up with normal network operations when all desired NGFW features are enabled. Further, reducing cost and complexity can only be achieved if the NGFW can consolidate traffic from various firewalls or run multiple security services concurrently. To support business continuity and bandwidth requirements, a NGFW platform must deliver highly reliable and resilient firewall Wilmington NC capabilities at high-throughput speeds.

Risk mitigation. A truly successful NGFW solution should reduce risks by segmenting network and infrastructure assets in accordance with business intent and continuously evaluating the trust of users and devices. It should provide cost-effective, advanced Layer-7 security for defense in depth.

The Fortinet NGFW Solution

FortiGate NGFWs deliver unparalleled protection, operational ease of use, and the industry’s best threat protection in a compact form factor. Powered by AI and machine learning (ML) from FortiGuard Labs, FortiGate NGFWs offer a wide range of integrated security capabilities and services.

• NGFW threat protection
• SSL/TLS inspection
• Intrusion prevention system (IPS)
• URL filtering
• Security rating
• Intent-based segmentation

• IPsec/SSL VPN
• User/device identity and authentication
• Sandboxing
• Networking (LAN, WAN, Wi-Fi)
• Management and reporting

                                 

Figure 1: FortiGate NGFW solution deployment.

Unparalleled Protection

Effective security solutions keep attacks from damaging organizations—and the more threats blocked, the better. Fortinet technologies are the most validated by independent tests conducted by industry experts. Most recently, FortiGate NGFWs received a “Recommended” rating in NSS Labs 2018 NGFW industry tests by achieving an 100% block rate for live exploits and delivering the

lowest-per-protected Mbps total cost of ownership (TCO).11 FortiGate also delivered high SSL/TLS inspection performance with minimal performance degradation, receiving the best scores in this area among all other tested vendors.

FortiGuard Labs delivers the most advanced threat intelligence to address all phases of the attack lifecycle with top-rated security effectiveness. Threat researchers around the globe keep close watch on the threat landscape 365x24x7. This enables the FortiGuard Labs team to deliver updates to the entire Fortinet Security Fabric ecosystem with some of the fastest response times in the industry.

Increasingly, enterprises look to implement network-based threat protection; however, most network security vendors only offer limited capabilities in this area. In contrast, Fortinet offers an effective, AI-powered threat protection engine that was developed in-house by FortiGuard Labs. Its features include one-to-many signature matching, heuristics, decompression, and emulation. This engine consistently receives ratings from Virus Bulletin, AV-Comparatives, and NSS Labs that are as good or better than other threat protection vendors.12

In addition to traditional threat protection, organizations are now also looking to NGFWs for protection from the latest advanced threats. Fortinet FortiSandbox, which earned the coveted NSS Labs Recommendation in the 2018 Breach Detection System and 2017 Breach Prevention System Test,13 analyzes objects for malicious behavior and is proven effective against zero-day threats. FortiSandbox natively integrates with FortiGate NGFWs and is available as a physical or virtual appliance on-premises, as well as a cloud-based or managed service.

Single-Pane Orchestration, Automation, and Response

The unique, single-platform approach of Fortinet’s NGFW solution delivers end-to-end protection that is easy to purchase, deploy, and manage. Single-pane-of-glass security management and visibility helps to simplify the problems of multiple complex consoles.

This centralization enables true automation-driven network management with features for flexible deployment. A highly intuitive view of applications, users, devices, threats, cloud service usage, and deep inspection provides unparalleled transparency of what is happening on the network at all times. With this strategic view, one can easily create and manage more granular security policies designed to optimize security and the allocation of network resources.

Figure 2: FortiManager dashboard view.

Using real-time threat intelligence, FortiGate NGFWs enable network engineering and operations leaders to:

• Identify thousands of different applications with application control (including deep application control specific to cloud services) to set up effective application-aware policy The FortiGate can inspect SSL/TLS-encrypted and -evasive traffic as well as traffic running on the latest protocols. By integrating this capability with AI-based threat intelligence and sandboxing, FortiGate NGFWs can help uncover both known and unknown malware hidden within applications or encrypted sessions.
• Set granular policies for different types of users with FortiGate user identity management capabilities integrated through Active Directory (AD), Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP), Remote Authentication Dial-In User Service (RADIUS), Microsoft Exchange, and other authentication This integrated NGFW capability is easily expanded to many more sources for user identity through the addition of Fortinet FortiAuthenticator for large, diverse networks.
• Uniquely identify the type and operating system of devices being used on the network without requiring agents or additional products to set stronger security policies for riskier types of
• Speed incident response with advanced visualization, such as custom threat maps specific to the organization, one-click policies (e.g., device quarantine), and
• Reduce administrative workload by leveraging the broadest range of enterprise-class security This now includes mobile malware and local sandbox intelligence—all consolidated and managed from a single-pane-of-glass console.

Industry’s Fastest Platform

Fortinet purpose-built security processing units (SPUs) drive performance at the heart of the FortiGate platform, delivering industry- leading threat protection and SSL/TLS inspection performance. This level of throughput is needed to deliver on the promise of a great NGFW solution that consolidates multiple security functions on a single appliance—thereby reducing cost and complexity while boosting operational efficiency to keep up with rapidly evolving enterprises.

At the same time, the FortiGate software architecture also leverages parallel path processing to optimize the high-performance hardware and software resources available in packet flow for maximum throughput. As a result, FortiGate NGFWs provide extremely high throughput and exceptionally low latency, while still delivering industry-leading security effectiveness and consolidating functions.

Best-of-Breed Security Reduces Risks and Complexity

Along with new sophisticated threats and escalating breach statistics, organizations simultaneously must manage rapidly evolving network environments that demand more connectivity and greater bandwidth. New and better security solutions are needed—but not at the cost of latency and complexity that impede operations. FortiGate NGFWs deliver the security effectiveness, robustness, and performance needed to secure transforming enterprises without slowing down the business.

Call SpartanTec, Inc. now and let us help make sure that your network is secured from common and new online threats.

SpartanTec, Inc.
Myrtle Beach, SC 29577
(843) 420-9760
https://www.spartantec.com/

SpartanTec, Inc.
Wilmington, NC 28412
(910) 218-9255
http://manageditserviceswilmington.com

Cities Served:
Wilmington, Silver Lake, Sea Breeze, Carolina Beach, Eagle Island, Leland, Wrightsboro