I was recently reading the Herjavec Groups 2017 Cybercrime report, and a couple of facts jumped out at me. By 2021 Cybercrime “will be more profitable than the global trade of all major illegal drugs combined”. They go on to mention that they expect the costs to be 6 Trillion by that time and that nearly half of all cyber attacks will be against small businesses.
Measuring IT Service Delivery
There is an old adage in business success that says, “You cannot manage what you fail to measure.” This is a valid point when it comes to focusing on a set of metrics that provide the best solutions for IT service delivery. The type of metrics which are used will depend upon the needs of the enterprise. However, there are key metrics which should be used across the board regardless of business objectives.
Thanksgiving is a time to reflect and be grateful for things that are often overlooked in the busy day to day life. I could go on and on about many different things that I am grateful for. I am especially grateful for my friends, family, health, and ability to eat way too much food today. Those things will always be at the top of my list. Also on my list, a few different technologies, specifically these 5:
Well sort of, popular TV series Grey’s Anatomy featured an episode last week where the hospital in the show was cyber attacked. It started with multiple departments experiencing some technical difficulties. Enter confused internal onsite IT guy, Tim, who is overwhelmed trying to figure out what is going on with all the computers in the whole hospital. Sounds like a lot of work for one guy doesn’t it? Normally day to day a small IT department onsite dealing with minor IT problems sounds like a good cheap plan until a disaster strikes.
You got a SIEM! Now what?Before we go any further, a SIEM (Security Information and Event Management) is a device or software that collects logs from various sources and allows you to query them. Different software or devices focus on different ways to do this. Some require you to create your own reports and are extremely powerful, others have almost limitless canned reports and don’t require you to know much more than a web interface to interact with it. In both cases, you suddenly have access to a ton of data that allows you to correlate your firewall logs, server logs, and potentially any other log in your environment. This information can allow you to track down attackers and see odd behavior in your network.
What is Hyper Converged Infrastructure?
It feels like all the heads in charge of these vendors loved the Six Million Dollar Man as a kid as that is how they position these products. Hyper-Converged Infrastructure (HCI) vendors tend to say that theirs is better, faster, smarter and they can rebuild our networks better than they ever were and requiring less support from IT staff.
In today’s world, we must make many choices when it comes to securing digital resources and users. With the speed at which the bad guys are developing new techniques, utilizing zero-day vulnerabilities, and jeopardizing on the human attack surface it is vitally important to create your own security fabric. How quickly are things changing you may ask?
What is a Botnet?Botnets are evolving and IoT is not being helpful. It’s been just over a year since we first saw Mirai, a botnet that took over IoT (Internet of Things) devices using a default password list of just over 60 and this is not the last time we will see a massive Botnet leveraging the lax security practices of many IoT device manufactures. The security research and firewall company Check Point has discovered a massive new Botnet known as “Reaper” which has been “evolving and recruiting IoT devices at a far greater pace and with more potential damage than the Mirai botnet of 2016”.
Pros and Cons of a VPNMany companies that have a series of branch offices or a staff that works remotely deploy what is known as a virtual private network or VPN. The primary purpose of a VPN is to allow business partners to communicate over a secure network from a remote location via IPsec or Internet Protocol Security. By using a VPN companies view this as one of the safest ways to link users together that are distributed across multiple locations.
Update: BadRabbit – What you Need to KnowUpdate: While there have been updates that BadRabbit has infected some US machines, it doesn’t seem to be as widespread as initially feared. This isn’t to mean that we should let our guards down. Continue to work with your end users to make sure they don’t click to update flash, except from Adobe’s site. Also, train them to be wary of updates that are not pushed down from either internal IT or their IT provider.