Author Archives: Thrive

As we start the new decade it may seem surprising that some business leaders are still reluctant to embrace the public Cloud. For years they’ve been hearing about public Cloud data breaches and compliance nightmares. Others feel trapped by legacy systems or a corporate culture fearful of new technology. These are all valid concerns that warrant careful consideration and discussion among key decision makers. However, since Salesforce launched the modern Cloud era in 1999, Cloud technology has evolved to solve those concerns.

First and most importantly, Cloud data security has far surpassed the capabilities of legacy on-premise systems. Still, many organizations believe a “security by obscurity” philosophy outweighs the security benefits inherent in the public Cloud. In a fully connected world where data is its most valuable commodity, simply reducing the number of pathways to the data is no longer a sound security posture. Your data will be attacked by cybercriminals no matter where it is stored. However, public Cloud providers have the capability and resources to use AI to learn from and adapt to each attack. Furthermore, once data is in the Cloud, metadata categorization can be used for additional security and DLP (data loss prevention) measures.

Nonetheless, securing your data whether it be on-premise or in the Cloud is ultimately your responsibility. The same is true of any compliance or regulatory requirements. If you think of the public Cloud as an apartment building, the Cloud provider’s job is to secure the main entrances, and they do that very well. However, if a tenant leaves their apartment door wide open, is it the fault of the building owner that something was stolen? This is why it’s so important to use a trusted and experienced partner like Thrive to make a move to the public Cloud both successful and secure.

If you are still reluctant to embrace the public Cloud, consider these points:

• Microsoft is no longer a software company, they are a Cloud provider and will invest in their products accordingly
• The Department of Defense is fully leveraging the public Cloud for its Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI)
• FINRA, the government organization tasked with protecting investors, was an early adopter of the Cloud and stores nearly 30 petabytes of data there

Still have doubts? Speak with one of Thrive’s Cloud experts to take the first step towards public Cloud migration today.

Firms in the alternative investment space have long confronted distinctive security challenges. After all, if you’ve successfully earned the trust of high-net-worth individuals and institutional investors, someone who breaches your IT environment will gain access to treasure troves of sensitive data and information about significant pools of capital—exactly what it takes to attract the eye of criminals seeking the quickest path to financial gain.

It’s no surprise that, according to Boston Consulting Group, financial services firms are 300 times more likely to be targeted in cyberattacks than companies in other industries, and those attacks are more costly to their victims than attacks in any other sector.

As we embark upon a new year and the start of a new decade, wealth managers face a critical imperative: they must adopt a strategic, risk management-based approach to the cybersecurity threats they now face. As attackers continue to grow more resourceful and sophisticated, this is the only way to protect a firm’s investors—and with them, its reputation.

Here are five key cybersecurity trends we’re seeing in the financial services sector today, and what they mean for the year to come:

#1: Phishing attempts are better targeted, succeed more often, and are more lucrative when they do.

Phishing attacks, which played a role in nearly a third of the data breaches that occurred last year, continue to generate increasing amounts of revenue for criminals. Global exposed losses due to this type of activity increased by 136% between December 2016 and May 2019 according to FBI reports.

Email impersonation attempts are more convincing and better targeted, and they remain difficult for today’s email security gateways to detect. Some criminals take over legitimate email accounts to exploit friends and business associates of their victims, while others send individual messages that are so carefully crafted that it’s near-impossible to distinguish them from legitimate communications.

#2: Criminals are getting up close and personal with their targets

As criminal organizations increasingly turn to automated tools to scan social media platforms and the wider Internet for personal information about potential victims, they’re getting better and better at socially engineering attacks. If, for instance, the son of one of your firm’s leading employees posts a series of family vacation photos on Instagram, criminals can now readily deduce that your employee is away from the office—and use that information to guide the timing of a spear phishing attempt.

Not only should financial services firms be mindful of the information about the company that their employees are making publicly available on social media, but they should exercise care in revealing information about their personal lives that could be exploited in a cyberattack. An executive or well-reputed employee known to be in the hedge fund or private equity sector makes an exceptionally attractive target.

#3: Nation-state level attacks are increasing in prevalence.

Not only have state-sponsored cyberattacks become more sophisticated, but they’re now targeting an increasing number of verticals. No longer motivated solely by the aim of gaining military or competitive intelligence, nation-state level attackers are now also seeking to disrupt business operations by targeting critical infrastructures, essential technologies, and the financial sector.

Because they’re well-resourced and highly professional, these attackers will easily be able to evade the majority of security controls in your environment. And because they operate at all times of day and night—or whenever their research shows they’re most likely to be successful—24/7 monitoring is now a must-have. Building a round-the-clock security operations center (SOC)—or engaging with a managed service provider with SOC capabilities—so that you can develop rapid incident response capabilities is essential for reducing your risks in this threat landscape.

#4: Attackers are sharing and selling information more regularly.

Because the Dark Web isn’t indexed by standard search engines, and because its content is encrypted, it’s challenging to determine the exact volume of activity, whether legal or illicit, that takes place there. Nonetheless, marketplaces for stolen personal and financial data have proliferated since cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin have come into more widespread use in the past few years. It’s easier, too, for would-be cybercriminals to purchase exploit kits so that they can launch ransomware attacks even if they don’t have enough technical know-how to develop their own malicious software.

As cybercriminals have become more willing and able to exchange information about potential victims and systems’ vulnerabilities, it is incumbent upon all of us to take a more collaborative approach to building our defenses. This includes sharing threat intelligence. It’s particularly valuable for smaller hedge funds and private equity firms to keep track of the types of attacks that major banks and larger firms are seeing, since similar tactics may be used against them in the near future.

#5: Regulatory bodies are driving stricter controls, while investors demand more transparency.

The global regulatory landscape is growing in complexity, and firms are expected to deploy more sophisticated security controls, to better document procedures, and provide more detailed and granular reporting. For hedge funds and private equity firms, this means that what was once the sole responsibility of the IT department has become a priority for legal and financial decision-makers as well. Accordingly, cybersecurity concerns are being given more attention and better funding.

Investors are increasingly likely to scrutinize funds’ security practices closely when making final decisions about where to invest. Not only can a breach result in immediate losses, but it can damage a firm’s reputation to the extent that its portfolio value will be diminished.

Want to learn more about how to develop cyber resilience and a solid risk management strategy for your hedge fund or private equity firm? Contact us for more details about our cybersecurity solutions and services.

So far in 2020:

In Canada, Newfoundland was hit with a huge blizzard that produced 75 centimeters of snow in a single day with wind gusts of up to 150 kilometers an hour, knocking out power, unleashing an avalanche, and burying the Avalon and Bonavista peninsulas in deep snow. The storm caused a state of emergency and even the military has been called in to help dig residents out.

Meanwhile, the northeast US was hit with a huge storm including snow, rain, and then more snow, and left cities like Boston slick with ice.

Across the globe we’ve seen powerful winter snow, rain and windstorms in Spain, causing civilian evacuations to escape from heavy flooding of the coastal towns. Unfortunately, there’s no such escape possible for brick and mortar businesses. Crippling bushfires, ash rain, and flash floods have devastated huge swaths of land in Australia, destroying wilderness and towns alike. As if that wasn’t bad enough, the Australian winds produced dust storms and thunderstorms across central New South Wales , producing conditions and lightning that sparked even more bush fires in a self-perpetuating firestorm catastrophe.

It’s probably no surprise that these extreme and increasingly common weather conditions can make equipment maintenance more difficult, and power outages even more likely. The latest storms are winter’s friendly reminder, whether your region is facing record snowfall, or just one bad storm, that your organization’s disaster recovery plan needs to be ready.

Preparing for Winter Disaster Recovery

As natural disasters continue to grow in scale, longevity, and geographic footprint, companies of all sizes and all locations need to prepare for the chance of a weather-related natural disaster by turning to cloud for disaster recovery. Cloud disaster recovery provides geographical diversity along with quick recovery times to keep your company running reliably. If a winter disaster like a blizzard or flood strikes your main data center, your cloud resources will escape its effects.

Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) enables your company to replicate data and deploy a backup environment without needing to construct a second physical data center. Continuous data protection ensures that your production site and DR site are in sync, allowing you to meet Recovery Point Objectives (RPO). DRaaS also allows for full recovery in the cloud in just minutes, giving your organization the Recovery Time Objective (RTO) that you need for true business continuity.

Your Winter Disaster Recovery Plan should include:

• Identifying mission-critical business applications and data. These are services at the top of your recovery priority list when something goes wrong. Identifying the key services and applications you must get back online, the order of their recovery, and the process of recovery helps to ensure that your business can continue doing business with minimum downtime.
• Testing processes and equipment, even if you’ve never had downtime. Testing communications processes in a DR scenario and ability to access sites and systems through remote access. This also means including equipment testing as a part of your regular maintenance checks. This should cover physical on-site equipment such as generators. Work with your service providers to make sure that they’re doing the same.
• Being transparent with staff, even if they aren’t critical to your winter disaster recovery plan and protocol. When employees across all departments know exactly what to do when systems go down, you’ll be able to get back up and running as quickly – and efficiently – as possible.

Need more help with preparing your winter disaster recovery plan? Read our Backup and Recovery Plan blog article!

Winter-proof Your Business – Thrive Can Help!

After a natural disaster, you can feel confident that you are making decisions based on accurate, complete, and current data with Thrive’s services. Before Old Man Winter starts knocking the power out with blizzards, floods, ice storms, hurricanes, and other nasty winter hijinks, be sure to bring your disaster recovery plan up to date with the help of your Thrive experts. Contact us to learn more about the Old Man Winter Disaster Recovery Plan.

There is a wide range of options available to IT teams in choosing a backup strategy and system for their organization. At Thrive, we work to keep your environment protected and accessible. Our goal is to keep your organization open for business despite whatever adverse events come your way.

Thrive’s solutions and responsive support enable your in-house IT team to minimize disruptions and ensure smooth operations and business continuity, even in the face of Old Man Winter.

We make sure that your data and IT systems are available and ready to resume operations so that you can continue to provide uninterrupted service to your customers no matter what the weather brings. Contact us to learn more.

Chip Gibbons, cybersecurity expert, details elements he finds that organizations overlook in their security platform.

FDIC & OCC cite their top six controls for risk management. Does your firm have these in place?

The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) issued an interagency cyber threat warning, citing a “heightened risk” to financial institutions amid increased geopolitical tension. Financial firms should re-evaluate the adequacy of safeguards to protect against a cyber security risk and focus on risk management principles that can reduce the chance of a cyber-attack as well as minimize business disruptions.

No matter how sophisticated the security solution, it is unreasonable to expect it to reduce the risk of a cyber threat to zero. However, security solutions combined with proper cyber hygiene can greatly limit exposure. Additionally, firms must also focus on risk management controls including detection and response. It is not enough to just have an incident response plan, firms should perform full incident response simulation training and crisis management. This immersive simulation training will identify cracks in your cyber preparedness.

The FDIC & OCC joint statement stressed the importance of the following key controls for Risk Management.

1. Response, resilience and recovery capabilities by (i) maintaining comprehensive resilience plans in order to respond and recover successfully from destructive cyber-attacks and (ii) establishing comprehensive system and data backup strategies;
2. Identity and access management to prevent phishing attacks that could compromise login credentials;
3. Network configuration and system hardening that (i) only provides access to approved ports, protocols and other services and (ii) are continually monitored;
4. Employee training on recognizing cyber threats, phishing and suspicious links, in addition to measuring the success of the training programs;
5. Security tools and monitoring procedures, such as (i) hiring qualified cyber security staff, (ii) reviewing system and network audit logs and (iii) implementing a sufficient internal and external testing programs to assess the firm’s ability to detect cyber threats; and
6. Data protection systems to implement (i) a data classification program and (ii) encryption and tokenization of confidential data.

Thrive has the resources to ensure that your firm adheres to the FIDC & OCC guidelines. Secure your sensitive data by contacting Thrive’s expert team of cyber security engineers today.

Do you shut your car windows when you leave it? The answer is most likely “yes” since you do not want people getting into your car and taking things or vandalizing the interior in any way. Just like your car, you need to make sure you do the same with your laptop, desktop, or cell phone. Many of the security solutions we discuss and support for our clients include software that gets installed and managed by Thrive to help further protect the assets of the client.

When traveling for business I often observe things that can be discussed with new and existing Thrive clients to bolster their security posture. On a recent train ride, I was reminded that not all security comes in the form of a piece of software that Thrive needs to manage. I watched as a gentleman got up to take a phone call in private and left his email up on the screen and the laptop unlocked. He was an attorney and had left some confidential information on his screen. If he had a privacy filter installed on the laptop, I would not have known he had left the computer unlocked. After ten minutes he returned and luckily no one had done anything with the email or his computer in that time. This is not an uncommon occurrence. On almost every flight and train one can watch someone using a computer, tablet, or phone get up and walk away from it without locking the device.

If you are unaware of how to easily lock your computer here are a few tips to help:

Microsoft Windows:

1. Press the Windows key + L
2. Press Control-Alt-Delete and hit enter
3. Press Control-Alt-Delete and click on “Lock Computer”

Macs:

macOS Catalina

1. Go to the Apple menu and click Lock Screen
2. Press Command+Control+Q

Older versions of the operating system

1. Press Control+Shift+Power button
2. Press Control+Shift+Eject if your Mac has an optical drive

Thrive, a Top 100 Vertical Market MSP, has hired John Holland as chief revenue officer. He previously held key roles at TierPoint, Sungard Availability, Internap and Broadwing.

Every organization needs to have an actionable data backup and recovery plan in place to ensure that critical data and applications are protected when disaster strikes. Underestimating the likelihood that adverse events will occur and impact operations, reputation, and revenue is a massive lurking threat to profitability and business continuity for organizations across the globe.

Businesses that evaluate the risks to their data continuity, identify their critical data and applications and implement best practices and systems designed to mitigate the threats and ultimately safeguard their operations, customers, and profitability. A way to do this is to be ready with a data backup and recovery plan.

Risks to Critical Data Continuity

Natural Disasters and Power Outages
Hurricanes, fires, and floods are on the rise

Security and Compliance
Malware, ransomware, and internal data handling

Human Error
Deletion of data, theft, or sabotage

Hardware Failure
End-of-life equipment, gaps in infrastructure, and redundancy

Software Failure
Failed or corrupted application patches or upgrades

Corrupt Data
Damaged or otherwise compromised files and infrastructure

Identifying Critical Data and Applications

Backups of data and systems should be done at least nightly and depending on the criticality of the system and the amount of data generated, often more frequently. Modern backup systems will provide flexibility to do full backups periodically in combination with incremental backups to optimize backup windows and recovery speeds.

In addition to backups, archive requirements vary from business to business based on internal policies and retention requirements, but which promote long-term data protection. Your organization should also consider applicable local and global consumer and industry data regulations and compliance laws, the volume of data that your company generates, and best practices around retrieving and deleting information.

Critical and irreplaceable data can include:

• Email messages and attachments
• Address books, contacts
• Calendars
• Customer data
• Documentation
• Applications and settings
• Databases

Other considerations:

• What do you need to backup?
• How much disk space is needed to back up?
• Review of your Internet connection capacity (can it accommodate off-site file transfers?)
• How often should backups be performed (depends on how often your data changes)?
• How will you monitor your backup system(s)?
• Can you test your ability to restore data (restore a portion of your data on a scheduled basis)?

Systems and Best Practices – Thrive Can Help!

There is a wide range of options available to IT teams in choosing a backup strategy and system for their organization. At Thrive, we work to keep your environment protected and accessible. Our goal is to keep your organization open for business despite whatever adverse events come your way.

Thrive’s solutions and responsive support enable your in-house IT team to minimize disruptions and ensure smooth operations and business continuity, even in the face of disaster.

We make sure that your data and IT systems are available and ready to resume operations so that you can continue to provide uninterrupted service to your customers. Contact us to learn more.

For the first Patch Tuesday in 2020, there is a potentially serious flaw that is being patched.  KrebsOnSecurity.com is reporting that Microsoft has already shipped patches to the US military and high value targets. It is also being reported that the patch could involve the crypt32.dll component. This is of importance because crypt32.dll is in many versions of windows and could impact a majority of the Microsoft windows systems in use today.

The crypt32.dll component handles “certificate and cryptographic messaging functions in the CryptoAPI”. This component secures windows applications, for example Internet Explorer and the Edge browser.

According the National Security Agency (NSA), they reported this vulnerability to Microsoft, which would be the first time the NSA has been credited for reporting a security issue. Microsoft will be releasing more information later today when it releases the patches. Thrive is monitoring the situation and will be updating our information as we know more.

UPDATE 1:30pm:

Microsoft the vulnerability Patch for CVE-2020-0601.  This is a spoofing vulnerability that is rated as “Exploitation more likely”. An attacker may be able to craft a certificate that appears to have the ability to be traced to a trusted root certificate authority. We recommend everyone patch for this vulnerability.

Proven industry Sales and Marketing leader to support accelerated growth and additional geographic expansion

FOXBOROUGH, MA, January 14, 2020 – Thrive, a premier provider of NextGen Managed Services, proudly announced today that technology sales-leader, John Holland has been appointed as Thrive’s new Chief Revenue Officer.

John Holland is a veteran of the Cloud and managed services industry, spending the last 20 years leading sales organizations throughout North America. Before coming to Thrive, John served as the Senior Vice President of Sales at TierPoint, a nationwide Cloud and Managed Services Provider, for nine years. Prior to TierPoint, John led sales teams at Sungard Availability, Internap and Broadwing.

John brings his vast customer-focused experience in executive-level sales, business development and marketing management to lead Thrive’s customer success, sales and marketing teams. While John will be Massachusetts-based, he will frequently travel across all six of Thrive’s offices to focus on developing each region’s sales efforts, further enhancing relationships with Thrive’s near-1,000 customers and help Thrive continue to expand geographically.

“With Thrive’s continued expansion through the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic regions, we are fortunate to have someone with John’s advanced sales and business development capabilities to focus on organic growth of the company,” stated Rob Stephenson, Chief Executive Officer. “Under John’s leadership, Thrive’s sales and sales operations teams will be able to roadmap, streamline and manage businesses’ Cloud, cyber security, global network management and disaster recovery efforts with our portfolio of advanced NextGen Managed Services.”

“I am honored to join the Thrive team during this exciting period of growth for the company,” said Mr. Holland. “I look forward to leading Thrive’s sales divisions and implementing strategies that will bring the IT capabilities of our clients’ and prospects’ businesses to new heights.”

About Thrive

Thrive is a leading provider of NextGen managed services designed to drive business outcomes through application enablement and optimization. The company’s Thrive5 Methodology utilizes a unique combination of its Application Performance Platform and strategic services to ensure each business application takes advantage of technology that enables peak performance, scale, and the highest level of security. For more information, visit thrivenextgen.com

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MEDIA CONTACT:

Stephanie Farrell
Director of Corporate Marketing
774.276.1521 | sfarrell@thrivenextgen.com