Cyber Security & Recovery
Cyber Security and Recovery - What You Need To Know!
What is your level of risk currently for being affected by a Cyber Security event?
Do you even know? Are you 3 out of 10? Maybe your well covered and your business is an 8 or 9 out of 10.
Answer these quick questions (Yes, No, Maybe) to get a better idea on your cyber security readiness:
- Do you have a Disaster Recovery Plan?
- Has your IT company explained what time it would take to become operational again if you had a disaster?
- Do you have Cyber Security Insurance?
- Do you have current Antivirus?
- Does your Antivirus have any active protection against ransomware?
- When was the last successful restore done from the onsite backups?
- Do you have an offsite backup?
- When was the last successful restore done from the offsite backups?
- Does your firewall offer active protection from threats?
- Do you have an additional layer of security protecting your email?
How did you do out of 10? Give yourself a score of 1 for every yes, maybe is a 0.5, and No is a zero.
Cyber Security and Recovery Consulting Services
What's Your Score?
If you’re not feeling too great now because of your low score, then you better look at upping your game on the Cyber Security and Recovery front.
We can review all these points for you, get you back on track to reaching your risk level at an acceptable level, and if IT Security is your responsibility at work, then this might save your job.
Let’s look at a few of these things in more detail.
You might think you are not that big, so I don’t need Cyber Insurance or a Disaster Recovery Plan. That’s fine, not every business does require that, but every business does need to think about how it would continue to operate if something happened to your IT system or even a part of your IT System.
How long can you run without email? A few days with no email are no big deal? If you can’t deal with email not working for more than a day, then you need to find out if your IT company has the resources to get you back up in a day. Do they have a spare Server to get you back up, and regularly test the onsite backups so they could do a restore and get you going again? If the onsite backups are no good, then how long does it take to get your offsite backups?
See what our customers say about us:
How much data would you lose if you had to restore? All these things are relevant to you if the email is something you rely on heavily.
Are you using virtual servers or are you running an older standalone Server? Is your Server hardware under warranty? These represent risks to the operations of your business. Do you have a backup that runs reliably every night? Does it take backups more than once per day? When was the last time you restored to recover a file?
Cybercriminals are indiscriminate. They don’t care about your data, concerning ransomware, they are sending malicious emails with the ability to encrypt all your files, they are infecting websites with the same nasty payloads. They want to encrypt all your files so that you must pay them money to get your data back. Did you know that they often encrypt your data with more than one code? They encrypt your data with multiple codes so that if you pay the ransom, then you need to go back to them again to get another key to unlock the rest until you get it all done. That could get very tricky. Discuss your level of protection with your current IT people and if you don’t like the answers, get in touch with us.
Protect Against Cyber Thieves
You should have an email filter that scans all your emails before they get to your mail Server, this eliminates all the junk email from clogging up your Server but also quarantines anything doesn’t look kosher. Preferably if people can release and whitelist their email without IT intervention is ideal.
As a third layer of defence, you should have current Antivirus software on your Servers, desktop computers and laptops. This software should have an active component that looks at the behaviour on your computer and stops anything that may have been inadvertently run or deliberately activated by a virus.
Microsoft is continually updating its software, part of your protection against Cyber threats is the inherent security of the software that you use, Microsoft Windows and Office and all the other applications can have security problems with them. These problems are picked up and patched, but the time between the patching is a problem. There are now new threats called zero-day threats which are security holes discovered that become an instant threat to computers. These threats are becoming more widespread and having a patch policy is now crucial to the security of your business.
Microsoft has just stopped support for Windows 7!
This means that if you are running Windows 7 then from January 2020, it will no longer receive security updates. Every month you run Windows 7 from now means that you are more exposed to potential security problems. We recommend that you upgrade to Windows 10 if the computer can handle it. If you are not sure if your computer can manage Windows 10 and you want to change your IT people, give us a call, we will help you figure it out.
Along with Windows 7, Microsoft has stopped supporting Windows Server 2008, Server 2008R2 and SBS 2011.
That means that if you are running any of those operating systems, you need to plan to remove them and upgrade.
You will be surprised how many systems are still running this software. Again, if you don’t have the slightest clue about any of this and you don’t feel comfortable with the answers you get from your IT people then help is only a phone call away.
Lastly, we look to Windows 10, you might think, I’m safe, I have Windows 10. The answer is not as secure as you might think. Press the Windows key on the bottom left of your keyboard and the R key and the same time. We say press Windows+R. It will bring up a little Run Window on the bottom left of your computer. Then type in winver and press ok or Enter. You will get a Window open up on your computer that looks like the image below:
This window shows you what version of Windows you are running, now if you are running Windows 7, then you need to upgrade sooner rather than later. Same goes for Windows 8.
If you have Windows 10, you will see the line that says version and a build number. This list shows the build numbers that are currently in circulation for Windows 10.
There are 12 builds that you may have on your computer. You will need to upgrade anything less than an 1900 level build. You can press the Windows key on the keyboard, type Check Updates and see if you can get your computer updated to a higher level build.
These builds represent different versions of Windows 10, and all of them have new security fixes and fixes for problems with Windows.
So you can see that even though you think you are running Windows 10 so you should be safe there are issues to sort out. Unfortunately, that’s how things are. It would be best if you were on top of all matters. It would help if you kept the computers and software as up to date as we can. It is to keep you protected and safe while you try to run your business.
If you found anything that rang alarm bells at your company and you would like to speak to our company about becoming a client and reducing your risk in these areas, please get in touch via our number or contact us.
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