As we now turn the corner into the new year, it’s time to assess goals surrounding your cybersecurity posture. Dare we say it – you need to set your cyber resolutions for 2022. Unlike traditional pie in the sky resolutions that fall flat before February hits (cough* cough* gym memberships), if you work your way through these five practices, you’ll set yourself up for cybersecurity success for years to come.
Cybersecurity Resolution #1: Acknowledge your weak links.
Four out of five organizations wish they had a stronger team to handle security incidents. That same number cite hiring as a primary challenge in creating a strong cybersecurity posture. In short, it’s impossible for most organizations to find the people needed to staff an exceptional 24/7 Security Operations Center (SOC) dedicated to handling cybersecurity for your clients.
This forces most MSPs to stand up a makeshift SOC within their organization. They utilize people that have an interest in cybersecurity, but also carry the ticket burden of a traditional NOC engineer. On top of everyday responsibilities, they now have potentially thousands of security alerts to monitor, analyze, and action as needed. In the beginning, your new cybersecurity specialists may be gung-ho about tackling both full-time jobs; but after they spend 25% of their time chasing false alerts and clients continually squawk about problems, client tickets will trump security alerts 100% of the time. With all good intentions, you have now unknowingly introduced a dilemma to your engineering staff: alert fatigue. This creates an inevitability: some threat will sneak in under the radar, sending your organization into emergency recovery mode.
Hiring your own 24/7/365 security team requires you find a minimum of 6 full-time, security educated, SOC Engineers. Once you assemble a team, you still need to train and retain the SOC Engineers to service your security offering. Responsibly exercising our core value of candor, you don’t have the time, nor budget, to do this authentically. Recognize this weak link, and you’re well on your way to improving your situation.
Cybersecurity Resolution #2: Support your end users, everywhere”
As of September 2021, nearly half of full-time U.S. employees worked from home either all (25%) or part of the time (20%). These numbers are expected to hold for at least the foreseeable future. In fact, if 91% of workers get what they prefer, these shifts will be permanent.
As we’ve seen throughout the pandemic, this opens additional threat vectors based on laptops or desktops utilized (BYOD or provided by the company), public or private WiFi, remote access services, and a shift to cloud-based SaaS rather than premise-based applications.
To gauge your level of readiness, ask yourself these questions. Are you doing everything you can to protect your clients in the cloud, or wherever they choose to work? If you have the right tools in place, have you tuned them properly to ensure that your team is able to operate efficiently while preventing threats on all layers of the attack surface?
Many BLOKWORX partners, like Adam Bell, have recognized that “by offloading this service [they] are able to focus on helping [their] clients continue to grow their business.” You must find a solution to support clients wherever they are, insuring protection across the entire threat landscape.
Cybersecurity Resolution #3: Understand the full attack surface.
There’s a problem in the MSP industry today. Many MSPs think that if they have one layer of protection for their customers (i.e. rudimentary firewall, anti-virus, backup), their customer is safe. Unfortunately, today’s bad actors know how to poke through these single lines of protection to expose major vulnerabilities.
For example, a bad actor sends a phishing email, and the recipient clicks on the payload. This releases ransomware across their system, and eventually, their network. There are four layers necessary to fully protect you from this type of attack:
- Email protection providing pre-delivery protection blocking the email before it hits the inbox.
- If for some reason the email protection fails, endpoint defense to prevent the payload from deploying,
- If the endpoint defense fails, a firewall configured correctly creates a buffer between the user and the bad actor’s actions.
- A backup should be used as a final layer if everything breaks down. Do not get caught mistaking a DR/BCP tool as a security tool.
In order to properly protect your client base, address all layers of the attack surface: cloud, edge, network, and endpoint.
Cybersecurity Resolution #4: An Ounce of Prevention is better than a pound of cure
Unfortunately, most MSPs (along with most cybersecurity providers) operate with an “it’s not a matter of if, but when a business will be attacked” attitude. While we believe wholeheartedly you should have all your ducks in a row in case you’re attacked, we hold to the optimism that attacks can be prevented.
BLOKWORX supports the first prevention-centric endpoint solution using Deep Learning to provide pre-execution prevention for both file-based and file-less attacks. Detection and response in minutes (touted by most cybersecurity providers on the market) is far too long. By that time, the critical data is already gone.
Our solution touts the highest detection and prevention rate of any “next gen” AV. This includes preventing “zero day” malware undetectable by any other vendor without spontaneous updates to the application when the zero-day hits. It presents the fewest false positives of any solution on the market. It also scans the broadest range of file types, including weaponized documents not covered by any other product.
This type of solution is traditionally only accessible to large enterprises with at least 2,000 endpoints due to high install and maintenance costs; however, the BLOKWORX MAED solution makes Deep Instinct available to most MSPs, with significantly lower minimums and a fully-managed service delivery.
Cybersecurity Resolution #5: Invest in a partnership.
If you’ve absorbed the first four resolutions, you likely understand there is no way you can deliver the high-end cybersecurity protection your clients need on your own.
Handling the massive amount of detected security events is not sustainable for the MSP. This will inevitably lead to stunted growth. DIY fatigue sets in, complacency follows, and the client is more exposed to the risk of a breach.
Just as you tell your clients to let you focus on their IT so they can focus on their business, you shouldn’t be spending all your time and energy learning how to be a cybersecurity firm. That’s where BLOKWORX comes in. Your fifth resolution is to reach out to the BLOKWORX team. We’re standing by to plan how to implement all these resolutions eliminating heavy lifting on your side.
TLDR: We defend. We protect. You Grow. Start your new year by contacting BLOKWORX.
