Security

Security is of the essence in today’s world. The similarities between the wild, wild west of the 1880’s and the internet today is uncanny. Just as the west had many dangers that a visitor had to traverse, the internet today poses a formidable foe to anyone who has not taken several steps to protect themselves. From viruses, to worms, to Trojan horses to name a few, there are many ways for the bad guys to gain a foothold into your system. Add to these troubles exploit kits and key loggers among others, and you find yourself under full assault when browsing the web or reading your emails.

This is not for the amateur. The number of threats and the fast changing environment makes it mandatory that you deploy a variety of defense mechanisms to protect your systems. Here are a few that we utilize to protect you:

Firewall: A Next-Gen commercial grade firewall is essential to protect your network from attacks and is the first line of defense, keeping most of the problems from ever getting into your network.

Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) – Secured Sites: All Next-Gen firewalls inspect packets as they enter and depart your network. However, standard deployment does not inspect secure sites. Knowing this, the bad guys have started encrypting their packets to avoid detection. As a result, if encrypted packets are not inspected, the bad actors can penetrate your network. As a result, we now offer DPI for secured sites. This will prevent those bad actors from penetrating your network!

Email Protection: Studies show that 59% of Ransomware enters an organization via email. Also, many organizations need an encrypted method to send private data that standard email cannot offer (Studies show approximately 10,000 businesses are infected with ransomware every week. A security breach can devastate your business.

Email end user training: It is unrealistic and unfair to expect your employees to know how to navigate the many threats on the internet today. Our phishing training and testing will help them understand and avoid the dangers that are all around. To do otherwise would be I.T. negligence!

Antivirus: An antivirus tool must reside on each computer should an attack enter into your network, allowing your computer to defend themselves.

Patch Management: Proactive and reactive patch management for servers and PC’s close the holes that hackers find in your software.

Encryption: Encryption is the process of protecting your data so that if someone unauthorized does access your information, it is encoded so that it cannot be read. Encryption is utilized in two primary ways, the encryption of email information so that your emails cannot be read, and the encryption of your computer, so that if your PC falls into the hands of a bad guy they cannot read the data.

Monitoring: A robust monitoring system will notify you if your antivirus is not up to date. It will also notify you before your equipment has a failure due to lack of memory, disk space shortage, disk failure, etc.

Password Management: When it comes to managing your internet passwords, there are only four types of users:

  1. Users that use the same password for everything. This is a recipe for disaster as sooner or later one of their web sites will get hacked and then the whole world has access to all of your web sites.
  2. Users that have unique passwords for each site, and write them in a log that is in their top left drawer. This is better in that only the people that have access to the top left drawer can access all of their confidential info stored in the internet. Unfortunately, this can be a lot of people.
  3. Users that use a variety of catch phrases with a variety of schemes to login to web sites. This is better in that they can remember them in their heads, but only a genius can clearly manage and segregate all of those passwords in their heads.

Users that use a password manager to keep their passwords. This is the best, another system that memorizes and organizes all of your passwords, so you do not use precious brainpower to manage passwords. It is not recommended that you use your computer browser. All it takes is someone to hack or steal your PC and they have all of your passwords.

Multi Factor Authorization: In the past, accessing systems required two things from you:

  1. Identify who you are – your user ID
  2. Identify what you know – your password

The need to improve the security of access to systems has exceeded having a login and a password. We now need to go to a 3rd level of security. Security systems are based on who you are (your login id) what you know (your password) and what you have. This third piece of information (what you have) is what has created the need for multi factor authentication (MFA). MFA requires that when you login to a site, you provide a code that has been sent to you (what you have). This code helps the system verify that you are really you. While this is not something we all long for or enjoy, this is the state of the art way to verify that only authorized people are accessing your systems.

white

Get In Touch With Us

Contact us today to find out how we can help with all your IT needs.