Cybersecurity Awareness Month Week Two: Fight the Phish
Cybersecurity Awareness Month is now in week two. This week’s article, coming to you from your top Marietta and Atlanta GA IT support company, INSI, is about how to Fight the Phish! This topic covers how to create awareness, protect, identify, respond and report any suspicious emails that can lead to malware and ransomware attacks.
5 Cybersecurity Awareness Tips to Fight the Phish
The first step in cybersecurity awareness is to manage your equipment and people. According to Radicati Group, a California research company, an estimated 135 million phishing attacks are attempted every day. This is of great concern since 91% of all cyber-attacks start from phishing emails. Therefore, if you want to fight the phish, you need to prevent ransomware attacks on your terms by following these cybersecurity prevention tips:
- Keep Your Systems Current– Don’t use out of warranty or unsupported equipment or software. Manufacturers will not prescribe fixes to any new issues, and it leaves holes in your system for hackers to slither their way in.
- Preventive IT Maintenance– Preventive maintenance is essential to Ransomware prevention. You must keep your patches/updates current and test your backups regularly.
- Train Your Employees– Your employees are your biggest weakness. Anyone on your network can click a simple link and accidentally download malicious code. For this reason, it is good to expand your cybersecurity awareness and do an annual phishing test to see which employees are prone to click so that they can get more training.
- Protect Your Passwords– 53% of your users will use the same password on your system as they do for home computing. Therefore, multifactor authentication goes a long way in preventing password leaks and cybersecurity awareness. This method makes the user prove they are who they say they are before gaining access to your network.
- Get Reliable Backups– Your backups are the key to a complete system restore. Therefore, if you manage to get hacked, your MSP can disconnect you from the Internet, clean the virus, and restore your backups to the last instance.
2 Cybersecurity Awareness Tools from your top IT support company
The second recommendation is to equip yourselves with the right tools to monitor, detect, respond and remediate any phishing threats. There are two programs INSI recommends:
Managed Detection and Remediation (MDR) – MDR is an antivirus on steroids. Subsequently, it records all the events that occur at your endpoints. Then, when a credible threat is detected, a cybersecurity team will analyze the chain of events in real-time and determine the threat’s validity. Once identified, they can stop malicious activity in its tracks and guide you through remediation.
SIEM – If you can afford it, SIEM is your best alternative. Security Information and Event Management service, SIEM provides real-time threat monitoring, event correlation, and incident response. Security engineers watch, gather, analyze, and report suspicious activities in your logs.
INSI Can Help You Fight the Fish
INSI has an extensive range of cybersecurity solutions to meet all your business needs ranging from GAP analysis, employee training, 24/7 monitoring, log management, and response. If you need help figuring out your cybersecurity needs, our consultants are always available to talk. In addition, we have great cybersecurity awareness training for your end-users.
About INSI
For over 25 years, Innovative Network Systems (INSI) has offered an integrated approach to IT support and cybersecurity for small and medium-sized businesses in the Atlanta area. Your top IT support company is comprised of 100% local, college-educated, and experienced engineers provide a range of services from basic monitoring to fully Managed IT services. The INSI IT model gives their clients the exact level and type of service they want while also providing greater accountability and reduced ongoing IT support costs. INSI options include cloud, cybersecurity, backups, cabling, wireless, business phones, and much more.
About the Author
Deborah Frazier is the author of IT Outsourcing Secrets – A Small Business Guide to Compare IT Support Companies. With nearly 20-years’ experience consulting small and medium-sized businesses on their IT support needs, she brings a wealth of knowledge to INSI as Head of Marketing and Sales. If you like this article and would like to get notified when a new article is posted, click here.
