In Balance IT Solutions

🔒 Cybersecurity Awareness Month: Final Tip & Fact of the Day 🔒 🙏 Thank you to everyone who participated and read our posts over the last month during Cybersecurity Awareness Month! 👻 Scary Halloween Fact: The average number of cyber attacks per organization every week is estimated at 1,636 in the second quarter of 2024. This is a 30% jump from 2023. 🦇 🛡️ Tip: Attacks will only get more sophisticated, the frequency will increase, the data will grow, and every industry compliance will tighten. If you have not evaluated your organization's security against a standard of some kind (SOC2, ISO27001, HITRUST, NIST CSF, CIS, etc.), it is time to do so and build a tailored and prioritized cybersecurity roadmap for 2025. One interesting tool at zero cost is the NCCIC ICS Cyber Security Evaluation tool (CSET) which provides a self-assessment approach for evaluation against different government standards. If you are unsure where to start, the NIST Cybersecurity Framework is the way to go. The tool can be downloaded from CISA at https://lnkd.in/dG5sR8TJ. 🎃 #InBalanceITSolutions #wedoITright #CyberSecurityAwareness #CyberSecurity #Halloween #CSET #NIST #DataProtection #CyberAwareness #SOC2 #ISO27001 #HITRUST #NISTCSF #CISA #StaySafe

🔒 Cybersecurity Awareness Month: Insightful Fact of the Day 🔒 Fact: In 2024, it is estimated that less than 25% of cybercrimes were reported to law enforcement 🔒💻 #CyberCrime #CyberSecurity Tip: Many victims of cybercrime feel shame and embarrassment in communicating the incident in fear of drawing unwanted law enforcement attention or amplifying reputational risks. 😔🛡️ Cybercrime is in federal jurisdiction and the Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) is a central hub for reporting these crimes. Your contribution provides immense value to attribute these threats to the malicious groups responsible and understanding the broader threat landscape we are living in. 🌍🔍 Don't be afraid to contribute information to better our national security. IC3 complaints can be filed at https://www.ic3.gov/ #InBalanceITSolutions #wedoITright #CyberSecurityAwareness #ReportCyberCrime #NationalSecurity #IC3

🔒 Cybersecurity Awareness Month: Daily Knowledge Nugget 🔒 Fact: 9 out of 10 successful attacks exploit the Microsoft identity systems Active Directory (AD) and Entra ID ⚠️🔐 Tip: The security posture of your Microsoft Active Directory and/or Entra ID is absolutely critical to protect your identities, access control rights, network resource objects and computer security policies. There are fantastic open-source tools out there that can assess your system and provide prescriptive recommendations to fix discovered issues and fortify your defenses. Purple Knight by Semperis is a free tool that can be downloaded from URL https://lnkd.in/gXrhM4ff. This tool is easy to use and discovers ways to fix misconfigurations and reduce the attack surface of both AD and Entra ID. This is a great exercise to perform periodically and before your next Penetration Test. 🛡️💻 #InBalanceITSolutions #wedoITright #CyberSecurityAwareness #CyberSecurity #IdentityProtection #ActiveDirectory #EntraID #PurpleKnight #OpenSource #PenTestPrep

🔒 Cybersecurity Awareness Month: Tip & Fact of the Day 🔒 Fact: Open-source Intelligence (OSINT) is publicly available information such as social media and breached search engines that provide context on you that is useful for attacks. 🕵️♂️💻 Tip: OSINT information is surveyed by attackers during reconnaissance to craft hyper personalized phishing scams or target account takeovers. 🎯 It is useful to be aware of the information that is available about yourself online. Take some time to search yourself and remove or modify stale information. You can also check sites like haveibeenpwned.com to see if your email was involved in a data breach. 🔍 If so, it's a great idea to change passwords for the sites discovered and ensure there is no password overlap with other sites you access. 🔑 Multifactor authentication will tighten things even further if possible. 🔒 #InBalanceITSolutions #wedoITright #CyberSecurityAwareness #CyberSecurity #OSINT #StaySafeOnline #DataBreach #ProtectYourself

🔒 Cybersecurity Awareness Month: Daily Insight 🔒 Fact: Operational Technology (OT) and Information Technology (IT) are converging 🤝, which presents new security challenges ⚠️. Tip: Where IT tends to focus on confidentiality, OT prioritizes availability and performance. An Industrial control systems outage (Energy, Gas, Communications, Water, etc.) can be catastrophic 💥 at a large scale to society. NIST SP 800-82 is a guide 📚 for securing OT with great recommendations on how to secure OT while addressing their unique performance, reliability, and safety requirements 🔐. Check out the full Guide to Industrial Control Systems (ICS) Security here: https://lnkd.in/giqn-QXA #InBalanceITSolutions #wedoITright #CyberSecurityAwareness #CyberSecurity #OT #IT #NIST #Safety #Reliability #Performance

🔒 Cybersecurity Awareness Month: Daily Knowledge Nugget 🔒 Fact: Less than 35% of the general population is familiar with smishing attacks 📉 #SmishingAwareness #StayInformed Tip: SMS Text Message Attacks (smishing) can be just as deadly as email and proven to be very successful. Many users have fallen victim to fraudulent gift card, package delivery, public announcements, tax relief programs, etc., costing an average of $800 per victim 💰💸 and leaking personal information. It is easier to evade detections and secure gateways when it's not an email message, and texts can easily deliver malware disguised as an application or a malicious URL link that redirects you to a fraudulent website. If you receive a text message that is unfamiliar, take the time to spot the Smish signals 🚩 and act accordingly. Don't respond ❌, call your provider directly (not using the number from the message) 📞, don't provide recovery codes 🔑, and beware of urgent sentiments ⏰ #InBalanceITSolutions #wedoITright #CyberSecurityAwareness #Smishing #CyberSecurity #ProtectYourself

🔒 Cybersecurity Awareness Month: Daily Security Tip 🔒 Fact: Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks are increasing and not well understood by executives. 📈🔍 Tip: DDoS attacks are mentioned less than ransomware, malware, or phishing yet can be the root cause of significant financial losses. 💰 In a DDoS attack, the attacker overwhelms a resource (Website, VPN Server, etc.) with requests so that resource becomes unusable to end users. 🚫 In an environment where any short period of downtime results in significant financial losses that are nonrecoverable, this risk should be top of mind. To mitigate these risks, explore the use of a purpose-built Web Application Firewall (WAF) and know that many cloud providers offer DDoS prevention services as an add-on to their hosting fee. ☁️🔒 These risks should be socialized and acted upon accordingly so that a loss of availability can be better mitigated. #InBalanceITSolutions #wedoITright #CyberSecurityAwareness #CyberSecurity #DDoS #RiskManagement #WAF

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🔒 Cybersecurity Awareness Month: Daily Insight 🔒 Fact: 45% of organizations experienced a disruption from a third-party supplier's cyberattack over the past two years 🔒💼 Tip: Companies rely on their supply chain heavily to fulfill critical business operations. Understanding you cannot transfer risk entirely to a supplier although they may offer robust managed infrastructure and service agreements sets realistic expectations that there is a need to perform ongoing due diligence efforts to mitigate residual risks. Here are a few tips to help develop your supply chain risk management program. 📊🛠️ • Keep a detailed inventory of each supplier and prioritize them by risk to operational outages or breaches. 📋⚠️ • Document your supplier's cybersecurity and privacy contacts for reference and emergency communications. 📞🔍 • Conduct annual supply chain risk assessments on your critical vendors (Questionnaires, SOC2 Report Analysis, Vulnerability Assessments). 📝🔎 • Hold a management review of assessment results including recommendations to mitigate or accept known risks. 📈👥 • Ensure third-party contracts define security requirements and breach notification within a reasonable timeframe. 📝⚖️ • Establish and maintain a Third Party Risk Management Policy that is supported by leadership. 🛡️🏛️ #InBalanceITSolutions #wedoITright #CyberSecurityAwareness #Policy #Cybersecurity #DataProtection #SupplyChain #RiskManagement

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