Businesses face more challenges than ever in the COVID-era workplace. Aside from the usual hurdles, you now have to think about employees working outside the office and causing potential security issues, your data and information being accessed in multiple locations, and a massive uptick in scams.
In this webinar, we discussed ways to protect yourself and your business successfully against these new risks. Watch the recording or read through the transcript for our advice!
Transcript:
Reese Ormand 0:01
All right, everyone, let’s go ahead and get started here.
Thank you for being with us here today. I am Reese Ormand, CEO of Techvera. We’re an IT company based here in Denton, Texas that works with small businesses. And joining us today is Mr. Matt Solomon. He’s the VP of business development at Kaseya. Definitely a friend of Techvera and a security expert. Matt, thank you for joining us, man.
Matt Solomon 0:27
Absolutely! Excited to be here and looking forward to speaking.
Reese Ormand 0:30
Cool. Well, I know you always bring really relevant info that when we get audiences, they always, you know, your talking points always resonate. So I’m glad that we’re getting to share those today.
So guys, what we’re going to talk about today, we’re going to give you an update on what the modern threat landscape is looking like today, as recently as some of the breaches we’ve seen here in the last few weeks. And we’re going to give you some context to why those breaches are happening. And why some of these security efforts that we’re going to be talking about today, things that you may have not implemented in your business in the past, why these things are so important moving forward, right.
So we’re going to do that, we’re going to give you some tips and some tools to stay safe. We’re going to talk about what we’re seeing out there when we meet with, with new prospects when we meet with businesses that are having challenges. And then we’re gonna do a Q&A at the very end here. So if you do have any questions, ladies and gentlemen, please do post those in the chat here. We have Lauren moderating that in the Q&A there. So if you have questions, type them in and she will make sure we get to them here at the end.
So wanted to start off with giving you guys a little recap, from a data source that here in the IT industry and for small businesses, we we rely on this data quite a bit. It’s it’s a annual compilation of data breach incidents, and it’s called the Verizon data breach incident report, the Verizon VDBR. I actually misspelled that there! So anyway, this is a very important thing for us because it looks at across the globe, what are the trends? What are we seeing, what kind of compromises are becoming popular? What are the new tactics that these malicious actors are using? And there were some key points that I wanted to point out from this data that just came out in June of this year.
So there has been an uptick in the percentage of breaches that are happening because of financial gain. And I think what Matt will go through with you guys here in a moment, we’ve seen over the last decade, five years, three years, that it’s more and more these are, you know, derived to financial gain. That’s that’s the end goal of all these data breaches and security issues. And we’re seeing an uptick of that even since last year from 71% to 86%.
Another interesting metric from that data, 43% of those breaches were from web applications like cloud based software as a service products. And these attacks have doubled and that complements that growth of cloud services, right? So we’ve seen major players here recently have outages. I know Microsoft has had some issues. I know other big vendors that did offer cloud services, they’ve had outages because of data breaches, right, and we’ll talk a little bit more about that. And in that regard, 67% of these data breaches resulted from credential theft, human error, or social attacks. We’ll get into that granular data here in a little bit. So of those, 67% credential theft. The major attacks, credential theft, and social attacks such as phishing and business email compromises caused about 67% of those breaches.
You break those numbers down, though, about 37% of credential theft breaches use stolen or weak credentials. We’re going to talk a little bit about that where those stolen credentials end up, and why your employees’ Gmail account and their password, why is that relevant to you, right? 25% of those involved phishing. You know, guys, that’s where you’re getting those emails, Hey, could you wire this money to this account, or, hey, here’s a new vendor information or, hey, I’m posing as the CEO, I email my CFO and tell them to, you know, pay a vendor, those sort of phishing attacks. Maybe you get an email that says, hey, your your iCloud has been breached, you need to reset it. You click on that link and give them your iCloud cloud credentials, right? It was a malicious link, they compromised your credentials, the more sophisticated ones will even continue you to log you into the service. So like you could literally log into the iCloud account with your credentials, but they phished, they’ve siphoned off those credentials in the process.
And then human error accounted for another 22% of these breaches. Now, something to think about ladies and gentlemen, when it comes to security: this is always going to be a multifaceted approach when it comes to protecting your business, protecting your team, but there’s always going to be malicious actors. There’s always going to be hackers figuring out new ways to attack to get around these measures you put in place.
And we saw this here recently with a phishing attack, a spear phishing attack on Twitter. And basically, on July 15, there was a user that was able to replicate, they called into Twitter, they acted as if they were an employee, they were able to provide enough information that they tricked the internal Twitter resources into giving them access to core network tools that allowed them to post to all these accounts, and 45 accounts were compromised, right? And so this was a Bitcoin scam, this malicious group, they got into all these accounts, they blasted out this message across all these very well known Twitter accounts that were verified. And they got about $80,000 in Bitcoin in this, right? And I think the bigger concern here, though, is that this shows that even multibillion dollar, you know, tech companies can still be fooled, right? There’s still human element to this. And furthermore, with this specific incident, I’m really interested to see if we’re gonna see anything further down the line of you know, data that was obtained through this right? Direct messages, they pulled any kind of salacious stuff these hackers can monetize.
So everyone is susceptible to this. And that’s something that we’ve just got to take into consideration as we, as we talk about next steps here. And so with that, I am going to pass it off to to Matt here, who is going to do a deep dive into where, where’s this information going? And what does this all mean, Matt?
Matt Solomon 6:47
Got it, and Reese, thank you, and are you going to be controlling my slides? Or?
Reese Ormand 6:50
I actually just killed the share there? I can do it if you’d like or?
Matt Solomon 6:54
Um, yeah, if you don’t mind, I didn’t have that. Sorry about that.
Reese Ormand 8:32
Yeah, go ahead.
Matt Solomon 6:57
Yeah. Yep. Um, you know, and Reese, there are a lot of different stats. And you know, what we’re gonna really bring this back to is credential exposures. So on the next slide, what we’re seeing is, the convenience of logging in is creating chaos. So your employees are being asked to log into more workplace applications than ever before. And they’re also logging in, you don’t always know this, they’re using their work email on third party websites that you might not even be aware of, depending on whether you have policies around, you know, signing up for different websites.
And where this really becomes a large issue is that we’re human. And Reese talked about a stat about human, you know, the human element that’s part of this, but 76% of people use the same or a derivation of the same password for everything they log into, unless they have a password manager. And it’s just human nature. I mean, take a step back, think about your own passwords, it’s so common to, you know, when it asks you to change your password, you add an exclamation point. And actually, to Bank of America’s credit, they now no longer allow you to use an exclamation point, because that is the most common special character that people use.
And the reason that the credential is so valuable to a hacker is it’s almost the keys to like your front door of your house, right? If it’s like if it’s a network password, again, your, the keys to the kingdom of an organization, but even passwords that are related to a third party application. So you know, a CRM system, I could then gain access to every one of your customers, imagine the damage in a single email. I mean, you saw the damage on Twitter accounts. Imagine if I send, a hacker sends out an email, you know, saying bad things about all of your clients, and you send out in a single swoop. So that’s a large issue with the repeated passwords because they can take one login, and really apply it to many other application logins that you have. And we’ll kind of get into this a little bit more.
The next issue with this stuff is how predictable we make passwords. We did a study and this, you know, the core of the study, some of the things that we took out of it was, you know, from the top thousand passwords, you know, the average length was seven characters, which is nowadays not really considered a long password, I don’t think, but you can see names people use their names as passwords. Like it’s, I mean, it’s not even close when you look at that chart, but there’s just common themes that we find and one third of passwords use your kids names. I mean, think how easily through social media I can figure out your kids names. And you know, and then of course, people associated to their birthdate. So it’s, you know, MattSolomon1980. Right? That, it’s so easy to do those.
There’s lazy passwords, you might not recognize that password at first glance, but it’s literally just a keystroke. It’s like a diagonal motion on your keyboard no different than if you did 123456. And all of these are really vulnerable because again, they’re predictable. On the next slide, what we have is kind of a tier of bad passwords to better passwords. I mentioned the 123456, you know, using cities, sports names, anything that they can have access to through social media, you don’t want to put of course names with a single number. That’s very common. You know, we see the exclamation point cowboys 1986. So you got a Cowboys fan, born in 1986, using the most overused special characters, so those are why those are so easy for them to crack. Something that we’d started to see kind of as like a, oh go ahead Reese.
Reese Ormand 10:48
Yeah, I was gonna say so with that, Matt, so if I’m a malicious actor, and you’re my target, I’m trying to get into your accounts. Well I can look at your Facebook, I can see what what sports you like, what companies you like, your kids’ names, I can take these different variables, right. And there’s there’s tools that these hackers use now, ladies and gentlemen, that are AI-based machine learning tools where they can just cram in different variants of those passwords until they find that match and brute force that, right?
Matt Solomon 11:15
That’s exactly right. And I think one of our slides will talk about credential stuffing. But yeah, it’s essentially they run a script. And they run a script. Yeah, well, there you go. I forgot that that was the next one.
But so that’s what I think people don’t realize, one, they have scripts to run predictable predictions based on on your password. The other way is this idea of credential stuffing. So this is where let’s, you know, I use LinkedIn a lot, because that was a really pretty major hack that really affected everybody. So LinkedIn got breached, and affected anybody who had a login to LinkedIn, and so on, a lot of those were work place logins. So what they do is they take the email in the password exposed in LinkedIn. And then they run a script across all the, you know, 300 top login sites, Facebook, Twitter, being examples of them, Venmo. And they run that same script to see if the login will work anywhere else.
And so that’s what I’m talking about where now you have I mean, for from a social engineering standpoint, you’re getting into people’s social media accounts, you can see everything, you can see all their interests, all their friends, you know who to target. The other part of it is you can actually log into accounts, like a CRM system, right, like a bank account. Because unfortunately, again, people repeat passwords. So, you know, we always think of like a network password being the real exposure point.
But again, you know, the damage you can do through a CRM system, things like that, you know, your accounting software, your TurboTax, whatever you’re using, that has confidential information, you know, and I would say, if you’re, particularly if you’re in professional services, where you have many clients, you are always going to be more of a target, because it’s a one to many. If you’re a law firm, for example, there’s that one to many. They get into your to your network, they can then access potentially all of your clients’ information. So there’s always more at risk.
And then on the next slide, what it all stems back, what it really all comes back to is compromised credentials are at the heart of almost all breaches, you know, through phishing, phishing attacks, compromised credentials, brute force attacks, other methods. But almost all of these breaches even, you know, I always like to point out ones that are more applicable to small businesses. But you know, the ones that come to mind that everybody knows about our the bigger ones like the Marriotts and the Targets, Office of Personnel Management, OPM, guess what every single one of those from a single compromised credential. Office of Personnel Management, one compromised credential led to 800,000 compromised credentials.
Reese Ormand 13:53
You know, man, it’s crazy too when people hear about these data breaches, and they hear about the big ones like the Home Depot and the Target one a few years ago, they don’t take into consideration all the attack vectors that these situations poise, right?
So for instance, the Target data breach – guys, that was, that happened because an HVAC contractor of theirs had access to their internal production network, right? It’s just insane how this stuff can happen. But there’s just so many different points of entry that these malicious actors are looking at. In fact, I know on your next slide here, we get into, here’s the best part…not the best part! This is what the hackers know, is that in emotional times, and when things are crazy, what do we do? We get sloppy.
Matt Solomon 14:43
Yeah, and I don’t know that I’m breaking news with the headline ‘phishing attacks are surging’, but what I think is so important for your audience to understand, we talked about two things. So one, small businesses are absolutely a target of hackers. Okay. They’re looking for easy prey. It’s not that your individual company, if you’re manufacturing, it’s not that they’re necessarily going right after you. But you’re getting swept up in these larger breaches. And that’s where you get caught. Because you don’t have multi factor authentication, you don’t have these policies in place. In order to make them move on to the next one there, trust me, they are looking for the easiest targets.
So the FBI came out with this, you know, talking about potential pandemic-related activities on the horizon. This was weeks, they came out on April 6, but I mean, weeks before that, it was already happening. And this is the thing – hackers are running it like a real business. And that’s what I really want to show you guys today is how nimble, I mean it’s crazy how nimble they are at adjusting. So here’s a workplace policy, phishing email.
Reese Ormand 15:46
It’s like, Matt, it’s like once people got in tune to the like, the fake alerts, it’s like once they start getting, okay, these these are saturated, then they figure out this new way, right?
Matt Solomon 15:56
That’s exactly right. There was a study that was done. And stay on this slide, I want to mention something about this. But there was a study that right in the first few weeks, actually, even hackers, the first week of COVID, had to adjust and they were like on, they were kind of taking a little bit of time off. But what ended up happening is they shifted their entire business model – 80% of all malicious activity switched to COVID-19. Because the entire world was dealing with this.
And so think about workplace policy and emails, right now, more than ever, because you’ve got spikes happening all across the country and the world, where employees are going into offices, then they’re getting pulled out, which requires an HR or some type of workplace policy to let people know what’s going on. And they’re hitting home right on this, you click on this, you’re going to get led to malware. So they’re taking advantage of that, the timeliness of this. On the next one, there’s a couple of them that we have.
Reese Ormand 16:49
And so if your workplace isn’t using some kind of email security tool, Matt, to verify that risk, the sender is who they say they are. I could send an email and say I’m Abraham Lincoln, right? And it would say, hey, this is from Abraham Lincoln here, you better open it. So that’s the other part of this, right? Is that without having the guidelines, the controls in place, then for users it’s like the Wild West out there.
Matt Solomon 17:12
Yeah, absolutely. This next one, you know, again, honing in on that human element, everybody’s looking for safety measures, everybody wants to be as safe as possible. Hey, click on this safety measures PDF, boom, you’re hit with malware, right? So just example after example. I mean, this is this one, I always just throw in, it’s a world, I just want people to understand this is a worldwide problem. Like this one’s in Italian. This is what hackers are doing. But they don’t care what, where you’re from. They just want, they just want to get into your organization. So this is a UK based one. But it’s important.
Any government assistance type programs, and obviously, that’s happening in the US with COVID-19 relief things and there’ll probably be another one coming up. The second, I’m telling you, the second that thing gets approved, all these new pages go up, they got the SMS alerts, because a lot of that’s related to the the loan applications as well.
Reese Ormand 18:04
So the American Express emails that were coming out, there was like a phishing email from Amex, it was saying, hey, you’ve got to click on this link to approve this to get your stimulus payment, right?
Matt Solomon 18:14
Yeah, exactly. That’s exactly right. So, you know, we show you these examples to begin to articulate, hey, this is real. These are real snapshots that are taking place. And you know, we talked about, we’ve obviously been talking about compromised credentials, and Reese you mentioned, where do they go, right, when they’re compromised? A lot of them end up on the actual dark web, where they are being sold and traded. So we always try to make sure that people realize that the dark web is real. I mean, this is probably a question we asked years ago, and people might have not realized it was real.
I think most people now understand it’s real, but I don’t think they understand how legitimate of a business is being run on it. This is an example. This is a real life example of a job application for The Dark Overlords. They’re hiring at $63,000 a month, so $762,000 annual salary. And by the way, if if you have a, you know, through the first probationary period of 90 days, you can get an expected increase over the next couple years, contingent on positive performance reviews. I mean, that’s it. That’s the stuff that always strikes me when I’m reading is they’re seriously they’re not running it that much differently than a legitimate business. And it’s serious money, right? So there’s a lot at stake. Yeah, here’s an example.
You know, and again, this gets back to, if you’re an SMB owner, and you’re saying we’re too small, we’re not going to get targeted. This is my example of, this is how you get swept up in larger breaches that you were not the original target. This is somebody asking for the latest databases, Time Warner Cable business class, if you know anything about Time Warner business class that makes up a whole variety of size organizations, including small businesses. So that’s an example of where you would get swept up in a large data breach as a small business. And so this information then gets leaked out there on the dark web.
Reese Ormand 18:39
So, Matt, thank you that was a wealth of information there. You know, the security around passwords. And more importantly, I think one of the biggest takeaways I always get when you speak on this is that gosh, guys, even so, even if they had your password, even if it was an active password, if you had multi factor authentication setup on that account, that greatly reduces their ability to do anything with those credentials, right, Matt?
Matt Solomon 20:38
Yeah, I mean, I think that’s the one thing I would want to leave everybody with is, nothing is foolproof, right? But you know, 2FA I do think it’s so critical, because of the level of exposure of passwords, you have to make it harder, you have to make it harder.
It’s no different than the same idea of like, you’re on a cul de sac, and you put your ADT security sign up, because you want somebody who’s potentially going to break in your home to know that you have this level of security. And they’re going to move on because they don’t want to deal with that. And it’s no different really with multi factor, you have to make it harder, otherwise you’re the target.
Reese Ormand 21:12
Yeah, so I’ve even heard of those kind of the scripting processes these malicious actors are using when they hit accounts that have MFA on them, they just blow past them, right and just keep going. So, Matt, thank you so much. I appreciate your time and giving our audience that information. So guys, we work with ID Agent, we actually utilize their service to monitor the dark web in real time. So for our clients, if there is a data breach, if they have a user that gets compromised, we get an alert, we can start remediating that for the client, make sure that they don’t recognize that as an active password there, right. So that is one way that you can protect yourself. We’ll talk a little bit more about that in a moment.
I did want to throw a little slide up here, though, we talked about these credentials that get bought up and sold on the dark web, right? That is the underbelly of the internet, you have to have a special web browser to go there. A lot of bad stuff happens there, ladies and gentlemen. So that is something that is really important. Recently, Zoom had a data breach, okay, they had millions of accounts for sale, they were going for 10/penny was the going rate for Zoom credentials. Okay?
And where does all of this lead, right? We talked about almost 50% of these data breaches result, start from a phishing attempt, right? So from the phishing attempt, you get the data breach. From the data breach, if they’re able to access sensitive infrastructure, they’re able to access your servers, your data, then you get into ransomware situations, right. And that is the nightmare situation that as a business, regardless of size, you do not want to to be dealt this hand, because when you are hit with ransomware, the results can be catastrophic.
Now, Garmin, the GPS company, they suffered a ransomware attack a few weeks ago. And this was a big deal. I’ve been following this story closely. The original ransom that was demanded was $10 million. And it looks like they worked with a company that kind of negotiated that ransom, but they did pay the ransom. Okay. So they were down for a couple of weeks. And they had aviation customers, you know, pilots that were unable to get their maps and their coordinates for flights, this was bringing down a big part of their business. The attack happened on July 23. So still very recently happened, newly developing story.
But small or big, ladies and gentlemen, this can happen to you. And the long and short of it is 60% of small businesses that are attacked that get hit with ransomware, they’re out of business within six months, right? So when you get hit with ransomware, at that point, you have to evaluate: Do we have backups? Can we restore from those backups and not have a major interruption in business? And what does that cost to do? And how much time? Or do we pay this ransom to these hackers and validate their whole notion of extorting people in this way? And if you pay the hackers, they decrypt your data about 80% of the time. So four out of five times you’ll get access to your data. What does that set up for the future? Are you going to be hacked again? You know, what if you’re that one in five chance that does not then what do you do?
Now another metric that I want to put out there is the amount of money that these malicious actors ask for is rising very, very quickly. Now, in 2019, average downtime associated with a ransomware attack was 12 days, jumped up to 16.2 days here in 2020. And so when you look at the downtime, the amount of money this is costing your organization and the average ransom costs, right. So by the end of it should say, Q4 2019. There. So by the end of Q4 2019, it was already up to $84,000 after a quarter before being $41,000. As early as Q1 2020 it was $111,000 was the average bounty, right?
So what we’re seeing on an average or on a daily basis, when we work with prospects that are, you know, needing to really enhance their security efforts, we’re seeing that they don’t have any kind of centralized management of their workstations, right? Maybe they were never domain joined, maybe they never had a server. Because of that, because there’s no centralized management, because nobody’s doing proactive maintenance on these machines or servers, workstations, we’re seeing many, many systems that are out of date in terms of Windows updates, other third party updates. And those updates are what keep you protected from the latest security breaches, right? So when Microsoft realizes, hey, there’s a vulnerability that hackers can attack, they will publish a Windows update to address that. So having a company come in and manage it for you is very important.
We see people with no kind of logging or monitoring, that’s the worst is when you get hit with a ransomware attack, or some kind of malicious thing happened, and you have no logs or no monitoring in place to even begin to deduce what happened. Managed antivirus, it’s a cost of doing business, ladies and gentlemen, you have to pay for a subscription-based, business class antivirus product, there’s just no getting around that. Web filtering, very important as well. If you’re a business owner, what kind of policies have you set in place for your employees? Are they allowed to go anywhere on the web? Is it like the Wild West out there? Can they only go to work related sites? The right tools can can adhere and control that policy, but also protect your users from clicking on links that would harm their workstations, your business, you know, protect them from themselves basically.
With that, we talked about that internet policy, but what other policies do you guys have? Do you have a policy on employees using their own devices to check your email? What does it mean if they leave your organization? Do you have the right to wipe their email from their phone? What about WiFi access at your office? Right?
So BCDR, that is an acronym for business continuity and disaster recovery. Right? So what we saw when COVID happened is that many, many, no one had planned for a pandemic and their continuity plans. And now moving forward, you know, we’re addressing this with our clients. If you have to be, you know, 50, 60, 80% remote, what does that look like? But more importantly, you need to have your continuity plans around if the internet goes down at our office, if we lost our site, if we lost that server at six years old, the boss refuses to upgrade, who would contact who, who has the backups, what’s our estimated time to get back online?
Email security, just having Office 365 or G Suite is not enough, ladies and gentlemen, you have to have a more robust solution in place these days. When I say email security, a spam filtering product on the front end, a phishing simulator a tool to run email phishing campaigns against your staff see what they’re clicking on, and an email backup and archiving on the back end that goes to that end user security training you can achieve. You can bring your employees’ baseline up in terms of how they use technology by training them.
And then lastly, using a dark web monitoring service, like what ID Agent provides for our partners here at Techvera, this is very useful to help mitigate the impact of breaches that are happening like in the wild in real time. And this is really important, the FBI just put a warning out for people that are still using Windows 7, and Windows 7 end of life. The end of support for that was earlier this year. And so Windows 7 is no longer getting updates from Microsoft, right? Now, this is really important. And when, sorry, when the FBI put this notice out there, they put the caveat on this that Windows XP was retired in April of 2014, right? The healthcare sector reported the largest increase of exposed records the following year. And it’s because those machines that were already vulnerable because they were old, you know, 5, 10 years, that’s a lifetime in technology terms. Now, they’re not even getting Windows updates, right? So those hackers can just figure out how to attack these. So very important to think about if you have Windows 7 machines, these are not secure, they need to be replaced as soon as possible.
Now, when I tell you about these patching needs, when there are critical security updates that need to be applied to your environment, somebody’s got to be addressing those. You may have seen that this big law firm that works with a lot of celebrities, Lady Gaga, Barbra Streisand, Elton John, Madonna. They got hacked here recently, right. And so some malicious actors were able to get into their infrastructure and pull down 756 gigs of data, contracts and all sorts of information. And they’re actually saying they’ve already demanded a $21 million ransom. The firm refused to pay that ransom. And they are now selling that information on the dark web. So that’s a developing story that you should follow. As this data continues to be extorted, they just sold some information about Madonna recently on the dark web, and they’re posting pictures of stuff as they sell it.
Now that same vulnerability, that same critical server update that was not patched that allowed this hack to happen, also allowed an outfit out of Russia known as APT29 to hack quite a few vaccine companies. So Russia is actively hacking all sorts of organizations, including Canadian communication, safety establishments, US Department of Homeland, there’s just so many agencies that have and you know, organizations working on vaccines, working on COVID efforts. Russia has a very equipped, you know, cybersecurity outfit, and yeah, they’re hacking all these different organizations. And obviously, y’all saw on the news, they came out and publicly stated that they have a vaccine now, so interesting to see if they were able to gather proprietary information, confidential information through these hacking efforts, that expedited their terms there.
So what can we do? What can we do, Reese, to help ourselves? Centralize your PC management, you need to have something, whether it’s an on-prem server, or a cloud service, like Azure AD, something needs to be managing your workstations, print policies, all that kind of stuff, right? You really need to have a tool that’s doing your patch management for you. And RMM is a tool that an IT company would use to remotely monitor and manage your servers, your workstations, all of your endpoints, you’ll go through do some baseline audits of your environment.
So here at Techvera, if you’re interested in working with us, when we start that conversation off, we are going to perform some baseline audits of your physical hardware, the software on them, the update status of the Windows operating system, we’re going to be looking at your users’ security baseline, running a phishing simulation against your staff. So these are all things that can be done.
If you don’t have these tools, that at the very least you can go through if you’re tasked with you know, updating machines at your office, go through check for Windows updates, check for Office updates, you can use a third party tool like Ninite, which is a website that can package all your updates for Adobe Flash, Chrome, all that kind of good stuff as well.
Securing your endpoints with managed antivirus and DNS web filtering, extremely important. Implementing that middle security stack that will cut down on a lot of these risks. So they will not even hit your end users because the spam filter is taking care of that for you. Set up log monitoring for your server infrastructure, your firewalls, your business needs to have logging happening. And ideally, you’ve got a company monitoring those logs for any anomalies that way they’re they’re clued in if anything changes.
Set up your sites, monitor those sites, make sure that they are staying online, especially if you’re integrated with all these cloud services, like you know, Office 365, and G Suite, VoIP phones. Set up dark web monitoring, also very important.
Implement a user training program. A good IT partner can help you with that. And there are some free resources out there on the web as well to train your staff, craft those acceptable use policies. So as a business owner, you really need to be looking out for the bring your own device and acceptable use policies. Something we can certainly help you with.
And then define what business continuity looks like for your organization, simulate that outage, right? Simulate a site outage and see how long it took you guys to craft a plan and get everything together and document that SOP it’s very, very important that you document this and that you simulate this so that you know who is in charge of what should these things happen.
Before I open up Q&A here, I do want to talk to Microsoft 365 for one moment here. I know we’ve mentioned this a few times, but this is the Microsoft business email solution that also includes the traditional Office productivity suite. If you have not implemented this in your business, I highly encourage you to check it out. Microsoft Teams which is their centralized hub to chat, share files, and collaborate. It’s very, very useful regardless of whether you’re working remotely or not. It’s a great tool that is intertwined in my business now. We use it every day for meetings and that sort of stuff. So highly recommend that. SharePoint and OneDrive, two cloud technologies that come together and can often, you know, with this Microsoft suite, there’s a lot of times where if you’re looking at refreshing server infrastructure, you might be able to evolve to some cloud services and not incur all that CapEx, right, and just have cloud services moving forward on Microsoft’s multibillion-dollar geo-redundant, highly available infrastructure.
And then lastly, supports all these bolt-ons that we’re talking about – security tools, web filtering, the phishing simulators, the backup and archiving, you know, every piece of mail you send or receive through your domain, you’ll have it backed up in a third party. That’s the ideal setup there, right? So some core setup, things that we talked about today that will really help everything that we’ve listed here. Seriously, consider looking at Microsoft 365, if you haven’t.
And with that, I’d like to open this up to our Q&A.
Anybody have any questions?
Okay. All right. Quiet crowd today. No worries. So, ladies and gentlemen, if you do have any questions, if you want to follow up with me afterwards, I’ll have my contact information up here in a moment, free resources for you. After this webinar, you will get an email that has a replay of it, a couple of resources as well, some security checkbooks and so forth. So take a look at the email follow up and the resources that we send out, lots of great stuff on our website and videos as well.
Should you need a partner to venture down this security journey with you, we’d be more than happy to talk to you. This is exactly what we do. We focus on empowering small businesses. And so there is my contact information here at Techvera. I will close this with saying if you are interested in mail security, if you’ve got a business that you’re looking at, you know, taking the next step either with Microsoft 365 or adding on additional mail security, something I’d like to offer to our audience here is a complimentary phishing simulation. So that’s where we would work with your team, run a campaign against your user base and see how many users you know over a week or so click on these on these malicious emails that are not malicious but simulating that.
So yes, and we will send out the resources, the video replay and the slides so you guys will have that. So with that, ladies and gentlemen, I think we’re gonna wrap this up. I will give you the last part of the hour back here. And we will be back next week. We’re doing a session for legal professionals. Next month we’ll be doing another business and technical track, so we will be sure to invite you there. So I want to thank Matt Solomon from ID Agent and the Techvera team for helping me put this together. As always, I’m Reese from Techvera here. If we can help you empower your business do not hesitate to reach out. All right, thank you everyone. I want you guys to have a great rest of your day and we will see you next month. Take care. Bye.
