Cybersecurity Lesson #6: Implement a Security Stack that Fits Your Organization

There is no one security tool or set of tools that protects every organization. Organizations need to work with their security vendors or Managed Service Provider (MSP) to define the set of security protections that is best suited to their business and its IT environment. Clients who made the right investments and updated their security protections to the newest innovations are the most likely to fare well in a disaster such as a cyberattack.   

The basic tools that most businesses use, with the help of their MSP or in-house information technology team, will employ a firewall, antivirus program, and standard backup and recovery to protect against ransomware and other hackers.  

However, cybercriminals are always evolving and finding new footholds and these regular protections are no longer enough to stop them in their tracks. Many vendors claim that the most recent versions of such programs are enough to protect against these malicious malwares; however, that is not often the case. Businesses need to have visibility across all workstations, servers, and data in order to monitor network health and behavior. Being proactive versus reactive is the most important element in this process, as it eliminates the compromise of recovering lost or encrypted data when an attack has happened. 

The Flagship Security Framework is our methodology for recommending what stack of solutions will provide the strongest protection in the event of an attack. It represents the five essential security functions that will give you the most advanced defense: Identify, Protect, Detect, Respond, and Recover. These concepts should be applied to the central aspects of your IT environment: Users, Endpoints, Infrastructure, and Network in order to manifest the best practices for your safety.  

 In addition to infrastructure and software systems, we recommend adopting policies that maintain the health of your protection, such as: 

• Do you have a lock-out policy to prevent users from logging in after several tries? 

• Do you have multi-factor authentication (MFA) to ensure all logins are from your staff? The US Cybersecurity Infrastructure & Security Agency (CISA) recommends that all organizations implement multi-factor authentication on every single account that is under their control. 

• Do you employ a “zero-trust” policy so that devices that connect to the network are not trusted by default? 

• Have you adopted the principle of least privilege on key network resources to limit access to only individuals who need it? 

• Do you have a safe location or system to store key documents (e.g., Incident Response and Business Continuity Plans) for access when all other systems are down? Flagship can help implement these critical policies and related security features in all your cloud and edge services. 

View our video explaining the elements of our Security Framework and how it can be used to define your security stack. 

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NOTE: This is part of a series of blogs on Ransomware Lessons Learned posted to the Flagship Networks website.  For more information on how Flagship assesses your security stack, please complete the form below.