Cybersecurity Goes Beyond A Firewall

Many people believe that installing anti-virus software and a firewall on servers and personal computers is enough to protect their business from ransomware and data breaches. These IT solutions are just one part of a multilayered security strategy. Along with technological advances, human factors must be considered.

As technology advances at an alarming rate, cyberattackers find it harder to circumvent them. This is why they choose to attack the human element. This has resulted in phishing emails, phone calls, and impersonations, all designed to steal the technology from the firewall and other security hardware.

Numerous government offices have been in the news lately. Ransomware encrypted all files on the network of municipalities, forcing them to close down. In some cases, ransomware encrypts the files on the network and forces victims to pay it. An employee opened infected emails and was the first victim. These messages can often be mistaken for legitimate UPS or FedEx shipping emails or notifications.

Cybersecurity and Firewalls

Attenuating the Human Factor

Awareness and education. Regularly remind and educate your employees about fake email. You might consider hiring a company that specializes in training employees about safe cybersecurity practices.

Your employees should be able to identify common malware and phishing methods that disguise malware as an everyday task. UPS and FedEx will not send confirmations unless the package is being shipped. It’s better to delete any messages if your company has not shipped anything recently, or isn’t expecting any delivery.

Inform your employees about the IT support teams and how they can be reached. This will prevent impersonation. Cybercriminals are good at doing their research and will attempt to find out which IT support company or staff they can trust. These imposters are a danger to your employees and you should inform them who the legitimate IT support team is.

Look at the links in your emails to make sure they get to their intended destination. Microsoft 365 users may see an email regarding quarantine. Attached links should be sent to onmicrosoft.com or office.com. They will not direct you to an unidentified, random or unusual link.

Validating requests is also a good idea. Ask the sender to confirm that they sent the message.

Technology Factors

Many companies have an anti-virus and managed firewall in place as part of the strategy for cybersecurity. These should be regularly updated and properly managed. It is important to update servers and workstations regularly. However, you must be aware of how to recover data in the event of a data breach.

Make sure you test backups regularly if you have them. If it cannot restore your files, it is not considered a backup. Encrypted backups are also recommended. It is best to have backups every week, month, and annually on a cold medium such as a cloud.

SpartanTec, Inc. can help you set up the best cybersecurity strategies to protect your business and network from online threats.

SpartanTec, Inc.
Fayetteville, NC 28304
(910) 745-7776
http://manageditservicesfayetteville.com

Serving: Myrtle Beach, North Myrtle Beach, Columbia, Wilmington, Fayetteville, Florence, Charleston

Bringing Endpoint And Firewall Together

Bringing endpoint and firewall together is an idea so simple it’s revolutionary

As the information security industry matures, we’re beginning to come to terms with the reality that there is no such thing as perfect prevention. Conventional wisdom in information assurance tells us to assemble best-of-breed network and endpoint components into arrays of controls that will provide some reasonable measure of defense in depth. While the practice is correct in its ingredients, the recipe is lacking.

Until now, unmediated coordination between protection at the physical or virtual network layer, and the endpoints that make up those networks, hasn’t been possible. IT and security professionals pay a price for this every day: missed cues that might have prevented or detected an attack; delays in responding to and mitigating a detected threat; an abundance of alerts with unknown relevance or outright irrelevance; and difficult, time-consuming investigations that often lead nowhere.

The missing recipe is synchronized security – enabling meaningful and contextual exchange of information between the familiar ingredients of endpoint and network protections.

The benefits of synchronized security can be broken down into two camps, each reinforcing the other. First, it improves protection by automating and coordinating the response to detected threats across assets. Second, it increases operational efficiency by shedding light on the five “Ws” of a threat (what happened, why did it happen, where, when, and by whom?), streamlining investigation.

Without synchronized security , information system controls don’t talk to each other, so they can’t work together to react to threats.

For example, if a firewall sees an outbound connection or a DNS lookup to a suspected command and control IP or domain, the best it can do is block the connection and alert the admin. The alert might contain an IP address or perhaps even the logged-in user, but it will not contain information about the offending process. Meanwhile, the endpoint remains infected, posing a risk to the business until manual intervention.

Likewise, firewalls Fayetteville NC are typically blind to what’s happening on endpoint devices. Runtime behavior analytics on an endpoint might identify and block a malicious process, prompting a need for investigation and cleanup. Until that cleanup is complete, however, the firewall is ignorant of the threat. The compromised system can freely communicate out to the Internet or to other sensitive systems.

Our approach to synchronized security involves a secure communication channel between the Sophos endpoint and network controls that we call the Sophos Security Heartbeat.

Now, when the firewall detects malicious traffic, it notifies the endpoint. The endpoint agent responds dynamically, identifying and aggressively scrutinizing the suspect process. In many cases, it can automatically terminate the process and remove the residual components of the infection.

Endpoints, for their part, report their current “security health” status to the firewall on an ongoing basis. When the security health is degraded – as in the case of a runtime detection awaiting investigation – the firewall applies an appropriate policy to isolate or restrict that endpoint.

This inter-product communication also boosts operational efficiency, particularly when it comes to investigating incidents.

One of the biggest challenges IT departments face is connecting the dots between isolated events and alerts. When a firewall detects malicious traffic from an endpoint, it’s typically reported in connection with an IP address. As the investigator, you must then connect the IP address to a particular user and computer. This might, for example, include reviewing DHCP or dynamic DNS records and querying an inventory or IP address management database.

From there, the real challenge begins: conducting a time-consuming analysis of the endpoint in question, attempting to correlate the network traffic seen by the firewall with a particular process. If you’re lucky, you might find the process still active with a simple netstat or lsof command. Much of the time, though, the process has terminated or severed its network connection, making it that much more difficult to identify the threat.

Synchronized security automates the process of connecting the dots. When the firewall shares what it has detected in real time with the endpoint, the endpoint agent immediately traces the traffic to the suspect process. That information, along with the computer name and username of the logged-in user, is communicated to IT and to the firewall. What might have required hours or days of analysis is fully automated and reduced to seconds, allowing incident responders to focus on resolving the threat instead of finding it.

While I’m proud of what we’ve done at Sophos to start the ball rolling, I’m even more excited about where we’re headed. From analyzing risky user behavior across the endpoint and the network to spotting statistical anomalies in endpoint traffic, the firewall – and soon our other networks devices – will know as much about what’s happening on the endpoints as it does about itself. And both will be able to act accordingly.

Synchronized security will also involve other control points that until now have been all too discrete. Soon we’ll be able to use encryption and endpoint protection together to isolate sensitive data based on the security health of the device, or even a specific process. And mobile devices, cloud-based gateways and sandboxes will all join the endpoint and the firewall in an interconnected, synchronized security system that is far more than the sum of its parts.

As Jon Oltsik, principal analyst at Enterprise Security Group says, “Integration is the new best of breed.”

I would modify that statement slightly: practical integration is the new best of breed. The vast majority of businesses struggle today to keep up with security. Money, well-trained staff, and time are all in short supply. Everyone might desire the promised benefits of a SIEM, but not everyone can afford to own or effectively operate one. Done right, synchronized security can be the solution, creating better protection with less cost and complexity than a hodgepodge of point products.

At its heart, I’ve described a simple concept: make products talk to each other and respond automatically. It makes you wonder why it hasn’t been done until now with endpoint and network security. As it turns out, though, it’s quite hard to bring these ingredients together in a way that makes sense. That’s why synchronized security is revolutionary.

After so long, we’ve finally delivered a better recipe.

Call  SpartanTec, Inc. now and let our IT experts set up the most suitable and effective cybersecurity measures for your business.

SpartanTec, Inc.
Fayetteville, NC 28304
(910) 745-7776
http://manageditservicesfayetteville.com

Cities Served:
Fayetteville, Spring Lake, Hope Mills, Dunn, Aberdeen, Southern Pines, Pinehurst, Sanford, Clinto

FortiGate NGFWs Provide Proactive and Transformative Data-Center Security for Business Continuity

Cyber Threat Risk Webinar

Identify security risks and understand general network usage.

July 21st  11:00 am EST
Register Here

Executive Summary

Businesses today demand unrivaled availability and resiliency in their data centers, but this is challenged by an attack surface that is rapidly expanding and a sophisticated and evolving advanced threat landscape. With FortiGate E-Series next- generation firewalls (NGFWs), organizations can deliver five-nines availability and superior mean time between failures (MTBF), while inspecting all network traffic— encrypted and unencrypted.

FortiGate E-Series NGFWs simplify complex security processes resulting from a proliferation of point security solutions. They also provide L7 advanced security by adapting to any segmentation using dynamic objects—all accomplished with single-pane-of-glass visibility and centralized control.





As Data Centers Evolve, Security Must Keep Pace


Digital transformation (DX) has evolved the nature of the data center from a defensible, on- premises infrastructure to an increasingly distributed hybrid IT environment that combines virtual, on-premises, and cloud elements. These new distributed data centers offer greater agility and new capabilities—where applications are consumed by business users and public users alike (such as in healthcare where both staff and patients require access to services).
But along with the expanded capabilities, the risk of cyberattacks also increases. Combining distributed, cloud-ready data centers with outdated security tools (which were originally designed only for on-premises environments) expands the network attack surface and increases the chances of application outages and disruption to critical infrastructure. The effects of this can be extremely damaging to a business—with the average infrastructure failure costing as much as $100,000 per hour and the hourly damages associated with a critical application failure running between $500,000 and $1 million, according to IDC.
Alongside a growing number of security breaches, the total cost of cyber crime per company reached $13.0 million in 2018—an increase of 12% from 2017.2

Adapting an Integrated Security Ecosystem

To ensure continuous operations, network engineering and operations leaders first need to effectively manage risks by protecting critical business applications and services, regardless of their location. They need to build a scalable and resilient network security architecture that can withstand adverse network security conditions within and across a distributed hybrid IT infrastructure.

In addition to the above, they need to move away from relying on isolated point security products that have proliferated as the attack surface has expanded, in favor of an architectural strategy that streamlines operations to reduce both capital expenditure (CapEx) and operating expenditure (OpEx). Indeed, more than three-fourths (77%) of organizations rely on nonintegrated point security solutions to some degree within their organization. This adds cost and complexity while leaving networks vulnerable to cyberattacks.3 In response, security integration simplifies operations and enables automated workflows, which in turn allows technical security resources to focus on more critical business outcomes and optimizations.

Enabling Effective Data-Center Segmentation

To manage risks, organizations must reduce the attack surface. This can be achieved in part through network segmentation, helping to isolate workloads from one another to secure them individually, while restricting lateral (east-west) movement of malicious intrusions to the network. Segmentation for distributed data centers must be sufficiently flexible to address a broad selection of use cases. The solution must provide scalability, resiliency, and availability across a hybrid IT architecture to maintain business continuity.
However, segmentation by itself does not offer mechanisms to inspect content for threats. Therefore, organizations need an NGFW solution that can adapt to various segmentation techniques and communicate with third-party security solutions to share threat intelligence and provide automated threat protection.

SOLUTION BRIEF | FortiGate NGFWs Provide Proactive and Transformative Data-Center Security for Business Continuity

Proactive Security Features for Expanding Risk Exposures

The FortiGate E-Series NGFWs, which are an integrated part of the Fortinet Security Fabric, address these evolving data-center security requirements. Specifically, integrated threat intelligence from FortiGuard Labs is included with the FortiGate E-Series firewalls Fayetteville NC to prevent known attacks plus artificial intelligence (AI)-driven detection of unknown attacks (via FortiSandbox). This collective threat intelligence is shared in real time across all of the parts of the security infrastructure, thus helping organizations to improve their risk posture.

Core capabilities of the FortiGate E-Series firewalls Fayetteville NC offer network engineering and operations leaders the best choice for several different reasons:

Risk management

FortiGate E-Series NGFWs are designed for deep integration into third-party technologies and platforms in multivendor infrastructures. Fabric Connectors and Fabric-Ready Partner compatibility enable two-way communications and threat-intelligence sharing. FortiGate NGFWs can adapt to any segmentation strategy (absorbing network changes using dynamic objects) and they provide L7 advanced security with a very high fidelity. Indeed, third-party testing shows that FortiGate NGFWs provide industry-leading security efficacy.

FortiGate NGFWs have received five consecutive “Recommended” ratings from NSS Labs in its annual NGFW industry tests.

Resiliency and scalability

Data centers demand maximum availability and resiliency. FortiGate E-Series firewalls Fayetteville NC achieve five-nines availability and superior MTBF by applying N+1 redundancy clustering (to ensure system backup in the event of a component failure), in addition to carrier-grade hardware and software.

Network security must also scale to protect all traffic—both unencrypted and encrypted. Inspecting encrypted traffic is a requisite, with 72% of network traffic now with secure sockets layer (SSL)/transport layer security (TLS) encryption.6 With upwards of 50% of cyberattacks using SSL/TLS encryption to infiltrate networks or exfiltrate data, employing SSL/TLS inspection is a requisite.7 But with many NGFWs experiencing serious performance degradation when SSL/TLS inspection is turned on, this incurs substantial increases in CapEx and OpEx.

FortiGate firewalls Fayetteville NC deliver high-performance inspection of both unencrypted and encrypted workflows (including TLS version 1.3). Specifically, they deliver industry-best price/performance for SSL inspection and one of the best total cost of ownership (TCO) per protected megabit per second (Mbps)—even when SSL/TLS inspection is activated.8

Automation and orchestration

As an essential part of the Fortinet Security Fabric architecture, FortiGate NGFWs maximize business value through point product consolidation and integration. Existing security solutions integrate with FortiGate firewalls Fayetteville NC through open APIs, enabling workflow automation, orchestration, and synchronized security to protect against unpatched applications and ever-changing DevOps environments. This comprehensive integration is enriched by indicators of compromise (IOCs) visibility into current and past logs for threat detection via single- pane-of-glass monitoring and management.

FortiGate NGFWs also enable network engineering and operations teams to keep pace with new and evolving government and industry regulations, as well as adherence to security standards such as those from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the Center for Internet Security (CIS) through automated compliance reporting, audits, and orchestration. In addition, the Fortinet Security Rating Service9 (which is part of both the 360 Protection Bundle and Enterprise Protection Bundle) allows network engineering and operations leaders to proactively manage and improve their overall security posture over time, while simultaneously detecting risks before they cause problems.

Securing an Expanding Data-Center Attack Surface

As data centers become increasingly distributed across hybrid IT environments, network engineering and operations leaders must ensure availability for business continuity. First, they must adopt an integrated security architecture for features such as shared threat intelligence, advanced segmentation, and access control. Second, they need resilient security that manages risks while scaling as traffic demands increase. Finally, they require automation and orchestration of security workflows to reduce cost.

The FortiGate E-Series NGFWs meet all three of these requirements, providing a cornerstone to any security approach—an integrated security offering that adapts to the changing shape and nature of the data center. This ensures industry-leading protection while simplifying operations and reducing TCO.

1 Kevin O’Connor, “Is Your Disaster Recovery Plan Up to Date?,” CIO, April 18, 2016.
2 “Ninth Annual Cost of Cybercrime Study,” Accenture and Ponemon Institute, March 6, 2019.
3 “The CIO and Cybersecurity: A Report on Current Priorities and Challenges,” Fortinet, May 23, 2019.
4 “Certifications,” Fortinet, accessed July 12, 2019.
5 Ibid.
6 “Quarterly Threat Landscape Report: Q3 2018,” Fortinet, November 2018.
7 “Study Reveals Hackers Increasingly Use Encryption to Hide Criminal Activity,” Lifeline Data Centers, accessed March 21, 2019.
8 “Fortinet Receives Recommended Rating in Latest NSS Labs NGFW Report...,” Fortinet, July 17, 2018.
9 “Proactive, Actionable Risk Management with the Fortinet Security Rating Service,” Fortinet, February 14, 2019.

Call SpartanTec, Inc. if you want to boost your network security and make sure that your business is protected against possible online threats.

SpartanTec, Inc.
Fayetteville, NC 28304
(910) 745-7776
http://manageditservicesfayetteville.com

Cities Served:
Fayetteville, Spring Lake, Hope Mills, Dunn, Aberdeen, Southern Pines, Pinehurst, Sanford, Clinto

Computer Safety Tips You Need To Know

Making sure that your computer is secure seems like a cumbersome task. The good news is that there are a few simple things you can do like keeping your anti virus software up to date to make sure that you have good computer security.

Update Your Anti-Virus Software

Make sure that you have anti virus software installed on your computer. Don’t forget to check for updates every day. Most software can be set up to get this done automatically. In case you do not know where to begin, you can consult an IT consultant to help you out.

Install Security Patches

New threats to different types of software are being discovered all the time and they do not discriminate by platform or vendor. It is not just a matter of updating the operating system, at least once a month, check for as well as apply updates for all the software you are using. You can check the Microsoft Update Catalog or the Secunia Software inspector for updates.

Use A Firewall

Any internet connection is at risk if there is no firewall. A non-firewalled computer will only have a few minutes before it gets infected. Fortunately, Windows operating systems come with a built-in firewall that is turned on by default.

Never Give Out Personal, Sensitive Information

Unless the website is prefaced with https, never provide personal and sensitive information like your credit card number or social security number. In case you really have to provide any of these personal details, you must do so carefully. When paying for goods or services online, consider using PayPal. You should also be careful about sharing too much information on social media. Identity thieves commonly turn to social media to get access to your personal and even financial information.

Control Your Email

Don’t open any email attachment that you may have received from an unexpected or unknown source. Keep in mind that worms and Trojan filled spam will do their best to spoof the name of the sender. You also need to make sure that your email client doesn't leave you susceptible to infection and any online threat.

Always Treat IM Suspiciously

Trojans and Worms frequently target instant messaging. There are countless scammers who are always working to find ways to gain access to your personal accounts or to get your personal information. Treat IMs just as you treat your email, if not even more cautiously.

Use Strong Passwords

Use a mix of numbers, letters, and special characters for your passwords. The longer and the more complicated it is, the better. Every account you have should have different passwords. You should also use two-factor authentication if it is available. Of course, remembering all of your passwords can be quite difficult so consider using a password manager, which is commonly a browser plugin that will monitor your password entry and save your credentials for all of your accounts. You just have to remember one password and that’s for your password manager app.

Keep An Eye On Internet Scams

Criminals will always find ways to take your hard earned cash away from you. Do not get fooled by emails that tell sad stories, or offering unsolicited jobs. Additionally, you should also be careful of emails that masquerade as security concerns from an eCommerce site or your bank.

Avoid Virus Hoaxes

There are emails that spread uncertainty, fear, and doubt about threats that do not exist will only spread needless alarm and might even cause you to delete legitimate files. Keep in mind that there are a lot of good things than bad things on the internet. Don’t be paranoid. Instead, be aware, cautious, and suspicious as well. By following the tips provided above and being proactive in securing your computer and your information, you will not just protect yourself but also contribute to the betterment and protection of the internet in general.

Call SpartanTec, Inc. if you need professional help in keeping your personal or office computer secure from all kinds of online threat. 

SpartanTec, Inc.
517 Owen Dr
Fayetteville, NC 28304
(910) 745-7776
http://manageditservicesfayetteville.com

Cities Served:
Fayetteville, Spring Lake, Hope Mills, Dunn, Aberdeen, Southern Pines, Pinehurst, Sanford, Clinto