Cybersecurity Awareness Month – Phishing Attacks

Phishing Attacks are Everywhere These Days

Hackers know there are two easy ways into businesses today.  Comb through the dark web for usernames and passwords that have been part of previous breaches and try those on the target companies Email systems, Remote Access solutions, and Cloud applications.  Eventually they will get in.  But when they fail, they turn to Phishing attacks.

Every employee today needs to understand the seven telltale signs that an email you have received is a phishing attack.  Learning these is critical to depending your organization and your personal life from modern hacker attacks.  The graphic above and video below outline how to spot these threats easily.  However, for businesses, it is not enough to educate employees.  You must test them with modern phishing tests to ensure they are applying their knowledge.

Companies have to be perfect each and every day in spotting and avoiding phishing attacks.  Hackers only need to be successful once.   Train and test your staff to put up the strongest defense possible.

In addition to training and testing staff, CyberHoot also recommends the following protective measures: 

CyberHoot Best practices:

1. Train your employees on the common attacks that are out there.  From weak passwords and password managers, to the importance of multi-factor authentication and how to spot phishing attacks.  Awareness is the key to defending your business.
2. Govern you employees with cybersecurity policies including Acceptable Use, Password, Information Handling and a Written Information Security Policy.
3. Establish cybersecurity best practice processes such as a Vulnerability Alert Management Process (VAMP) and a Cybersecurity Incident Management Process (CIMP) to guide and require action in the face of an emergency.  Then move on onboarding and offboarding processes, SaaS management processes, and 3rd party risk management.
4. Establish strong technical protections including: a Firewall, antivirus, anti-malware, anti-spam, multi-factor authentication on all critical accounts,  Enable full disk encryption, manage the keys carefully, and most importantly, adopt, train on and require all employees to use a Password Manager.
5. Test employees on how to spot and avoid phishing attacks.  CyberHoot has released a disruptive method of Phish Testing the fills in gaps in your employees knowledge without punishing them for failure.  Instead we reward them for success.  More info is available here.
6. Backup your data by following our 3-2-1 Backup methodology to ensure you can recover your business from a cybersecurity event.
7. In the modern Work-from-Home era, make sure you’re managing personal devices connecting to your network by validating their security (patching, antivirus, DNS protections) or prohibiting their use entirely.
8. If you haven’t had a risk assessment by a 3rd party in the last 2 years, you should have one now. Establishing a risk management framework in your organization is critical to addressing your most egregious risks with your finite time and money.
9. Buy Cyber-Insurance to protect you in a catastrophic failure situation. Cyber-Insurance is no different than Car, Fire, Flood, or Life insurance. It’s there when you need it most.

CyberHoot believes that for many small to medium sized businesses and MSPs, you can greatly improve your defenses and chances of not becoming another victim of cyberattack if you follow the advice above.