Critical (Confidential) Information

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Critical (or Confidential) Information in a Small to Medium-sized Business (SMB) is most easily understood to be regulated data such as PCI, HIPAA, NPPI, CCPA, and GDPR. Additionally, some unregulated data such as Intellectual Property, that needs special protection from disclosure and theft can also be considered Critical or Confidential Information. Protecting the Confidentiality, Integrity, and Availability of critical and confidential data is very important to the health, well-being, and success of your business.

Protection Requirements: It is best practice to shred paper, encrypt critical and confidential data at rest and in motion, and follow the principle of least privilege with mandatory access controls enforced wherever possible. It is also important to codify your definitions of critical and confidential data within your business using examples for your employees in a policy known as an Information Handling Policy. CyberHoot users have access to a Policy Template for just this purpose.

What does this mean for an SMB or MSP?

Business owners and their employees should be aware of the difference between Critical, Sensitive, and General (public) information and what to do if they come across them. It’s in your company’s best interest to craft an Information Handling Policy (IHP) so your employees know what they should be doing with certain types of information. An IHP will outline what can and cannot be done or shared with critical and sensitive information. CyberHoot’s vCISO services can help out with crafting this process for your and your clients. Additional actions listed below can also be accomplished through that engagement.

Additional Cybersecurity Recommendations

Additionally, these recommendations below will help you and your business stay secure with the various threats you may face on a day-to-day basis. All of the suggestions listed below can be gained by hiring CyberHoot’s vCISO Program development services.

Govern employees with policies and procedures. You need a password policy, an acceptable use policy, an information handling policy, and a written information security program (WISP) at a minimum.

Train employees on how to spot and avoid phishing attacks. Adopt a Learning Management system like CyberHoot to teach employees the skills they need to be more confident, productive, and secure.

Test employees with Phishing attacks to practice. CyberHoot’s Phish testing allows businesses to test employees with believable phishing attacks and put those that fail into remedial phish training.

Deploy critical cybersecurity technology including two-factor authentication on all critical accounts. Enable email SPAM filtering, validate backups, and deploy DNS protection, antivirus, and anti-malware on all your endpoints.

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, etc) or prohibiting their use entirely.

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.

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.

All of these recommendations are built into CyberHoot the product or CyberHoot’s vCISO Services. With CyberHoot you can govern, train, assess, and test your employees. Visit CyberHoot.com and sign up for our services today. At the very least continue to learn by enrolling in our monthly Cybersecurity newsletters to stay on top of current cybersecurity updates.

To learn more about Confidentiality, Integrity, and Availability of information, watch this short video:

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CyberHoot does have some other resources available for your use. Below are links to all of our resources, feel free to check them out whenever you like:

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