Although the Haunted House of IT had some extremely dangerous threats lurking about, many of our brave visitors were able to avoid danger by finding the right weapons to protect themselves against these threats.
After that nerve-wracking ordeal, five lucky survivors have each won an amazing $200 Amazon gift card! But before we announce the winners, let’s take a brief look at the sinister cybersecurity threats that plagued our Haunted House of IT and the weapons the survivors procured to protect themselves against these threats.
1. The Threat: The Stealthy Hacker
Our Haunted House of IT left its doors wide open with only usernames and passwords to guard the entry. With a sharp rise in sophisticated hacking, cybercriminals can easily hack user login credentials or buy them on the Dark Web. As per the Verizon 2020 Data Breach Investigations Report, over 80 percent of hacking-related breaches involve brute force or the use of lost or stolen credentials.
The Weapon: Two-Factor Authentication
Two-Factor Authentication (2FA), a form of multi-factor authentication, uses a second layer of authentication to access your systems by requiring users to provide a password (something they know) and a mobile app or token (something they have).
It prevents hackers from gaining easy access to your systems through the use of weak or stolen login credentials.
2. The Threat: Malware
Malware – short for malicious software, is a term used to represent computer viruses, worms, trojans, ransomware, adware, spyware, etc. Any computer connected to the internet is at risk of a malware attack. Your House of IT could be haunted by malware if your computers are slow, have frequent pop-up ads, infection warning pop-ups or problems with shutting down and starting up.
The Weapon: Antivirus/Antimalware (AV/AM)
Protect your devices from malware attacks by installing AV/AM software. AV/AM software provides robust protection against viruses, blocks ads and suspicious websites, identifies infected programs and releases warnings that prompt you to take action. Manage your AV/AM deployments from your endpoint management solution for higher IT efficiency.
3. The Threat: Unpatched Software
Outdated operating systems and applications frequently have security vulnerabilities that cybercriminals can exploit to attack your IT systems. Nearly 60 percent of breaches in 2019 involved unpatched software vulnerabilities.
The Weapon: Automated Software Patch Management
Keeping your software up to date by applying the latest security patches is an aboslute must. Unfortunately, a recent Verizon report revealed that patches that aren’t applied within the first quarter of release in a few industries, never get applied at all. This gives cybercriminals ample time to build tools to exploit those vulnerabilities and breach your IT environment. We highly recommend that you automate software patching. Automated patch management ensures that all important and critical patches are installed on time, thereby improving your security posture by minimizing the attack surface.
Kaseya VSA, a remote monitoring and endpoint management solution, maintains the security of your infrastructure by automating software patching and remediating critical software vulnerabilities.
4. The Threat: Phishing Emails
Phishing works by sending emails laced with ransomware, fileless malware and other threats directly to your employees. These emails are disguised as messages from trusted individuals, such as a manager, coworker, or business associate, to trick your employees into activating the embedded malware or granting unauthorized access. This results in Business Email Compromise (BEC), Account Takeover (ATO), credential theft or worse.
The Weapon: Automated Phishing Defense Tool
Identify and mitigate phishing attacks with an automated phishing defense platform such as Graphus. Graphus analyzes and scans for suspicious irregularities in message content and attachments and compares them to trusted profiles to detect potential attacks. As phishing attacks grow more sophisticated, not even G-Suite or Office 365 can filter them out. However, Graphus certainly can.
5. The Threat: The Dark Web
The Dark Web is that part of the web that is not indexed by search engines and is host to all kinds of illegal activity. It is inaccessible by traditional browsers and is hidden by various network security measures like firewalls. As of 2020, more than 15 billion username and password credentials to online digital services are sold on the Dark Web. If you’re wondering how much danger the Dark Web poses to your House of IT, keep in mind that your IT system and application login credentials could very well be floating around out there, waiting to be sold to the highest bidder.
The Weapon: Dark Web Monitoring
Dark Web monitoring combines intelligence with search capabilities to identify, analyze and proactively monitor for an organization’s compromised or stolen employee and customer data.
ID Agent’s Dark Web ID, a leading Dark Web monitoring platform, provides actionable cybersecurity threat intelligence and helps companies protect themselves against the risk of a costly data breach.
6. The Threat: Insider Threats
As the name suggests, this threat resides within your House of IT without you even noticing. Insider threats are threats that originate from within the organization and include negligent employees or disgruntled employees with malicious intent. These people have access to all your systems and can create havoc at a moment’s notice.
The Weapon: Insider Threat Detection Tool
Detecting insider threats is not an easy task. Since the users are legitimate employees, distinguishing their normal activity from potentially malicious activity can be difficult.
However, an insider threat detection tool, such as CyberHawk, a RapidFire Tools product , not only detects malicious activity but does a whole lot more. It detects anomalous user activity, unauthorized network changes and also threats caused by misconfigurations. It scans the network searching for internal threats that occur behind the firewall. It detects keyloggers, trojans, spyware, unauthorized registry changes, or other malicious activity and provides you with information that allows you to take proactive steps to mitigate these threats.
7. The Threat: Unplanned Downtime
Unplanned downtime can be very bad for your business. If your House of IT is haunted by unforeseen disruptions, such as system-wide outages, it could lead to a loss in revenue and productivity and negatively impact your corporate reputation.
The Weapon: Backup and Disaster Recovery
Back up your IT systems with the ability to recover quickly. Choose a backup and disaster recovery tool that meets all your IT needs.
Kaseya Unified Backup quickly recovers backups using an appliance-based solution that minimizes downtime. It automates backup testing to ensure your data is successfully backed up when disaster strikes.
VSA is integrated with Kaseya Unified Backup so you can manage endpoints, AV/AM and backups from a single interface.
The Ultimate Weapon to Combat All IT Security Threats
Defending your House of IT against all the threats listed above can be an exhausting task. You probably wish you had one, single, all-encompassing, ultimate weapon that could slay these threats once and for all.
Well, your wish has been granted. Kaseya’s IT Complete suite of products includes ID Agent Dark Web ID, RapidFire Tools CyberHawk, Graphus, Passly for SSO and 2FA, Kaseya Unified Backup, and Kaseya VSA, the remote monitoring and endpoint management solution we mentioned earlier.
VSA not only automates patch management but also:
- Remotely monitors and manages endpoints
- Controls user access with 2FA
- Automates IT processes to significantly improve IT operational efficiency
- Integrates with KUB to provide a single point of access for your backups
- Integrates with industry-leading AV/AM tools such as Bitdefender, Kaspersky, Webroot, etc. and deploys and manages these tools
Now that you have all the information you need to survive your own Haunted House of IT, we’d like to congratulate the winners of our Haunted House of IT contest.
The winners of the Haunted House of IT contest who have each won a $200 Amazon gift card are:
- Katherine Trusty from Jacksonville, FL
- Jason Zickefoose from Williamsburg, VA
- David Muncey from West Jordan, UT
- Guillermo Arzola from El Paso, TX
- Drew McEntire from Columbia, IL
We hope everyone had a good time with the contest and if you’d like to check out Kaseya VSA, you can request a demo right here.
