Data Security

Cybersecurity Without The Hassle of Awareness

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Welcome to Cybersecurity Awareness Month 2022. Again. After 18 years of celebrating Cybersecurity Awareness Month, you’d think cybersecurity would be second nature to most organizations, yet it’s not. CISOs and Security professionals down the line struggle in the face of the numerous cyberattacks lurking in the dark corners of our everyday lives, threatening our businesses, our healthcare industry, our educational systems, and even our national security.

Ransomware alone has increased by 62% in 2021 compared to 2020. Organizations have faced increasing ransomware attacks annually since 2018, peaking in 2021 at 68.5%. Even more disturbing, a recent report indicated that 97% of ransomware attacks attempted to infect backup repositories, and 88% of those attempts were successful. But what if your organization could be secure without you having to “be aware” of your cybersecurity? What if your security team could go through a day without worrying about a ransomware attack on your organization?

 

Cybersecurity Takes Effort to Manage

New ransomware constantly evolves. Keeping up with new methods of attack and countermeasures takes time and effort. Even if we know what to watch out for, it’s difficult to stop hackers who are determined enough to succeed. However, it’s important to remember that too much complexity often leads to wasted time and increased overhead for IT teams. In addition, poor maintenance of these systems can expose sensitive data and increase the risk of breaches.

What Is The Problem?

There are three common mistakes that prevent organizations from effectively managing cybersecurity solutions and tools.

  1. Too Much Complexity

Too many cybersecurity solutions and tools can confuse employees, cause them to spend excessive amounts of time troubleshooting issues, and waste resources. This problem is exacerbated when there isn’t a clear understanding of what each solution does and how it integrates with the others. A lack of transparency can make it difficult to know whether a particular tool is working properly or causing unexpected side effects.

  1. Lack of Consistent Management

Consistency between different elements of a cybersecurity strategy is critical because it ensures that everyone understands what is expected of them and where they fit into the overall plan. This means that cross-training is crucial because if the person who knows how to operate the solution best is out on PTO, this leaves the rest of the team guessing. When employees aren’t sure about the status of a system or how to use it, they may not complete tasks efficiently or correctly. Likewise, if a team member doesn’t understand how to access a tool, he or she might inadvertently expose sensitive information or leave a security gap, creating an opportunity for nefarious actors.

  1. Failure to Maintain Systems Properly

The cybersecurity landscape evolves rapidly, requiring constant attention to maintain a robust cybersecurity posture. This includes both technology and people. With the current state of cyberattacks, threats, vulnerabilities, and attacks, you cannot afford to ignore the needs of your employees. Organizations don’t always have the resources to dedicate to managing their IT infrastructure; oftentimes, software patches and critical changes to policies get put off or forgotten.

Cybersecurity Awareness Isn’t The Problem

Creating digestible security messaging that isn’t too technical and doesn’t confuse a general audience is difficult. The problem lies in the fact that most cybersecurity messaging is written for people who have some level of cybersecurity experience. They talk about things like zero-days, malware, exploits, etc., and use terms that aren’t understood by anyone else. Most people simply don’t know what those words mean.

Education Non-Security Personnel is a Challenge

When it comes to communicating about cybersecurity to staff and employees without cybersecurity experience, there is a lot of room for improvement. Messages that are too high-level wind up sounding generic and pointless, failing to educate the audience. Other times, messaging and awareness campaigns become so technical that people get confused and don’t know what to do. At worst, cybersecurity awareness campaigns scare employees, and they are afraid to do anything because they fear getting fired or reprimanded.

 

Practice Falls Short

Even with a solid cybersecurity awareness campaign, some employees still fail to implement best practices properly. It may seem obvious, but it’s important to remind everyone that cybercriminals constantly look for weaknesses and loopholes to exploit.

Yearly training is useful, but ongoing training and reinforcing good habits are essential. A recent study found that over half of all adults believe their online activity is not secure, and on average, only five percent of companies’ folders are properly protected. This means that, on average, over 95% of an organization’s unstructured data is not adequately protected against cybercrime, particularly from ransomware, which occurs at the data level.

 

Cybersecurity Solutions That Don’t Require Management Do Exist

Automation allows organizations to focus on doing the right thing rather than spending time trying to fix problems after they happen. With automation, you can quickly respond to incidents and prevent them from becoming bigger problems.

If your organization already uses technology to automate processes, then you won’t have to worry about getting caught off guard. When something goes wrong, you’ll immediately know about it and can act accordingly.

When you put together a team of experts, you should expect each person to bring their unique set of skills to the table. However, when it comes to automating processes, you can rely on software to handle repetitive tasks and free up your team members to spend time focusing on larger projects.

 

Minimizing Oversight Eases The Staffing Burden

Increased compliance and privacy mandates, coupled with the recent 93% rise in malware attacks, rapidly increased the need for information security professionals. But hiring is still not easy. Employers face a shortfall of 2.7 million skilled cybersecurity professionals, with over 465,000 open cybersecurity positions open in the US alone. The global need is much higher.

A common method of compensating for this massive skills shortage involves cybersecurity solutions designed to work without much human intervention. The proliferation of tools that automate manual tasks makes it easier to scale cybersecurity programs without adding additional personnel. These tools focus on doing their job quickly to make it easier for IT teams to perform routine tasks like patching vulnerabilities. This helps reduce staffing needs and lessens the likelihood of misconfigurations. As a result, IT organizations can focus on developing security skills rather than operational ones.

 

An Effortless Ransomware Solution

Sotero ransomware protection works without requiring any effort for the user. Once the connection is established, allowing Sotero to monitor the data, the protection is automated. Sotero monitors all actions taken on the data, which machine learning analyzes to create a baseline of operations. When ransomware attempts to infect the data, Sotero detects the threat by identifying malicious attack patterns. When these patterns are recognized, the access request attempts are blocked, preventing transactions from going through and protecting shared unstructured data from malicious encryption. This protection doesn’t require any user intervention or activity, allowing end users to continue their daily operations protected.

Tags:

data protection,

data regulations,

data security

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