09 Nov SOS|Support Qtr 4 2017 IT Security Update

SOS|Support Qtr 4 2017 IT Security Update

It’s been an eventful year of IT Security in the news. All of this has likely affected you or somebody you know in one way or another. In fact, as you see below, this is not an over-statement. Over 3 billion people have been affected by data breaches and hacks in the past few years, with the evidence coming to light just recently here in 2017.

Technology is currently the forefront of our economy. Every few months one phone gets faster then the other. Processors add more cores. We seem closer to the limitation of our CPU processing architecture than ever, yet somehow the tech manufacturers keep coming up with ways to make things smaller, faster, cooler.

IT Security Trends 2017

Here are a few industry trends and crazy facts:

• Tech industry leads the stock market and economy growth
• Tech companies continue to move into Utah at an unprecedented rate. This is good and bad. Good because it’s shooting up Utah economy to #1 in the nation and increasing our home values. Bad because… well, its increasing home costs and cost of living. Also the cost of IT support specialists is at an all time high – both for small businesses who want to hire IT people, and for customers that need to buy IT services.  
• Some economists predict we cannot sustain this growth, and that we are on pace for a mini-crash in 2019/2020. I believe that what happens with “Big Data” and the technology industry will give precedence to this theory.
• Lehi, UT – the heart of “Silicon Slopes” has been marked as the “5th fastest growing city in the nation” https://www.lehi-ut.gov/community/about-lehi/
• Apple stock hit all time high this past week with the launch of the iPhone X (mixed reviews).
• Samsung has done all they can to recover from their “exploding” Galaxy Note phones – and has quite remarkably made a solid recovery.
• Tesla, the High Tech auto company, has surpassed Ford’s market cap at $49.5 billion – in less than 15 years of existence. Ford has been around for 115 years.
• Two of the highest rated TV shows currently on TV are about “hackers” and “information technology” –  MR. ROBOT and Scorpion.
• The Equifax hack, which has been disclosed as one of the most devastating hack’s in history – mostly because of the breach of confidential information of over 11 million people. Equifax CIO and CSO (Chief Information/Security Officer) were forced to resign.
• 2013 Yahoo hack was initially reported to be 500,000 people. End of 2016 the report changed to 1 billion people. Recently in October 2017 Yahoo revealed that the previous numbers were incorrect and over 3 billion accounts were originally hacked. If you have a Yahoo account – you still need to check to see if you are a victim. Here is a guide on what you need to do (This could affect OTHER email accounts not just your Yahoo account): https://goo.gl/31HaUM
• The hacker group “Shadow Brokers” has reportedly (and provided proof) of hacking elite NSA systems bypassing the NSA IT security and leading to ransomware attacks worldwide 
• Ransomware such as WannaCry and Petya spread globally infecting millions of computers and in some cases destroying data beyond repair or recovery.
• 198 million voter records exposed: An IT firm was tasked with storing data on an Amazon web server but they did not secure it properly. Over 1 Terabyte of information was publicly available to anybody which included confidential voter records.

This is just a quick run-down of how important cyber-security and data protection is – AND how it is only going to become more important to keep your company safe.

The cost of downtime

At SOS Support, we do all we can to convince our clients to invest into best practice security solutions. We don’t re-invent the wheel, or build out “custom Firewalls” to save money or make more margins – a solution that would be ripe for hackers within 2 months of negligence and non-maintenance. We go with the best solution for the customer!

We are happy to report that since 2004 none of our clients that have embedded best top tier practices have been hacked. That is nearly 14 years of success rate.

So what makes this success happen? It’s our pro-active nature and commitment to better. Seemingly 50%+ of our new customers already have a Firewall in place. Sometimes it’s a nice Firewall – perhaps the exact model we would recommend. But 50%+ of the time we dive into the infrastructure and find that the Firewall hasn’t been maintained, updated and optimized. One “firmware” version behind can often result in failure of compliance testing.

Datto Downtime Calculator reports the following scenario as an example:

• Company size: 20 employees
• Average Employee wage: $27/hr
• Total critical data compromised: 250 Gigabytes
• Hourly Revenue of the business: $1000/hr
• Estimated Downtime: 13 Hours
• Total Cost to Business: $22,500

Takeaway

Security and Backups are the most essential and important part of your IT services portfolio. We always give our customers options. We will provide options such as OK, Good, Better, Best.

Use the following list to see how your IT security and services stack up against Industry Best Practices. If you are not sure, contact us or your IT provider and verify how you are being protected and if measures such as these are in place.

In a “Best” environment, you will have services and systems such as:

• Fully Managed Firewall with updates every few minutes protecting your Network and provides high level of IT Security.
• You will have a File Share platform that meets government and healthcare compliance standards for storing and sharing files – both internal and external.
• You will have your Servers behind lock and key in an air conditioned room – often overlooked in businesses IT security protocol
• You will have data redundancy on the storage/server level, onsite image backup, and a cloud backup
• You will have a cloud + local image backup with 15 second restore capability
• You will have endpoint security on every workstation and laptop enhancing IT Security in and outside of the office
• You will have remote monitoring on every workstation and laptop
• You will have VPN connection to your office to keep your network safe from employees working from home
• You will have Office 365 with Compliance Archiving in place (or the G-Suite comparable)
• You will have a team of IT security and support professionals at your side with a 20 minute response time to all inquiries that will bend over backwards and get to you immediately in case of a true emergency.

When we watch or listen to the news, we hear 90% bad stuff. But with the right tools and partners in place, you can rest assured you are in the best situation possible. Nothing is EVER 100%. Equifax and Yahoo proved that. But we can do everything within reason and common sense to get you as close to 99.999% as possible.

Is this Applicable to you?

But you are part of a smaller company… Why invest in your IT Security?

• Nearly 50% of hackers go after small businesses (inc.com)
• “Hackers have already breached more than 50% of small businesses” in one way or another. 14 million small businesses are not protected and at risk of hack (cnbc)
• Only 2% of small businesses survived (cnbc)
• Read our blog post titled “Do you know if your company is being hacked?“

Contact us today to find out how we can help you to better your Information Technology and IT Services – We would love to hear from you!

Jason Kidman

SOS|Support | 801-563-9700