Things The CIO Must Know About Cyber Security

Today technology is more important to the functioning of enterprises and to their profitability than ever before. As a result, many CIOs believe their role has increased in importance over the past five years. CIOs have grown from technical experts to key business decision-makers who play a vital part in formulating corporate strategy, optimizing operations, and increasing profit margins. At the same time, CIOs face many challenges. Their jobs are now more structurally complex, involving problems such as technology sprawl, siloed infrastructure, and operational challenges due to the competing needs of different stakeholders. This additional complexity means that more than half of CIOs rate their companies’ IT/business alignment as moderate or worse.

Things are changing for the CIO regarding cybersecurity as well. An increasingly complex threat landscape brings significant risks to an organization, and network security is currently the top spending category in the area of networking. At the same time, protecting against these risks has become a topic of intense interest for the leaders above the CIO. For example, cybersecurity is now discussed in 89% of board meetings.

Hacking has grown exponentially. The growth of hacking and malware can be attributed to the monetization of cybercrime. The overriding motivation behind these attacks is Financial. Mostly, in this case, the information is either stolen and sold or held for a ransom.

Why Should You Care?

Today many organizations are most likely to spend a lot of money, perhaps 10-20% of their annual IT budget, on security but it’s still not working against the new breed of advanced cyber-attacks.
If that’s not enough to concern you, consider how losing the security battle can hurt your business:

1. Loss Of Competitiveness

When cybercriminals can circumvent your defenses, trade secrets, patents, customer records, and M&A activities can all be exposed and significantly weaken your competitive position.

2. Damaged Reputation

Customer trust and market share are precious commodities. All it takes is a significant breach to hit the headlines, and those hard-earned assets can erode quickly. Estimates from companies that have been breached have ranged from several millions of dollars up to 200 million dollars.

3. Compliance Breaches

If you are not protected from breaches, your organization’s compliance with relevant policies and mandates is in serious jeopardy. Whether you are a financial institution that needs to safeguard credit card data and stay compliant with PCI DSS or your business is tasked with compliance with HIPAA, NERC, FISMA, privacy rules, or any of the other policies in effect around the world, data breaches can lead to fines, lost business, and a host of other penalties.

4. Lost Productivity

If your security team is finding out about breaches after the fact, they are going to be scrambling to handle forensics, shore up the vulnerability, assess where other similar gaps may be, rebuild corrupted systems, and so on. The time spent on these efforts is the time your business doesn’t get back—and that can’t be focused on more strategic efforts.

Why Are Today’s Security Defenses Failing?

Many organizations are using an outdated arsenal, i.e.: legacy security platforms based on technology that originated many years ago. These tools are good at blocking basic malware that is known and documented, such as viruses, but they are incapable of identifying today’s dynamic, multi-pronged cyber-attacks, which are often called advanced malware or advanced persistent threats (APTs). Many companies now use MSP services with more advanced features to prevent attacks which is more effective than legacy security platforms as, all these security devices, old or new fail to provide IT and Security teams with a 24×7 Monitoring & Reporting system.

In almost all companies we can see that no one has ever externally scanned their environment to quality check the configuration, architecture, or software level of their externally facing infrastructure. One mistake is, a firewall that isn’t updated or an unpatched server that could undo the whole effort. With MSP’s Real Time Optimization, they will look from the hacker’s viewpoint and keep your infrastructure optimized for example: with our Managed Services, we keep our customer’s infrastructures optimized through our NOC enterprise-class technology which identifies, reports, and resolves critical issues in real-time.

In the case of Sony Pictures, hackers gained entry months before they announced to the Sony staff that they had been hacked. After gaining initial entry they moved horizontally through the network capturing Administrator and User credentials without detection. Over a period of many months, they extracted TBs of data from Sony including all their emails, Staff Salary information, and unreleased movies. They then destroyed all Sony’s backups and then erased all their data leaving only a skull and crossbow on each staff member’s PC Finally they published all the company secrets online leading to the resignation of the CEO and other C-level staff. The fact that Sony had no idea they had been hacked for months is what made this hack so damaging. Had they been hacked and been able to identify the breach within hours or days, they would not have suffered such horrendous damage to their brand and their company, and this wouldn’t happen if they had MSP’s services which monitor their network and systems 24×7.

TB’s of data were extracted over many months.
At no point was the Sony IT team aware!

What Can You As A ‘C’ Level Executive Do?

1. Allow your team to see what hackers can see

Undertake an external vulnerability assessment from us so we can show your teams what the hackers can see.

Once fixes and patches and changes are applied to close the gaps and take Internal and External Continuous Vulnerability Scanning from us. This will allow your team to know what patches are needed on an ongoing basis, allow them to be aware of any configuration mistakes, and provide them with up-to-date intelligence. Your team will also have access to our team and monthly in-depth and management reporting. All for a low fixed monthly cost.

2. Give your team the service to know if a breach occurs

Take a Managed Antivirus & Backup Service from Real Secure. This will allow us to alert your team should any incents occur. Our Security Operation Center operates 24×7 and will work diligently with your team off and on-site to address any security concerns.

ELV Solutions

Software Solutions