As the way we do business becomes increasingly digital, cybersecurity remains a top concern for today’s organisations. The pandemic has made digital transformation a business imperative, but adopting new digital capabilities can also be a double-edged sword. In this article, we unpack Cybersecurity in 2021.
The migration towards remote work environments has presented cybercriminals with a much larger attack surface on more vulnerable home networks, while cyberattacks are also becoming more sophisticated. Thankfully, so are the ways that businesses can protect themselves.
It is therefore crucial that every organisation – big or small – takes into consideration how cybersecurity is changing in 2021 and what they can do to ensure their data is well-protected.
The hidden costs of cyber attacks are more significant than many business owners might think. A breach can lead to a prolonged loss of productivity, legal exposure or POPIA contravention, reputational damage, and potentially crippling financial losses. A report by the Ponemon Institute revealed that data breaches cost South African companies a staggering R46-million on average. It also took an average of 184 days for the surveyed companies to detect that they have been compromised, and a further 53 days to contain the security breach.
Larger enterprises are also not the only targets. One in five small businesses fall victim to a cyber attack, and 60% of those victims go out of business within six months of the attack.
Mimecast's 2021 State of Email Security report showed that 47% of the South African companies they surveyed were infiltrated by ransomware during 2020. 53% of those companies paid the attackers their ransom, but only 60% were able to recover their data.
While most antivirus software and firewalls can protect businesses against known types of attacks, they cannot always detect or contain unknown and more advanced threats. Businesses, therefore, need modern software protection that can detect new types of threats from day one, without waiting for a security patch or human intervention.
HP Sure Sense is a security tool that uses deep learning, a subset of Artificial Intelligence (AI), to intuitively recognise any never-before-seen threat. This is a huge step forward from legacy cybersecurity solutions as it monitors for behaviour associated with a potential attack, rather than only scanning whether a file looks like a known threat. With the help of AI security, protection is always active, rather than reactive, regardless of how new the type of attack is.
HP Sure Sense provides protection against a broad array of file-based threats, but also against fileless threats that do not write onto the hard drive. Fileless threats are becoming a growing concern, but they are also more difficult to detect by legacy solutions. For these modern threats, businesses need modern protection.
The problem for many small businesses is that they often lack the resources or IT security expertise to actively deal with a broad range of threats. HP Wolf Pro Security Edition is a comprehensive security solution designed to protect small to medium businesses against malware and browser-based attacks – without relying on the judgement of users or IT teams.
One cybersecurity consideration that businesses tend to overlook is the fact that anti-virus software alone isn’t always enough. Businesses need devices that have built-in protection from attacks on hardware or firmware that antivirus software can’t protect.
HP Sure Click utilises hardware-enforced protection to isolate malicious content from a device’s operating system. Threats are contained at the hardware level and can also not spread to any devices connected to the same network.
When a device is compromised, employees also need to be able to recover them quickly to minimise costly downtimes. HP Sure Start is the world’s first self-healing BIOS that automatically detects new threats, notifies the user, logs the event for IT, and restores the device to a recent good version. With HP Sure Recover, employees can also easily recover their devices from a system image that has been stored on a cloud network, reducing the remediation downtime for remote employees.
Software and hardware aren’t the only factors a business needs to consider when it comes to cybersecurity.
Employees are often the most vulnerable part of an organisation’s IT because of social engineering tactics such as phishing, scareware, pre-texting, or even visual hacking.
Companies need to provide training programs and promote awareness of the common strategies since antivirus software cannot always protect against these kinds of threats.
There are, however, some solutions that can protect their employees from social engineering. HP Sure View mitigates the risks of visual hacking by using reflective technology to obscure the screen when viewed at an angle, allowing users to work without fear of on-screen data being compromised. Employees also need to protect their devices from physical attacks. A stolen device can be tampered with and modified to bypass firmware security, potentially giving a hacker access to any network that device is connected to. HP Tamperlock provides devices with protection against all kinds of physical attacks, even when all power sources are removed.
Businesses should be able to focus on their core offerings, rather than worrying about the ever-increasing risks and complexities of cybersecurity. With managed security services from leaders in the industry, your business doesn’t need an IT security team to ensure that your data is always protected. Tarsus Distribution, in partnership with HP, offers a range of IT products and services that are tailored to unique business requirements. If you’re looking for a technology partner to guide you when it comes to cybersecurity, schedule a one-on-one consultation with us today.