With Cautious Optimism on the Road to Digital Immunity

From the cyber-risk management perspective, the combination of the lack of staff, technical debt, and current COVID-19-related difficulties poses quite a challenge. Learn how to strengthen digital immune system of your IT environment and improve its cyber resilience.

In the year that is slowly coming to an end, we have not had many reasons for optimism so far: from the medical crisis that has affected the entire world to natural and humanitarian catastrophes that have claimed the lives of too many; from swarms of locusts in Eastern Africa to the biggest drop in shares values in the history in USA. Furthermore, cyber criminals took advantage of all these calamities for their own profit—from sending fake e-mails and attacking the already vulnerable health-care environments to theft and encryption of data resulting in blackmail.

Within the European Cyber Security Month, the European Union Agency for Cybersecurity ENISA has, with the help of local partners in EU member states, been focusing on organizing of a campaign to educate the wider audience about the threats endangering users in their use of internet services, secure e-mail use, secure use of mobile devices, and incorrect password use since 2011—in short, they strive for a comprehensive public and business user awareness. Awareness-raising topics do not change much from one year to another, especially not for business users, which points to the fact that, unfortunately, business security challenges do not significantly change either.

One of the main reasons for such a situation in the business world can be found in the lack of appropriately educated employees: at the end of 2019, ENISA issued a report in which they analyzed the level of employees’ skills in the field of cybersecurity and made a comparison between the EU and the rest of the world. The research showed that EU lacks almost 300,000 appropriately educated analysts, engineers, architects, and management staff in the field of cyber-security, and that almost 60% of companies have trouble filling job positions in this sector.

The combination of the lack of staff, technical debt, and current COVID-19-related difficulties poses quite a challenge for ICT managers. How to ensure the uninterrupted safe operation in an environment that was forced to transform overnight, from the traditional office-based workspace into one that is geographically and logically dispersed, to retain the visibility of data flows, and to stop leakage of confidential information, to prevent or at least limit the non-purpose use of laptops and mobile devices, and to simultaneously still ensure the functioning of crucial IT processes which the company depends upon?

Faced with the health crisis and its consequences in the ICT environment, risk management teams have several common guidelines:

• Opportunity knocks but once. At least the affordable one.
  • We cannot afford the optimism that we are immune to problems pestering the entire world around us. The timely detection of problems and facing them is of key importance, for which, unfortunately, we occasionally run out of time, willpower, or both.
• Divide and conquer.
  • Although the measures such as the ban on crossing municipality borders and the imposition of a curfew may seem too harsh, in the IT environment, too, we have to use the same measures to stop the spread of a virus, from strict environment segmentation to isolation of potentially compromised devices.
• Prevention is better than cure.
  • Why should we be getting over a virus infection if we can prevent it by washing our hands and a timely vaccination? And why should we stop the operations of an entire company after a breach due to restoring safety backup copies, if we can ensure the detection of attacks and elimination of vulnerabilities in advance?

At NIL’s Security Operations Centre (NIL SOC) we can function as the immune system of your ICT environment, by improving its cyber resilience. Our team of top cyber-security experts is stocked with the essential expertise in detecting and responding to suspicious security events. These experts in NIL SOC constantly (24/7) provide expert management of your security incidents. Thus, the companies can achieve a fast and affordable “digital immunity”, by employing the NIL SOC services.

The near future prospects allow us to be optimistic, as we can expect several highly efficient vaccines in a short period of time, which will stop the spread of this coronavirus. The predictions for your digital immune system are just as optimistic, as NIL has an experienced team of experts working on its protection.

Everything is running as it should, so we can look forward to the New Year with great optimism, expecting that our private and business lives should return to normal and our personal immune system will have nothing more than a common cold or hay fever to deal with.

Don’t battle the cyber epidemic without the mandatory safety equipment—pick up your NIL SOC prescription today!