10 Measures To Help Prevent a Cyber Attack

What are cyber defensive measures? As companies and organizations have become more dependent on technology for daily operations, attacks on critical information, such as confidential documents, financial data, and customer details are increasing rapidly. Data residing on networks, workstations, and web sites is increasingly being destroyed or stolen.

Attack methods and techniques include social engineering, phishing, identity theft, password cracking, denial of service, data breaches, ransomware, malicious code, buffer overflows, cross-site scripting, business email compromise, and others. Damages may be very significant and defensive steps need to be implemented.

Details: The Top 10 Defensive Measures You Should Have Working For You

	Security Measure	Get Started
	Create a Written Information Security Policy (At a minimum, include an Incident Response Plan, Password Policies, and User Training scope. Start with our Information Security Policy outline.)	Enroll In Basic Defender
	Conduct a High-Level Assessment With a Trusted Partner (Find danger spots and opportunities for improvement without disrupting your business. Start with our Discovery Questionnaires and Tech Scan)	Enroll In Basic Defender
	Semi-Annual User Security Awareness Training (SAT) (Custom training tailored to your company reduces the chances of a successful attack or security breach)	Schedule With Us
	Create an Inventory of All Your Data Stores (Use a formatted inventory sheet, include locations, how data is protected, who is responsible, where backups are stored, value of data)	Enroll In Basic Defender
	Take the Five Easiest Security Steps (Simple, economical steps you can take to reduce your risk and avoid cyber attacks. Includes policy and training development.)	Enroll In Basic Defender
	Implement the Seven Best Security Practices (Basic steps and practices that will go a long way toward protecting your critical systems and data)	Enroll In Basic Defender
	Adopt Risk Assistant and Flexible Risk Management (Utilize an industry standard set of cyber risks, work with basic effective counter-measures)	Risk Assistant Summary (Included in Enterprise Defender)
	Utilize a Database of Known Cyber Risks (Build on list included in Risk Assistant, add threats from other sources as needed. Your risks may be categorized as technical, physical, or administrative.)	See Risk Assistant Prototype (Included in Enterprise Defender)
	Evaluate and Apply a Set of Basic Defensive Measures (Pull from Risk Assistant and other sources, apply to threats to reduce overall risk score)	See Risk Assistant Prototype (Included in Enterprise Defender)
	Explore and Consider Automated Security Tools (Deploying a SIEM application, using vulnerability scanning tools like Nessus, adopting the NIST framework, conducting penetration test exercises. Start with our brief Security Technology Overview.)	Enroll In Enterprise Defender Below

Four Easy Steps You Can Take Today

1. Teach users to use actual words in their passwords. Which is easier to remember, "DancingShirt250" or "JxQ2$e#wQ9Kh" ?
2. Create a bare-bones, minimalist Incident Response Plan. Just jot down the names, email addresses, and phone numbers for the people who need to be contacted when there is a cyber incident or breach. And post it where people can see it.
3. Identify the crown jewels. Make a list of the information and documents your company just can't operate without. And make sure these items are being backed up frequently and automatically.
4. Enroll in the flexible Data Defender program above.

What You Can Do Now