It’s important to understand the basics of why having a cybersecurity partner assist in securing your corporation’s infrastructure should be at the top of your list for funding. Most C-Suite personnel will not look at the security posture of their corporation’s network until a breach occurs. Once that takes place, the corporation has already lost. If you have employees or perform any online work whatsoever, your company is vulnerable to a breach, period.
In 2020, if a breach occurs, the average cost will exceed $3.8 Million dollars, which is down 1.5%. This demonstrates that companies are now taking this more seriously. Larger corporations may be able to absorb that cost, but most of the SMB’s will surely go under.
The Human Element
One thing to realize is a company’s employees are the key to keeping your network safe. 65% of groups used spear-phishing as a primary infection vector for malware and 62% of businesses experienced social engineering attacks. Most employees will never know they were the ones that caused a company to be compromised. Employees will click on a hyperlink that looks legit while they are in the “work mode” and recognize the name of the sender from the email. What they do not realize is one letter is missing. Or two letters in the sender’s email were switched around. That is how a hacker gains entry.
Social Engineering Testing and a Security Risk Assessments with a skilled cybersecurity partner are two very important things you can perform to help keep your network safe. The Social Engineering Testing will allow you to see if employees click on fake malicious links, giving a real-world simulation of what can happen when that Nigerian Prince sends his next email. A Security Risk Assessment will look at all the policies and procedures, and safeguards, that are currently in place.
It’s All About the Connections
Whether your company uses Public facing Network IP’s, Web Applications, or Mobile Applications, you are risking exposing your company to the outside world. Hackers are highly creative, and they continue to get smarter as the days roll on. Plus, many of them have all the time in the world to look for ways to get into a company’s network. If a hacker were to gain entry to your firewalls through a vulnerability, they will surely gain full control of your internal network and own it.
Performing quarterly Vulnerability Scans and yearly Penetration Testing is another key to helping keep your network safe and secure. These resulting reports will provide detailed information on the vulnerabilities discovered and how you can fix them. Your trusted cybersecurity partner should be able to help answer questions if the reports aren’t quite clear enough.
Vulnerability Scans and Penetration Tests are two different beasts. You can learn more about them in our blog.
Looking into the Future
Company IT Teams are now seeing the importance of a cybersecurity partner. In the past, it was viewed as “they will expose our holes in the network and make us look bad”. Now it is more of thanking a cybersecurity team for assisting them in securing their network. It’s better to catch the holes before the hackers do. Which is why we call ourselves your cybersecurity partner. Working together to find these vulnerabilities helps companies keep their information secure.
The money spent for a cybersecurity partner to expose vulnerabilities is crucial for a company to survive the ever-rising threats of “hacking”. On average, a small company will spend under $10,000 to test their network and expose known vulnerability’s; Micro businesses even less.
MainNerve continues to see companies adding a budget to their security infrastructure to include testing. Some larger corporations are now placing a security purposed person into the C-Suite, as they should. This person sits at the board just like the other C-Suite personnel.
Security is extremely important in our connected world, and companies that want to survive will need to take steps to find a security partner like MainNerve to assist in this endeavor.
