It’s 9:45 on Thursday. While you’re looking for an important email, you notice messages in your Sent Items you don’t remember sending.
“It won’t happen to us.”
Too often, no one thinks seriously about security until it’s too late. Even small and medium sized businesses hold sensitive information that is valuable to hackers (and we don’t mean Zero Cool and Burn Notice) . Today’s hackers live all around the world, are often professionally organized, use automated tools to hack cheaply at scale, and are motivated solely by money. Those who don’t proactively plan for security risk are their favorite target.
The sheer number of ways they can attack an organization can seem overwhelming, but knowing which ones are most frequently assailing your organization is a helpful first step.
Let’s Get Specific
Two of the most common attack types are phishing and ransomware. These incident types have the potential to severely impact any leader’s ability to meet organizational goals. While you may have seen scare headlines of “60% of hacked businesses go under” thankfully that isn’t true. However, the impact of a successful hack is always painful.
Where to Start
The time to address security posture is now. First, identify the gap between today’s best practices, and your own organization’s security standards. How? It is wise to partner with a mature and innovative information security team like the one we have at Mainstay. We assess, we guide, and then we carry the weight of the responsibility with you. We do this for hundreds of northern New England organizations and are fortunate to experience firsthand the positive impact business leaders experience, after having the right security posture (with a shrewd budget).
Microsoft Defender for Endpoint – One Example
Recently, one of our client’s employees downloaded what he believed was a legitimate video player application. When the application was opened, it deployed malicious code that attempted to extract his email folders and cached passwords. The code was sophisticated and bypassed normal antivirus scans. Without robust protections, this would have resulted in significant confidential data falling into the hands of a greedy criminal. However, we had deployed a tool called Microsoft Defender for Endpoint which uses advanced AI to detect and block threats in real-time, all at low cost. The user’s machine was separated from the network, all malicious connections were severed, and a trained security professional was investigating, within minutes. This turned the potential of a brutal breach into simply a minor inconvenience.
Partnering with Mainstay will give you the confidence and tools to lead your organization’s security strategy
We have brought clarity and confidence to hundreds of business leaders, whether through a risk assessment, ongoing information security services, being the IT department, or through a simple meeting.
If it makes sense to evaluate or increase your organization’s security posture, please contact us today, for a conversation with an experienced leader at Mainstay.