The Business Exchange Swindon & Wiltshire Edition 40: Dec/Jan 2018/19 | Page 35

TECHNOLOGY
REVVED UP
DANGER ZONE: Is your business ready
for a cyber attack every 14 seconds?
The 2019 business community needs to
be prepared to deal with a ransomware
attack every 14 seconds based on
current government forecasts. Alarming
statistics for any business, but perhaps
not unexpected. After all, breaches this
year have provided us with a long list
of casualties, with British Airways (BA),
Facebook and Uber hitting the headlines
for all the wrong reasons.
With nearly 40,000 new methods
of attack occurring every day, you’ll
need clarity and expert advice when
approaching the issue. The BA hack
that saw more than 380,000 customer
details stolen was caused by a simple
website hack of 22 commands, which
adds a whole new dimension to ‘devil in
the detail’.
With such well-known brands having
to issue apologies to customers and
face fines from the regulators, many
small to medium sized businesses
are left scratching their heads when it
comes to defending their computers.
After all, if big companies cannot protect
their systems from cybercriminals what
can you do?
New combinations and multiple
methods of attack mean that the usual
firewall and antivirus solutions on their
own are no longer sufficient to defend a
business and its IT systems.
Indeed, the best security practitioners
should be able to move beyond
the headlines to demystify jargon,
demonstrate an understanding of your
needs and articulate these in simple
terms and actions. They should also be
able to offer advice and solutions that
seamlessly align with your business.
Furthermore, current leading cyber
threats such as ransomware, where IT
systems are locked by cybercriminals
until a ransom payment is made to
restore access to the files, can be fully
countered with the assistance of a
professional IT practitioner who can
advise on the appropriate measures
and tools.
Next year ransomware alone is
expected to cost businesses in excess
of £8.9bn.
By combining a number of tools
and technologies that work together to
provide a single coordinated multi-
layered protection scheme across the
entire business, it is entirely possible to
proactively defend the network, detect
emerging threats, and react to any
potential breaches. This is known as
Unified Threat Management (UTM) and
businesses are going to need it.
One of the major benefits for
customers adopting UTM technology
is that it leverages new preventative
solutions such as Artificial Intelligence
(AI) and Machine Learning (ML).
These technologies allow the IT
security system to become smarter
than the hacker and to ‘know’ and
‘learn’ what hacking attempts look like,
stopping them in their tracks before
problems arise. All this happens
constantly without requiring human
intervention, ensuring that your IT
systems are always up to date and
offering the best protection.
Further complicating security
issues are the complexities of modern
IT system setup. This involves a
mix of cloud, mobile devices and
home working, and it’s easy to see
why businesses need UTM to tackle
increasingly sophisticated adversaries
across a broader scale than just with a
standard business firewall.
By adopting a forward looking
combination of UTM, together with
expert advice and systems covering the
entire IT estate, this will help to reduce
business costs, save time and mitigate
risk so your staff can go about their daily
business knowing the data and systems
they depend on are safe.
For an informal chat around this
and any other IT issues you may have,
please call 01367 700 555 or visit
www.cisltd.com
THE BUSINESS EXCHANGE 2018
The days of a firewall alone protecting you against cybercriminals are long gone,
says Neill Lawson-Smith FBCS, MD of CIS Ltd.
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