By Marcos Caruso, Senior Manager at Minsait
When we talk about cybersecurity with leaders from various sectors, questions like “are we prepared to face threats?”, “are we investing resources effectively?”, “how can I understand what the IT area means?” are still quite frequent in the current scenario.
In a rapidly changing environment – and increasingly frequent attacks – having a complete picture of online security is still a challenge. And, to overcome it, it is necessary the commitment of all spheres involved in society as a continuous effort to prevent damage.
Reaching a high level of expertise is still one of the barriers today, which can be overcome with the help of effective tools. At Minsait, we constantly invest in platforms capable of supporting this growth and providing alternatives capable of creating value in digital security learning.
Based on our experience of relationships with public and private institutions, we gathered our experience and evaluated that there are five essential points to prevent this type of attack.
The first one is the update. It is essential that teams keep in mind the main and most modern cybersecurity strategies. This ranges from training professionals to updating operating systems, taking into account the best internal and external security practices.
With the internal systems up and running, it's time to look at tools like email and browser tools, which make up the second point. E-mail is often the biggest gateway for cyberattacks: just one contributor opens spam with malware for it to infect everyone else. Thus, awareness and having an adequate and clear policy of protection and communication is essential at all levels for organizations of different sizes.
If the cybersecurity team finds a computer that has been infected, it is necessary to proceed to the third step: isolate it as quickly as possible to try to contain the identified intrusion as much as possible. Once isolated, teams must proceed with a full system cleanup and restoration. Then the recovery step must begin. Even so, the most advanced protection tools work with artificial intelligence, for behavior monitoring and threat detection, based on algorithmic processing in real time. In this way, the level of protection increases significantly, since security teams no longer need to worry about updating tools on users' equipment.
In our experience, these are best practices to prevent cyber attacks. The last two steps would be: the constant review by the leadership in order to make possible entry points less and less vulnerable and having a series of backup measures to recover possible infected materials.
Today, cybersecurity is no longer a tool, but a strategy that must be comprehensively addressed by companies. And, to solve these problems, it is increasingly necessary to have multidisciplinary teams. At home, we have gathered from 'hackers', computer scientists, to technologists and business consultants working hand in hand to respond to the new generation of threats and preparing to understand behaviors and detect them in advance, or even, creating defense mechanisms with comprehensive protection that by similarity can ensure the defense of corporations.
In this way, it is possible to achieve results that go beyond cybersecurity. Strategies made by these teams reduce the companies’ exposure level, but also improve employee productivity, company reputation (since their service is perceived as safe and reliable by their customers) and allow for more efficient cybersecurity management, translating the investment in technology into gains beyond the IT area.
Digital transformation and cybersecurity go hand in hand. In a hyper-connected environment, any device with access to a network is likely to be used for criminal purposes. It's not about sending an alarm message, but translating a real environment: just as technology is sophisticated, cyber attacks are also getting better and better. Therefore, companies and institutions must invest in effective protection measures and in the training of their professionals.
In a rapidly changing environment – and increasingly frequent attacks – having a complete picture of online security is still a challenge. And, to overcome it, it is necessary the commitment of all spheres involved in society as a continuous effort to prevent damage.
Reaching a high level of expertise is still one of the barriers today, which can be overcome with the help of effective tools. At Minsait, we constantly invest in platforms capable of supporting this growth and providing alternatives capable of creating value in digital security learning.
Based on our experience of relationships with public and private institutions, we gathered our experience and evaluated that there are five essential points to prevent this type of attack.
The first one is the update. It is essential that teams keep in mind the main and most modern cybersecurity strategies. This ranges from training professionals to updating operating systems, taking into account the best internal and external security practices.
With the internal systems up and running, it's time to look at tools like email and browser tools, which make up the second point. E-mail is often the biggest gateway for cyberattacks: just one contributor opens spam with malware for it to infect everyone else. Thus, awareness and having an adequate and clear policy of protection and communication is essential at all levels for organizations of different sizes.
If the cybersecurity team finds a computer that has been infected, it is necessary to proceed to the third step: isolate it as quickly as possible to try to contain the identified intrusion as much as possible. Once isolated, teams must proceed with a full system cleanup and restoration. Then the recovery step must begin. Even so, the most advanced protection tools work with artificial intelligence, for behavior monitoring and threat detection, based on algorithmic processing in real time. In this way, the level of protection increases significantly, since security teams no longer need to worry about updating tools on users' equipment.
In our experience, these are best practices to prevent cyber attacks. The last two steps would be: the constant review by the leadership in order to make possible entry points less and less vulnerable and having a series of backup measures to recover possible infected materials.
Today, cybersecurity is no longer a tool, but a strategy that must be comprehensively addressed by companies. And, to solve these problems, it is increasingly necessary to have multidisciplinary teams. At home, we have gathered from 'hackers', computer scientists, to technologists and business consultants working hand in hand to respond to the new generation of threats and preparing to understand behaviors and detect them in advance, or even, creating defense mechanisms with comprehensive protection that by similarity can ensure the defense of corporations.
In this way, it is possible to achieve results that go beyond cybersecurity. Strategies made by these teams reduce the companies’ exposure level, but also improve employee productivity, company reputation (since their service is perceived as safe and reliable by their customers) and allow for more efficient cybersecurity management, translating the investment in technology into gains beyond the IT area.
Digital transformation and cybersecurity go hand in hand. In a hyper-connected environment, any device with access to a network is likely to be used for criminal purposes. It's not about sending an alarm message, but translating a real environment: just as technology is sophisticated, cyber attacks are also getting better and better. Therefore, companies and institutions must invest in effective protection measures and in the training of their professionals.
Disclaimer: The opinion presented in this article is the responsibility of its author and not of ABES - Brazilian Association of Software Companies
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