Cyber Security Growth
By Kip Kirchberg
The global Cyber-security market is set to grow from its current market evaluation of $120 billion per year to well over $300 billion per year by 2024. The Cyber-security market is drastically increasing among organizations in an effort to minimize Cyber-security risks and to meet Cyber-Security insurance requirements.
Unfortunately, the additional money being invested into Cyber-Security by organizations does not necessary mean that their Cyber-Security stance has improved. Many organizations attempt to improve their Cyber-Security stance and protect their organization by layering several technologies. In many cases the additional layers simply create more complexities and ultimately become ineffective.
Cyber-Security is a complicated web that involves solutions that are expensive and, in many cases, requires the expertise of a dedicated Cyber-Security professional to effectively deploy and maintain. The biggest risk you or your organization can take is believing that you will not become a target or fall victim to a cyber-attack.
The good news is there are some basic things you and your organization can do to better secure your environment.
- Enable two factor authentication on all cloud services
- Practice good Password Hygiene. Eight character passwords is not enough. Migrate to at least a 12-character password and force special characters, numbers, and the inability to reuse passwords in your environment.
- Utilize a password safe to centrally store passwords. Many services like dashlane and last pass allow you to use their app to fill passwords. By storing passwords you can create a unique and challenging password for each account. Please don’t do what appears to be the trend for most and use the same password for all your accounts.
- Lock your devices and enable auto lock when not in use. You wouldn’t leave your car unlocked with the keys in the ignition at a Walmart. So don’t leave your electronic devices unlocked and vulnerable.
- Back up your devices and pc’s and for the sake of sanity please verify the backups are completing successfully. You would not believe how many times I have had to assist an organization with an issue only to learn they were not successfully backing up their systems. This can be disastrous to say the least.
- Be cautious of the information you provide on social media. Don’t give out your address, phone number, social security number, or anything else that is personal. Believe it or not I have seen people posts pictures of credit cards on social media sites. Not very smart.
- Don’t trust everything you see in email. If you get a request from a financial institution or a request to verify your account password in email be cautious. Many hackers use phishing techniques to lure you to provide sensitive account data. When in doubt open a new browser and go to the site manually.
- Do not access sensitive accounts or data while connected to free wifi. While it may be tempting remember nothing is free. And free wifi is a hot spot for hackers to harvest data and use later for an identity or credit card attack.
- Change account passwords at least quarterly. I know this may seem tedious but trust me. You never know when a site may fall victim to a cyber attack. Always better to be safe than sorry.
- Most of all use common sense. If it smells like a duck, looks, like a duck, quacks like a duck, then it’s probably a frog.
Again a lot of cyber security risks can be mitigated with simple steps to ensure your digital hygiene. If you or or organization is looking for a team to review your cyber security posture feel free to reach out. I can surely connect you with the right team of professionals to do the job. From a basic analysis to cyber security insurance review to a full blown pen test I have a resource for you.
You can reach me at [email protected] or at 863-734-8060
