Recently Cyber Criminals attacked and demanded ransom from the popular GPS maker Garmin. Garmin issued a statement sharing that a Cyber Attack took many of Garmin’s computer systems offline causing several online subscription services to be unavailable. Garmin does not believe the attackers were able to obtain any customer data, including payment information from Garmin Pay™.

The Cyber-attack not only affected general fitness users of their popular products but also affected commercial services like flyGarmin and Garmin Pilot Apps which are used by pilots for flight planning and updating mandatory FAA databases in order to be cleared to fly. According to Sky News, to alleviate some of the pain Garmin paid millions of dollars through a third-party company called Arete Incident Response to obtain an encryption key in order to recover their Systems and get services back online.  

While Garmin works very hard to restore systems it should come as no surprise that this attack will not only costs them millions in Ransom but their business will suffer reputational damage that could affect their stock price.  While the details of the attack have not been confirmed it is very possible that attackers had been conducting reconnaissance on their systems for months with alarm bells going off. These alarms were either never caught, ignored or tagged as false positives and never completely investigated.

Unfortunately, it appears that Cyber Attacks against small and large businesses are increasing. The large movement of working from home and having offsite access to some of an organizations crown jewels adds an additional risk to Organizations that once was not considered. Staff who typically could only access certain high value assets while onsite are now able to access the same resources from the comfort of their living room. Sometimes times these high value assets are accessed from the same machine used for family entertainment such as Facebook, email, Netflix, and general internet surfing.

Companies simply were not prepared with the tools needed to be handle the large volume of staff now working from home due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Many are not staffed to support the volume of workers or requests needed to maintain offsite staff.

The good news is there is a solutions that will help you not only protect your remote work force but will also provide the ability to remotely support staff, and ultimately be alerted if a Cyber Security Event occurs.  

In order to protect your remote staff you must install some type of endpoint protection on their workstation or PC’s. The one I recommend and support is PCMatic’s Endpoint Suite. PCMatic’s Endpoint Protection is a full suite of cybersecurity tools delivering real-time whitelist protection, two-factor device authentication, RDP controls, remote management tools, expansive reporting and more.

PCMatic will provide real time application monitoring to ensure no malware or viruses are running on your user’s system. The added benefit of having PCMatic’s Endpoint Suite is accessing a portal where you can view the overall health and status of your endpoints. It does not matter if the devices are onsite or remote. As long as they have internet access they will check in and report.

The second bonus to running PCMatic’s Endpoint Protection is having the ability to RDP into any machine running the Endpoint Suite. Having remote access to a user’s machine will allow you to provide real time hands on support to all your users both local and remote. This makes handing those rough support calls a little easier as you can see first had what the user is experiencing and take the appropriate actions to mitigate their problem.

Most of all PCMatic’s log collection can be setup to alert you in the event a potential Cyber Security Risks is present in the system. This can range from an attempted failed login to someone attempting to remotely access the machine for remote Command and Control, or an application that attempted to launch but was blocked due to its reputation or actions.

PC Matic Pro Endpoint Suite includes a robust dashboard that provides system health at-a-glance. Key metrics such as CPU load, storage utilization and bandwidth-use are viewable in one central location for system health management, along with device and session settings management.

If you would like to discuss how PCMatic can help protect your business, please reach out for a free consultation. I’ll be glad to show you all the great features and benefits PCMatic provides.

You can reach out at 863-734-8060 or [email protected]

Kip Kirchberg is an International Cyber Security Expert who has experience building World Class Cyber Security Teams. His experience has been leveraged by Multiple Fortune 500 organizations to help build, tune, and enhance their Cyber Security Posture.

Experience includes but is not limited to Building SIEM platforms, Endpoint Security, 3rd Party Remote Access, Industrial Control System’s, NextGen Firewall’s, Threat Hunting to Identify Cyber Security Risks, Generating Executive Reports that lead to actionable data, Build and maintain Incident Response Team’s, Draft and Adopt Corporate Cyber Security Governance, Internal and External Pen Testing, Team Building, plus much more….