Our clients have been rapidly transforming the way their businesses operate and how their employees work in response to COVID-19.
As a managed IT provider, it is our obligation to ensure our clients’ IT environments are resilient and secure. Therefore, ANP has turned to a Zero Trust Security model to protect against the growing security threats associated with this transformational shift to remote work.
It’s no surprise, that as the number of remote workers exponentially increase, so do the number of new cybersecurity threats. Cybercriminals recognize that in the rush to continue to conduct business as usual from home, many companies had to take some shortcuts with security. And because they prey on fear, cybercriminals have ramped up COVID-19 Phishing Attacks as well as added several new attack vectors to hack your network. Combine all of this with the shear influx of everyday people using the internet for business, it’s the perfect storm for successful cyberattacks.
Ransomware, in which criminals encrypt files and then demand a large ransom fee to restore access, continues to be the leading cyber threat today. Ransomware attacks are up 90% since the onset of COVID-19, according to a recent report by VMware. If that isn’t enough to ring the alarms, here are a few more new stats on Ransomware:
- 65% of ransomware infections are delivered via phishing
- 51% of businesses have been impacted by ransomware in the last year
- A ransomware attack will take place every 11 seconds by 2021
- 85% of ransomware attacks target Windows systems
- The average cost of a ransomware attack in 2019 was $133,000
- 50% of IT professionals don’t believe that their organization is ready to defend against a ransomware attack.
- Hackers attack every 39 seconds or an average of 2,244 times a day
- Ransomware costs will reach $20 billion by 2021
Ransomware in itself has become a business for cybercriminals today – specifically targeting small and midsize companies in hopes they don't have the proper security controls in place.
Years ago, your corporate firewall was all it took to secure your network from outside the Internet interference, but today that is no longer the case. Cybercriminals are more sophisticated than ever before and have figured out ways around your firewall.
Now it is all about tricking your employees into giving up their user ID and password. Unfortunately, as humans, we make mistakes and such attempts to steal your employee passwords are in fact more successful than you think. Once a criminal has your employees domain credentials, they can access your network via a Virtual Private Network or through Remote Terminal Services, which often leads to a Ransomware attack.
It’s no longer safe enough to count on your employees to protect their credentials -- it’s incumbent upon you, as the business owner or IT Director, to add another layer of security that protects your company data so that even if the bad guys do obtain a valid user ID and password they still can’t get in.
What is Zero Trust Security?
Zero Trust is a security concept centered on the belief that organizations should not automatically trust anything inside or outside its perimeters and instead must verify anything and everything trying to connect to its systems before granting access.
Zero Trust Security requires all users, even those inside the organization’s network, to be authenticated, authorized, and continuously validating security configuration and posture, before being granted or keeping access to applications and data. This approach leverages advanced technologies such as multifactor authentication (MFA), identity and access management (IAM), and endpoint security technology to verify the user’s identity and maintain system security.
ANP has been hard at work building controls, tools, and practices to address the heightened risks of this modern, remote workplace. Our Zero Trust Security offering—a new managed service is based upon the Zero Trust security principles and is applied cross your employee identities, PC endpoints, company data, business applications, LAN and WAN networks, and IT infrastructure such as on-premise and cloud servers.
ANP’s Zero Trust Security is part of ANP’s Secure Cloud Advantage bundle which includes several mini managed services focused around the Office 365 platform to transform your business into a secure, resilient digital workplace.
- MS Teams Collaboration as a service
- SharePoint & OneDrive File Management
- Exchange Online: Email and File Management
- Teams Voice & VoIP Phone Integration
- MS 365 Compliance & Zero Trust Security
- And more
Today, organizations need security that effectively adapts to the complexity of the modern remote work environment, embraces the mobile workforce, and protects people, devices, applications, and data wherever they are located.
Contact us at (215) 572-0111 to learn more about our Zero Trust Security offering or any of our managed services available in our Secure Cloud Advantage bundle.