Cyber Security Safeguards - 10 Most Crucial Defenses

In today’s hyper-connected world, where we are closely connected and highly dependent on several technologies and digital platforms, protecting our digital infrastructure has become a necessity. Considering the threat landscape nowadays, protective sensitive information, business systems, and intellectual property must be your number 1 priority.

In this write-up, we will dig into the world of Cyber Security Safeguards discussing all the security measures that are essential to protect your crucial data against malicious attacks. Following these safeguards will ensure the confidentiality and integrity of your digital assets.

Top 10 Cyber Security Safeguards Essential for Your Crucial Data

1. Identify Your Assets

The first step of cybersecurity starts with knowing your IT infrastructure and environment. You cannot protect what you don’t know exists. This Cyber Security Safeguard is essential to understand the scope of the problem and it will make the overall process for cyber security safeguard quite organized.

You can initiate the process in the following manner:

• Identify the crucial set of data that you want to protect
• Classify how the sensitive information flows through the environment

You also need to gather the technical details of the hardware such as the Makes, Models, Serial Numbers, MAC Address, IP Address, and Open Ports.

In the case of software, find out the type of software (OS and applications), version, and whether it requires admin privilege or not. At last, collect the name of the users, their job titles, and whether they use an administrative account or not.

2. Train your Employees

In a research carried out by Stanford University and a top cyber security organization, it was found that approximately 88% of cyberattacks or data breaches happen due to a human mistake. This is because humans are vulnerable to social engineering attacks. In this attack, the fraudster attempts to mislead someone to perform an action that eventually results in the desired result.

A phishing attack is one of the best examples of social engineering. Here, the attacker crafts an email in such a way that it tricks the user to take some action like clicking on a link, downloading an attachment, or providing some really sensitive information.

Social engineering attacks can be pretty bad like a Ransomware attack. This is why businesses need to provide Cyber Awareness Training to their employees. After such training, a business can transform its most dangerous weakness into its strength.

You can reach out to SysTools for an advanced Cyber Awareness Training Solution that can help train your employees against phishing attacks. Using our solution, businesses can reduce the chances of a successful phishing attack by up to 96%.

3. Keep your Endpoints Safe and Protected

Endpoint is a device that is connected to a network and exchanges information with it. An endpoint could be a computer, laptop, printer, server, security camera, or anything that is connected to the Internet and exchanges information within the network.

These endpoints are a point of concern because they might be outside the scope of network security (eg: Network Firewall). While the network firewall is responsible for restricting any malicious traffic to the endpoint, what if it passes the firewall and reaches the endpoint and resulting in a successful attack?

Fortunately, many operating systems have their inbuilt antivirus program (Windows Defender in the case of Windows OS) that can help you filter that malicious traffic. You can use these solutions and make basic optimizations in them to create a nice first layer of defense from such attacks.

However, this is not a sure-shot Cyber Security Safeguard as WIndows defender might not be enough considering the highly sophisticated cyber attacks happening nowadays. You likely need to have a rather professional and robust solution to stay safe from such sophisticated attacks.

4. Keep your Software and Operating Systems Patched

If you are shocked to see this in our Cyber Security Safeguards list, then you should be. Many business owners don’t take it as seriously as they should. Unpatched applications and operating systems are more vulnerable to already-known cyberattacks. A beginner-level hacker can easily exploit the already known vulnerabilities and get access to your computer in an unpatched system when compared to the patched systems.

It is always recommended to keep your systems patched and it is one of the easiest ways to lower the risk of cyberattacks. However, if you work in an Industry where you are using some sort of machinery with the old operating system and software, then patching those systems might be tricky as it can result in a halt in operations. Thus, you need to make sure that you are implementing all other cyber security safeguards to ensure the complete security of your data.

5. Restrict Admin Privileges

Almost all operating systems support different user accounts with different technical capabilities. In the case of Windows OS, you can create two types of accounts i.e. user account and administrator account. The administrator account has every privilege in the operating system and can be used to install any application, make changes to the configuration, or disable any service.

All these capabilities of an administrator account make it the top choice for pulling off a cyberattack or running malicious executables in the system.

For such cases, what you can do is you can create Standard user accounts manually so a user or employee doesn’t have administrator privileges by default. If they need to install any application or need to make any changes to the configuration, they first need to switch to an admin account or add an admin password to carry out the task.

This Cyber Security Safeguard is quite useful to keep your business-critical assets safe from cyber attacks.

6. Harden System Components

Whenever you set up an IT infrastructure, no matter small or large, there are several types of devices that are involved in it. The devices could be laptops, printers, servers, scanners, routers, etc. When you install these devices, they come with pre-configured settings by default and most of us don’t even change it.

Unfortunately, these default settings are not the best setting to keep our infrastructure secure from external or internal attacks. Thus, you can implement another Cyber Security Safeguard by hardening our devices.

You can harden the IT components by performing the following steps:

• Update default credentials of the devices
• Identify and disable all unnecessary services of the devices.
• Apply maximum possible encryption algorithms
• Enable Multi-Factor Authentication wherever available
• Install the latest security updates on the devices

7. Divide your Network

If you run your business through a physical space, then implementing this Cyber Security Safeguard is extremely crucial. When you first set up networking equipment in your business, it is very likely that you have created a flat network.

A flat network means that all the devices are available on the same sub-network as they share very similar IP addresses. 

When all the workstations and servers are on the same subnet and an attacker successfully deceives someone into a phishing attack, then he/she won’t have any barrier getting access to the server. 

Thus, it is essential for us to segment our network into different logical pieces. Segmenting our network gives us access to add hindrances to our environment so that if someone breaks into our network, he/she actually needs to struggle to get into other devices.

8. Keep a Backup Copy of your Data & Test Restoration

The very first thing that you need to accept while being connected to the Internet is that cyberattacks are inevitable. Once you have accepted this fact, then comes the next Cyber Security Safeguard i.e. keep a backup copy of your most crucial data that you can’t afford to lose.

Once you know that specific data, it helps you create a clear Incident Response Plan. In this plan, you need to discover the recovery metrics that you need to follow to get your system back in its working state after a cyberattack.

When it comes to taking a backup of your crucial data, there are various options that you can choose from. If your business is distributed in different locations, then going with a cloud backup solution is the perfect choice.

Although these cloud backup solutions come with a monthly subscription, they are much easier to manage and can be scaled easily without any issues.

9. Use Multi-Factor Authentication

The next Cyber Security Safeguard on our list is MFA i.e. Multi-Factor Authentication. Here, a user needs to authenticate at least two of the three authentication factors in order to validate a user account. The three types of authentication factors are:

• Knowledge factors
• Inherence factors
• Possession factors

The reason why MFA is so much praised is that it is one of the simplest and most effective ways to keep your accounts safe. Although there are many awareness campaigns where it is told to create strong and unique passwords, still many people keep old and easy-to-guess passwords.

Thus, MFA becomes a crucial Cyber Security Safeguard to act as a protective layer for your account’s security.

10. Store and Analyze Event Logs

Event logs are the files that store all the activities that take place in a system. The logs will be generated whenever you sign in to your computer, install or uninstall software or do any such activity.

Along with storing the activities of the machine, these logs store the activities happening within the network in the form of traffic. If you store and analyze your logs regularly, then you can spot any malicious activity within the machine or the network before it becomes worse.

So, these were the Cyber Security Safeguards that a business needs to have a secure online presence. All these security tips are necessary to implement in order to keep your confidential and sensitive data safe when there are so many sophisticated cyber attacks taking place.

If you are also concerned about the safety of your IT assets, you can reach out to our expert team for our expert Cyber Security Consulting Services. We have a team of 20+ certified professionals who take care of all your cyber security related needs.

Moreover, we also offer SOC, NOC, and VAPT services to ensure that your and your customer’s data is safe from cyber threats.

You can reach out to our support team or submit your query for a free consultation.