Cyber Security: Be Prepared and Prevent Disaster

The threat landscape is becoming more incessant, dangerous, and high stakes for businesses. The sheer quantity of attacks has been increasing at an alarming rate. The complexity and ingenuity of these attacks are frightening.

Almost all these attacks are identity-based; they start as phishing emails or password spray attacks. Once they gain access to a user account in your environment, you have officially been owned. If you are lucky, they will use the compromised account(s) to send out more phishing emails to your global address list and contacts from the owned account. This will result in a lot of embarrassment, organizational risk, potential blacklisting of your domain, and untold negative business impacts. If you are unlucky, they will encrypt your sensitive data with ransomware, exploit you for money with a socially engineered scheme, or exfiltrate sensitive data such as employee tax forms or proprietary intellectual property. This can potentially result in your company or organization ceasing to exist.

To mitigate attacks of this nature, there are several critical items you need to address:

Globally enforce multi-factor authentication
Globally block legacy authentication
Leverage device and application trust to limit your attack surface area
Solidify identity and access management governance for your cloud-facing identities
Educate your users about phishing attacks and implement technologies to mitigate them

When solidifying your organizational security proactively, we can prevent the most infamous attacks and their highly detrimental consequences. Sometimes we must take on this work reactively after a breach or security incident has already occurred.

Operationalizing the above bullet points can be difficult and ineffective if not done within Microsoft best practices. Red Level’s years of experience and certifications help ensure minimized end-user impact and maximizing your security posture.