Old School IT Security Tactics When an Antivirus Program is not Enough

One of the biggest issues of most companies today is information security. With news of cyber attacks from large corporations such as Sony, Home Depot, and Primera Blue Cross, companies have to take a step further when it comes to cyber security and disaster recovery.

 

Traditional Anti-Virus Are No Longer Enough

 

Most enterprises rely on antivirus technologies to protect them from the rising tide of cyberattacks. True enough, these programs are equipped with the right features from detection to maintenance. However, this doesn’t mean that these programs don’t have their own weaknesses.

Last year Tavis Ormandy and team discovered a number of vulnerabilities in well-known antivirus programs. Comodo Antivirus’ “GeekBuddy” program installs and starts a VNC server that had no password at all. Trend Micro Antivirus’ bundled password manager launches a web server that listens to API commands from the internet without a whitelist, enabling remote code execution.  Lastly in December of 2015, AVG products forced its users to install an “AVG Web TuneUp” Chrome extension. Ormandy reported that it’s “so badly broken that I’m not sure whether I should be reporting it to you as a vulnerability, or asking the extension abuse team to investigate if it’s a PuP.” And not to mention the various zero-day attacks with minimal or no mitigation for several solutions that are available in the market.

These security companies have made policy changes to address these issues. Unfortunately even if these corporate products have improved since then, criminal hackers can now bypass these technologies and pretend as network administrators. They can freely move within the system and find the best ways to extract targeted assets.

 

Old School IT Security

 

These developments doesn’t mean that enterprises should give-up. There are old school IT security methodologies that are still reliable in fending off cyberattacks and preventing a data breach.

 

Security Testing

This is a technique done to evaluate different aspects of security such as authentication, porting, firewalling, monitoring, encryption, availability, confidentiality, authorization, non-repudiation, and integrity.

With the existence of new viruses and the inability of most anti-virus software to determine new threats, security testing is an excellent way to spot threats across multiple layers of an application. Through a vulnerability assessment, organizations can determine whether their applications and infrastructure are vulnerable to threats, and take the preventive measures as needed.

 

IT Risk Management

IT covers many aspects within an organization—from business operations to technological services. Since all of these are vulnerable to threats, having a strong and strategic IT Risk Management (ITRM) plan would make your organization stand out from competitors with a unique advantage.

Your ITRM plan should describe a comprehensive view of IT risks that your organization might face and create strategies to monitor, prevent, and mitigate. An effective ITRM program can help organizations improve business decision-making and establish a risk-aware culture.

 

IT Audit

Company operations are now conducted on the digital realm, which results in higher data threats. User-friendly technologies are also hacker-friendly which opens the door to hackers stealing valuable information and causing reputational damage.

Companies should exercise caution to not fall from traps set-up by data thieves.Organizations have to conduct defenses to combat these thieves. Conducting IT audit allows companies to evaluate their IT infrastructure to determine how effectively it manages risks, ensure information management processes are in-line with policies, and uncover inefficiencies in IT systems.

 

IT Forensics

Data breach is damaging to your reputation as an organization. It weakens customer trust, reduces the value of your intellectual property, and worst of all, stories of your data breach nightmare would reach media and your other competitors.

The success of your organization depends on how you handle data protection. However, no matter how secure you think your organization is, a data breach may still happen.  IT forensics can follow the trail left behind by data thieves, analyze digital data, and determine the cause of the breach. IT forensics can help lessen the damage and provide remedial steps to avoid recurrence.

 

In today’s interconnected world, an organization’s number one nemesis is data loss and theft. With hackers getting more creative and sophisticated in conducting data breach, organizations also need to step-up their information security. Organizations need a strong IT support to assure that their IT infrastructure is safe from threats.