How to Protect Your Small Business from Cyber Attacks? The Essential Eight

In today’s interconnected world, small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) face increasing cyber threats that can compromise their sensitive data and disrupt their operations. To safeguard your SMB from potential cyber security breaches, it’s crucial to implement robust security measures. In Australia, the government’s cyber security experts have identified a set of eight essential strategies, known as the Essential Eight, designed to protect organizations from the most prevalent cyber threats. In this blog post, we will explore these strategies and discuss how SMBs can leverage them to fortify their cyber security defences.

The Essential Eight for your Business

These are just the Essential things your Small to Medium Business need to consider when it comes to Cyber Security. Some other areas SouthEast IT can assist you with your Cyber Security IT Stratergy:

1. Application Whitelisting: Application whitelisting is a proactive approach that allows only approved and trusted applications to run on your systems, while blocking unauthorized and potentially malicious programs. By implementing a strong application whitelist, SMBs can significantly reduce the risk of malware infections and prevent unauthorized software from compromising their network.
   
2. Patching Applications: Keeping all software applications up to date with the latest patches is vital to address known vulnerabilities. Regularly applying patches from software vendors helps protect your SMB from cyber attacks that exploit these vulnerabilities. Establishing a robust patch management process ensures that critical security updates are applied promptly, reducing the likelihood of successful attacks.
   
3. Configuring Microsoft Office Macro Settings: Malicious macros embedded in Microsoft Office documents are commonly used to launch cyber attacks. Configuring macro settings to disable macros by default, or implementing code execution policies, minimizes the risk of unintentional execution of malicious macros. Educating employees about the potential dangers of enabling macros from unknown or untrusted sources is equally important.
   
4. User Application Hardening: Configuring web browsers and email clients to block or warn users about potentially harmful content, such as malicious websites and email attachments, is an essential defensive measure. By hardening user applications, small business can reduce the likelihood of employees inadvertently downloading malware or falling victim to phishing attacks.
   
5. Restricting Administrative Privileges: Limiting administrative privileges to only those who require them minimizes the risk of unauthorized access and potential system compromise. Implementing strong access controls ensures that users have the necessary permissions to perform their tasks without granting unnecessary privileges that can be exploited by attackers.
   
6. Patching Operating Systems: Just like patching applications, keeping your operating systems up to date is critical to address known vulnerabilities. Regularly installing security patches and updates from the operating system vendor protects your small to medium business from potential exploits and strengthen your defences against cyber threats.
   
7. Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA): Implementing multi-factor authentication adds an extra layer of security by requiring users to provide multiple pieces of evidence to verify their identities. This could include something they know (e.g., a password), something they have (e.g., a smartphone or token), or something they are (e.g., biometric data). MFA significantly enhances the security of user accounts and helps prevent unauthorized access.
   
8. Daily Backups: Regularly backing up important data is crucial to protect your SMB from data loss caused by cyber-attacks, hardware failures, or accidental deletions. Automated and encrypted backups stored off-site or in the cloud ensure that you can recover your business data and resume operations quickly in the event of a breach or system failure.

Cyber Security Protection that you need to consider for your business

For most business a review of your IT environment, implementation or managed patching, daily backups and implementation of MFA is a great start to start your Cyber Security jounrney. Data breaches can damage a small business overnight. However there are some other critical areas to consider to improve your Cyber Security posture with security solutions that SouthEast IT can provide help with. These include:

1. DarkWeb Monitoring: Has your email address been included in a known databreach? Are your login details getting share or sold around the DardWeb by criminals? You should have a service that can monitor if any of your organisations emails have been mentioned in a data breach and notify you of them to change password. DarkWeb Business monitoring is done domain level and will detect any of your known email addresses without having to update them everytime a new staff member is onboarded by your organisation.
   
2. Security Awareness Training: Sometimes your staff can be tricked by a link in an email or something that allows a bad actor into your network. SouthEast IT have the solution that will provide regular quick training to help your staff upskill their knowledge on IT Security. Our training includes simulated phising emails that if staff are tricked by will result in a short but effective training video helping them identify the difference between a legitament email and a phishing email. We can also provide reporting to management on who are the culprits that click the links the most often.
   
3. Behavioural monitoring and detection: Traditional antivirus software is looking for know file signatures and bad links. These days thats not enough to protect against cyber threats. We can help you to continiously track requests from workstations to make sure their activity is not unusual or trying to do something unexpected including elervated access. Using the Mitre attack Framework our systems and also track user activity again the know vunerabilites and provide your business with specific instructions on what to do if a vunerability or security hole is found on any of your workstations. this provides you with peace of mind that your machines are not only patched with the latest patches but protected against know vunerabilites that have not been patched yet. Putting your Cyber Security ahead of the pack in terms of knowlege and protection.
   
4. 24×7 Security Operations Center: 24×7 monitoring and notification – Monitoring of your cloud, such as Microsoft 365 account and on-premise IT environment for any breaches is very important. The key here is remediation not just detection. Gone are the days of detect and forget. Detecting and acting on threats could be the difference between no impact and your business going bust. SouthEast IT offer the ability to detect malicous actors in your network and then isolate them in real time any time of the day. Most of these actors love to operate outside of busienss hours to maximise there discovery time inside your network.
   
5. Ransomware Canaries: Designed to detect ransomware activity on an endpoint. Similar to how miners used canaries in coal mines to detect carbon monoxide, this feature deploys canary files in various directories and monitors them for changes. When the Huntress Agent detects that a canary file has been altered, renamed, or deleted (such as by ransomware encryption), it will alert our Threat Operations Team. Our team will review the conditions causing the alert in order to confirm ransomware and sending an incident report with incident details.

Cyber Security discussion Conslusion

Protecting your business from cyber threats may seem like a daunting task but it’s not as difficult as you might think with SouthEast IT. The cost of not acting on cyber threats can be hugh. Just look at the reputational loss for Medibank Private, Optus and Latitude Finance from cyber attack in 2022. It’s estimated that by 2025, cybercrime will cost the world an unbelievable $10.5 trillion annually. Should this prediction come true, cybercrime will have secured its spot as the 3rd-largest economy in the world!

Implementing robust cyber security measures is essential for SMBs to protect their sensitive information and maintain business continuity. The Essential Eight strategies identified by Australian cyber security experts provide a solid foundation for enhancing SMB cyber security defenses.

By adopting application whitelisting, patching applications, and operating systems, configuring user applications, restricting administrative privileges, implementing MFA, and establishing regular backups, SMBs can significantly reduce their vulnerability to cyber-attacks. Remember, investing in cybersecurity is an investment in the long-term success and resilience of your small business.