Russian Hackers May Be Aiming at Your Business

Carl Mazzanti is the president of eMazzanti Technologies in Hoboken.

Russian Hackers May Be Aiming at Your Business

The shattering events in Ukraine continue to rivet the world’s attention – but while the military and human damage rightfully capture most of the attention, U.S.-based business owners and individuals should also focus on the potential cyber-risk fallout to their own operations.

A Dangerous Time

Even before the U.S. and Russia resumed a Cold War confrontation over the Ukraine invasion, business were at an increased risk of attack from state-backed actors, highlighting the need for companies of all sizes to maintain robust cloud security services. And now, with reports of increased hacker activity against U.S. companies of all sizes, many business owners are still not aware of the need to bring their security systems up to the next level with an affordable SIEM (Security Incident Event Monitoring) program and response. A SIEM program will continuously review important hardware and software logs on a real-time basis and flag suspicious activity. From these logs, most SIEM tools will leverage Artificial Intelligence (AI) to filter out the noise in a way only a computer can, to focus attention on the most important of events. The holy grail of a good IT service management or SIEM service provider is that when authorized or enabled, the service will also launch immediate responses designed to shield your identity and digital assets.

A Security Triangle – A SIEM Program

A SIEM-response package is part of the cyber security solutions “triangle” that makes up a must-have, robust cyber security approach. The first “leg” is preventative controls, which almost everyone has: keeping up to date on software patches, a good antivirus program, an effective firewall, and multifactor authentication.

The second leg is a detection tool, like a SIEM or full Security Operations Center. This integrated, cyber automated response package that kicks defenses up to the highest level by monitoring and alerting users about their devices and systems, and when elected launch a real-time response to eliminate or mitigate the Bad Actor’s malicious efforts.

The third “leg” is made up of great recovery controls, like a robust backup— preferably shielded from the rest of the system in case of infection — that can serve as a kind of fail-safe.

Most business owners just want to run and grow their enterprise and service customers — they did not sign up to be warriors in a digital battlefield. But as we have seen from past mass-hacking events, companies can no longer stay neutral. Like it or not, bad actors see all of us as legitimate targets. And as the global situation heats up, the threats are likely to get worse.