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By Structured Staff -- Does resilience planning factor into your cybersecurity strategy? If not, it should. And here’s why: While prevention is a great objective, it is increasingly difficult to defend a complex attack surface from all threats – especially the sophisticated and advanced threats we encounter today. Instead, organizations are bolstering prevention efforts with tactics and tools that enhance resilience. This is the ability to quickly identify attacks, limit their damage, and recover rapidly, thereby avoiding lengthy and disruptive downtime and data loss. To that point, MITRE released its Cyber Resiliency Engineering Framework (CREF) Navigator™, which is a free visualization tool for engineers designing cyber-resilient systems. The CREF framework, which aligns with NIST SP 800-160 standards, offers guidance along four primary principles: Anticipate: Maintain a state of informed preparedness. Withstand: Continue essential business functions through an attack. Recover: Restore all business functions after an attack. Adapt: Improve processes and business functions to better support the requirements of technical and operational environments. There is evidence to support the notion that focusing on resilience – as opposed to prevention alone – is sound strategy. Gartner reports that the average midsized business will experience 20 days of disruption following a successful ransomware…
Protect Your Business with Backup and DR Planning, Practice and Performance
By Abe Covello, Structured Senior Systems Engineer -- The Playing Field Before any discussion of backup, archive and disaster recovery, you first need to define what you are talking about in each case. While everyone has a slightly different interpretation of what the terms mean, for me they are: Backup - Short-to-medium term storage, fast…
So Vulnerable: Common Findings from Penetration Testing
By Chris Green, Structured Security Engineer, CISSP-ISC2, CISA ISACA, QSA PCI SSC, PCIP PCI SSC Amid rising global tensions and numerous warnings from the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), organizations across the globe can expect to see an increase in cyber attacks from nation-states, criminal gangs, and copycats riding the…
Know the Three “Cs” of Cloud Connectivity
By Robert Karcsay, Structured Connectivity Specialist, SD-WAN & Cloud, CCNT #662000 If you have decided to move your systems and data to the cloud, you are among a growing number of businesses looking to stay competitive and remain nimble. But to achieve your business goals without blowing up your budget or your people, there are…
Identify, Connect & Protect at the Edge
By the Structured Enterprise Networking Team In modern network architectures, more and more data is being generated, analyzed and stored at the “edge” -- not in a traditional data center. That edge better serves users of ubiquitous mobile devices like laptops, phones, and tablets because it puts them closer to their applications and data. But…
Fast, Secure Backup and Recovery Powered by Veeam® Cloud Connect
By Darrell Bowmer, Lead Engineer, Data Center Services, Structured Some business disruptions are difficult, if not impossible, to come back from without significant tried-and-tested contingency planning. One of those incidents is data loss, be it through human error, a software or hardware failure, or a malicious attack via ransomware. The best way to protect your…
Worried about Higher Cybersecurity Insurance Premiums? Here’s How to Limit Your Exposure.
By The Structured Security Team -- Experts agree, it isn't a matter of if your organization will come against a cybersecurity threat, it's a matter of when. And companies that provide cybersecurity insurance are passing along the costs, increasing premiums to combat the risk of increasing payouts. Cybersecurity Insurance Costs Are Increasing Rapidly Cybersecurity insurance…
The Amazing Upside of Millimeter Wave P2P/P2MP Links
By Jed Rabe, Senior Wireless Engineer, CWNE#280, ACDX#925, ACMPV8 -- DEFINITION: A band of spectrum which utilizes wavelengths from 30GHz to 300GHz. The wave lengths are between ten to one millimeter in length. The millimeter wave band is above the micro-wave band and is typically used for similar applications. Background: Recently I was involved in…
Superhero Stuff: MSP Best Practices for Fighting Evil… or REvil
By Brandon Bischoff, CISSP, Manager of Structured Managed Services -- As an IT managed services provider, I spend a lot of time thinking about crime fighting – but no capes. I’m preoccupied with how to shore up and safeguard what seems like an endless expanse of systems spread among a multiverse of clients. I think…
Protect Identities with MFA, Validation and Strict Management
By Brad Pierce, Structured Managing Director of Security, CISSP/CISA/PCIP -- Last week in the news were reports of more than a billion accounts being leaked online from just two sources (Facebook (533M) and LinkedIn (500M)). The data is still being validated, but the source seems to largely be public information that has been aggregated, bundled…
Supply Chain Hacks: Fallout from a nation-state-backed attack
By Jesse Wilson, CISSP, Sr. Security Engineer -- Two weeks have passed since the discovery of Sunburst (https://us-cert.cisa.gov/ncas/alerts/aa20-352a), an exploit so vast it likely will become the biggest breach in history – at least to date. Government agencies and private businesses alike are scrambling to detect indicators of compromise (IOCs), install patches and implement damage…