October Is Cybersecurity Awareness Month!

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and the National Cybersecurity Alliance (NCA) announced this year’s campaign theme — “See Yourself in Cyber” — demonstrating that while cybersecurity may seem like a complex subject, ultimately, it’s really all about people.  They highlighted key actions that everyone should take:

Update Your Software: Don’t delay 

Operating systems and off-the-shelf applications should be updated quickly, especially if the updates patch known exploited vulnerabilities.  Deploying patches, installing software updates, and remediating vulnerabilities are what BigFix does best.

Use Strong Passwords

Use passwords that are long, unique, and randomly generated. BigFix can ensure continuous compliance with a password policy that ensures password complexity strength and change frequency.

Enable Multi-Factor Authentication

You need more than a password to protect your online accounts or access a critical system, and enabling MFA makes you significantly less likely to get hacked by a dictionary attack.  Fortunately, BigFix can ensure continuous compliance with a logon policy such as two-factor authentication are consistently enforced.

Think Before You Click: Recognize and Report Phishing

If a link looks a little off, think before you click. It could be an attempt to get sensitive information, install malware or infect your system with a virus. Since phishing is one of the most difficult attack vectors to prevent, it’s a favorite way hackers like to gain access to sensitive information and systems. So although BigFix can’t stop you from clicking on a suspicious link, BigFix can help keep your anti-virus agent running so that downloaded viruses and malware can be detected.

Although these are a few ways that people can prevent a cyber attack, the HCL BigFix team suggests a few more actions that IT organizations can take to improve security:

Keep Anti-virus and Security Agents Running

If those agents are not kept running, they can’t protect your systems. BigFix Client Manager for Endpoint Protection provides real-time visibility and a single point of control for third-party anti-virus or anti-malware solutions from various vendors including Symantec, McAfee, Trend Micro, Sophos, and Microsoft. BigFix can keep security clients running so that malware and virus protection is constantly enabled.

Remediate Discovered Vulnerabilities As Soon As Possible

 The Security Operations team regularly runs vulnerability scans across the network but the remediation process after a scan can take weeks or months because of the time it takes to research and correlate vulnerabilities with available fixes and coordinate remediation with IT Operations. BigFix can compress research and correlation time by 90% allowing organizations to remediate vulnerabilities faster.

Eliminate Configuration Drift

Configuration drift — a systems or application change from an established known-good baseline or industry-standard benchmark — leaves an organization vulnerable to a cyberattack. More often than not, drift is the result of administrators or software programs making changes to computer configuration settings. Fortunately, BigFix can ensure continuous compliance by changing altered settings back to their desired state.

Let’s all take time to be more knowledgeable about how cyberattacks occur and what precipitates them. During Cybersecurity Awareness Month, take action to improve the security of your endpoints!

Listen to Network Chuck describe how BigFix helps manage and secure endpoints and then contact us to see a demonstration or request a free trial.