Essentials for cyber security – and why it should matter to you

By CSC® Digital Brand Services

There wasn’t one major newspaper around the globe that didn’t write a featured piece about cyber crime in 2015. The Wall Street Journal, Die Zeit, Le Monde, El Pais, China Daily, and many more are looking at this topic with alert. And so they should. In the first 60 days of 2016, 36 mainstream cyber attacks were committed against governments, public, and private sectors around the world. That’s more than one attack every other day.

Facebook® and Instagram, two rather technically savvy social networking sites, were hit by a major outages in 2015, which left users wondering why they couldn’t log in to their accounts. In fact, as Infosecurity Magazine reports, “last year saw the largest ever DDoS on record at 500 Gbps, as attackers increasingly adopted multi-vector techniques to extort money from their victims.”

All the top security companies predict increasing and changing attacks that will become harder to detect in 2016, according to a round-up of predictions on govtech.com. One of the largest banking and financial services organizations in the world, suffered another distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack at the end of January 2016, leaving 17 million personal banking and business customers in the UK alone with no online banking for hours.

And in February 2016, Snapchat’s payroll information was compromised by an email phishing attack from cyber criminals posing as the company’s CEO. Customers and employees rightfully start to panic when their sensitive information is stolen for sale on the black market.

The list of cyber attacks is endless.

If you work for one of the companies that has suffered a cyber attack—whether DDoS or phishing—you know firsthand how it affects business. If you haven’t experienced it, now is the time to understand how you can prevent it, and why—as marketing, legal, and IT professionals—you need to be involved in what is probably the biggest risk to your business in this day and age.

Read on to find out why cyber security should matter to you, and what you can do to make sure your brand and company are safe against attacks.

“Last year saw the largest ever DDoS on record at 500Gbps, as attackers increasingly adopted multi-vector techniques to extort money from their victims.”

Why IT security should matter to Legal departments and trademark attorneys

Depending on where you trade, cyber crime may be considered a criminal act. A DDoS attack in the United States, for example, is a federal offense, meaning the person committing those attacks would be charged with criminal and civil attacks on a federal (versus state) level. But until the person or group responsible is caught and put to a stop, your expertise is needed to prevent the attacks in the first place.

Law firms are vulnerable because of the sensitive information kept on file for clients, as well as being an industry that’s slow to change. Take the Mossack Fonseca breach, for example. According to an op-ed by John McAfee, that breach was “by far the largest and most damaging cyber attack on record … the release contained 11.5 million documents chronicling the formation and actions of 214,000 offshore companies along with the names and manipulations of more than 14,000 clients¹.” As the fourth-largest asset protection law firm in the world, who will cyber criminals target next?

The legal department may also be responsible for registering and managing promotional and defensive domain names and social media usernames, depending on how your company manages online intellectual property. But does your department also deal with the security aspect of this?

Step 1: Secure and Monitor

Your brand protection service provider should offer two-factor authentication, and registry and registrar-level locks with three-party manual authorization, as they are the most efficient and cost-effective ways to secure business-critical domain names, such as your main websites or client portals. This will prevent domain hijacking, and protect against unauthorized changes and deletions. To make sure you have a comprehensive list of business-critical domains, bring your marketing department into the fold, as they know and work with many of the most important company domains.

“Law firms are vulnerable because of the sensitive information kept on file for clients.”

Step 2: Communicate and Educate

Now that your business-critical sites are secure, make sure you understand the various types of phishing attacks and how this could affect your clients as well as your company. As soon as your company deals with client-sensitive information, like bank details, client addresses, personal details, etc., it becomes paramount to communicate to your clients about phishing prevention. For example, letting your customers know that your company would never ask for personal information via email. Your provider should be able to offer you a phishing solution that is tailored to your company and brand, and also help you draft phishing training for your company’s employees. Speak with your IT department to understand what protection they’ve applied in house; those services vary from provider to provider.

“Who will cyber criminals target next?”

Cyber security is a major concern for companies. Cyber attacks target digital assets with adaptive tactics, and can quickly become costly problems, impacting revenue, and damaging your brand reputation.

Fortunately, security technology is evolving. CSC Digital Brand Services offers a complete suite of cyber security services designed to protect you from these attacks.

We partner with Verisign® for DDoS protection services that help organizations reduce the risk of catastrophic DDoS attacks by detecting and filtering malicious traffic aimed at disrupting or disabling Internet-based services. Verisign’s network features world-class traffic analysis and detection platforms with proprietary, globally-distributed DDoS mitigation that scales to handle the Internet’s largest and most complex attacks.

Our sophisticated authentication options prevent unauthorized access to your digital assets, while our anti-phishing services secure your organization’s email channel. We also offer the latest digital certificates and enterprise domain name system services that protect the core of your digital brand against DDoS attacks.

CSC’s NameProtect® is the first application that makes it possible to monitor domain names, Internet content, social media, global trademarks, and company name registrations from a single platform. The integrated, online case management system helps you manage your data more effectively, because all your monitoring data is in a single location and available to multiple users. It also enables you to track changes, with Web, WHOIS, Popularity, and Trademark application change tracking, automated alerts, and archiving for evidence building. Using CSC’s NameProtect application, all of the reporting data you and your colleagues need is in a single location alongside other monitoring data so you have a complete overview of your online estate.

CSC Digital Brand Services welcomes the opportunity to conduct a security audit of your digital assets to determine whether your organization is exposed to these vulnerabilities. For more information about how CSC Digital Brand Services can help you, visit cscdigitalbrand.services.

About CSC

CSC® Digital Brand Services helps businesses thrive online. One of the world’s largest corporate domain name registrars, CSC is also the leading provider of services related to ICANN’s New gTLD Program. We offer a suite of services to safeguard our clients’ digital assets and assert their intellectual property rights, including Internet monitoring and enforcement tools, social media username and trademark services. To protect and secure our client’s web properties, we offer SSL certificates for safe online transactions, enterprise DNS services and anti-phishing services to secure the email channel and mitigate phishing attacks. CSC Digital Brand Services’ award-winning customer support and superior technological assets enable companies to maximize the value of their brands, expand into new markets, and counter emerging online threats.

Reference:

¹ http://uk.businessinsider.com/john-mcafee-panama-papers-evidence-we-need-better-cybersecurity-2016-4?r=US&IR=T

Original article:

https://www.cscdigitalbrand.services/en/cyber-security-essentials