Any given organization relies on various technological, human, and physical assets to make sure their business is running smoothly. Some of these assets are more important than others, but at the end of the day they all work together to build a company up. What happens if one of these assets is compromised? It could be extremely detrimental to your day-to-day operations as well as your brand, but more importantly what can you do to recover
Defining a Compromised Asset
Your business assets come in a variety of different forms. Some may be considered critical to the function of your business, while others aren't so important. These critical assets are how you are able to make money and serve your customers. The Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) describes any critical asset as: "the organizational resources essential to maintaining operations and achieving the organization’s mission". If you can't maintain operations then you can't achieve your organizations mission. Whether it be your servers, network, employees, or physical security, the critical assets that make up your organization must be protected.
Your business assets can become compromised in a number of ways. The most common method of attack used to compromise your business is phishing. Bad actors will send scam emails to your employees containing malicious links or requests for sensitive information and login credentials to trick your employees into willingly handing over their accounts. Once these employees have fallen for the scheme, they've been compromised. From here, cyber criminals can escalate their privileges and gain access to other devices and applications in your organization.
Your physical security should also be a top priority. Making sure devices are locked down and unable to be tampered with, networking devices are behind closed doors, cameras are used to monitor your building, and controlling access to the building are all factors that go into physical security. If just one of these is broken than an attacker could have unfiltered access to your organizations physical assets.
Making sure your clients and vendors are secured is important as well. Your organization may transmit confidential data between companies that you work with and making sure everyone in your supply chain treats security as a priority is essential. Your data is one of your most important assets, make sure when you are creating it and transmitting it, you trust that who it's going to is secure.
Maintaining Your Assets
The first step in making sure your business assets aren't compromised is creating a comprehensive inventory of every asset and how important they are to your day-to-day operations. Not all assets are created equal and your critical applications and tools need to be secured first in the event of a cyber attack.
One of the most important factors of any cybersecurity plan is making sure your humans are prepared for the inevitability of an attack. Most data breaches are started via a social engineering attempt or phishing attack, if your employees know what to look for and how to respond, they can better secure your assets from external treats.
Having a general understanding of the security posture of your business can also help you maintain your IT infrastructure and protect it from harm. Ask yourself who has access to your network? Do they have access to what they need to get their work done, or are there permissions that need to be limited in order to reduce risk? Making sure to keep all of your applications and software up to date is another important step to ensuring security. While constantly updating your devices may seem frustrating, it's the best way to curb the threat of zero day exploits and other vulnerabilities.
If you need someone to help you managed your IT assets, you can contact CorpInfoTech today to see how our MSP can help you maintain the highest level of security for your business!
