Commercial Integrator February 2021 - 14

THE SERVICE DESK
Cybersecurity in 2021
As cybercriminals become more sophisticated, it's good to go over the basics that cover the bases
of cybersecurity. by Joshua Liberman
ANYONE WHO FOLLOWS the news or
social media knows how scary the security
landscape is nowadays.
The madness of 2020 and the " instant "
Work from Anywhere lifestyle has only
made this issue worse as our home machines
are rarely as secure as those at work.
With all of this bad news out there, what
is the good news? For the most part, it is
that getting back to basics covers most of
these concerns.
Passwords. No matter how or where you
connect, the truth is that most of us still rely
on some very old technology as our primary
defense, the password.
Of course, better passwords or passphrases
help, but there will always be
an inherent tradeoff between password
complexity and ease of use. The first line
of defense for most of us is a better (more
complex) password that is unique to each
login or web site.
Password complexity is complicated,
but a good starting point is to create
passwords of eight or more characters and
are neither dictionary words nor obvious
numbers.
Complex passwords have upper and
lower case, numbers, and punctuation
marks too. Passphrases are even more secure.
You can also create passwords from
passphrases; NowistheTimeforStrongPassWords@2021
becomes " NitTfSPW@21. "
As cyber-criminals become more advanced, so too must our best practices.
that may supplant passwords entirely by
tying biometrics to MFA.
Protecting the " Endpoints. " No matter
how or where you connect to or from, you
are using what we call " endpoints " (your
desktops, laptops, tablets, and phones). As
the car guys say, that is where the rubber
hits the road.
Most attacks are focused on endpoints
and the users of those devices. That is why
we have to focus on protecting these devices
just as resolutely as the bad actors focus
Having truly comprehensive and reliable backup
and business continuity is just one part of an overall
cybersecurity plan, but it is a critical part of that plan.
Multifactor Authentication (MFA). No
matter how well you play the password
game, a compromised password is a real
threat, and that is where MFA comes in.
Long available by SMS, authentication
apps in phones, USB devices, and even
biometrics (fingerprints, facial recognition,
etc.) are here now.
And on the horizon is a new technology
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on finding and exploiting them.
And that again comes down to getting
back to basics here by deploying endpoint
detection and response, with a human
factor as well.
The first line of defense is what I call
" active endpoint protection " aka EDR
(Endpoint Detection and Response). This
is modern antivirus software that is not
Commercial Integrator FEBRUARY 2021
pattern file based, but instead analyzes
behavior and recognizes malware as it
attempts to enter the machine.
It is paired with " threat hunting " software
that can detect evidence that something
has penetrated those defenses. And finally,
the human factor comes in.
Modern EDR software often includes a
security operations center (SOC) watching
over the endpoints, ready to pounce upon
any indication of compromise at a moment's
notice.
Patching, Patching, Patching. All
software requires frequent updating. We
all know Windows Update, but few of us
realize how many patches are out there;
616 Microsoft patches were released in the
first half of 2020.
Windows Update does not include
patches for third-party products such as
Adobe, web browsers, and more. That is
why most attacks still leverage issues that
have been patched long ago.
One More Twist. Almost all of us are
using Office 365 (now Microsoft 365) by
now. With so much being done in M365
(OneDrive, Outlook, Sharepoint, Teams,
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Commercial Integrator February 2021

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