Over the next months we will discuss the TOP Cyber-Defense Measures for improving your Cyber-Risk profile the BEST you can as FAST as you can.

· Email Security and Employee Cybersecurity Awareness Training

· Data Backup, Firewalls, Incident Response and Business Continuity

· Multi-factor Authentication (MFA) and Access Management

· Internal/External Vulnerability scans and Continuous Improvement

· Document “Best Practices” Policies to support your security strengths

· Maintaining Your Networks Software and Hardware Security

This month: Email Security and Employee Cybersecurity Awareness Training

With the continuing adoption of technology for our everyday tasks, including remote work, remote teaching, and remote learning, opening up more and more points of user-connectivity and corresponding potential points of vulnerability, user error, particularly with email, is the cause of the majority of Cyber breaches today,

Insurance Companies recognize the risk of user-error and are requesting and often requiring public entities and K-12 school Districts to have documented protections and procedures in place to help Guard against user-error as a condition for providing Cyber and Ransomware insurance coverage.

Common User email Mistakes:

· Opening an email with a sender’s email address that is similar to a co-worker’s or trusted confidant, but is actually slightly misspelled and is instead a Cyber Criminal.

This can allow a Cyber Criminal access to your organizations sensitive data and/or systems to install ransomware attack software.

· Opening an email appearing to come from a recognized company like Amazon asking for credentials and/or their Personal Information.

This can allow a Cyber Criminal to steal this Personal Information and sell on the DarkWeb

Organizations need effective cloud email security and phishing defense solutions that are simple, automated, powerful and cost effective to protect users from making a seemingly simple mistake that can create a huge problem:

1. automatically detect and blocks malicious emails so employees never see or interact with potentially harmful messages.

2. alert recipients of a potentially suspicious message by placing an interactive warning banner at the top that alerts users to block and/or mark the message as safe with a single click.

3. proactively quarantine suspicious emails for IT to investigate the root cause.

Protecting from user-error by blocking or alerting users of suspicious emails is the first line of defense to protect your environment from user created vulnerabilities.

Even with these defensive measures in place, cyber-criminals can still get through to a user’s email account, resulting in Cybersecurity Training being one of the top considerations Insurance companies are using to decide on Cyber insurance and Ransomware coverage terms.

Cybersecurity Training programs use software to inform and train users to be alert and aware of the actions they need to take or avoid to keep your environment safe from cyber-attack. These programs will periodically “test” users with emails that contain the potential for Cyber breaches in order to measure their response and set up re-training when a user commits an error that, if real, could result in a breach of security.

Next month we will discuss the importance of Data Backup, Firewalls, Incident Response and Business Continuity plans in minimizing the damage if you unfortunately do experience a Cyber-attack.

ResoluteGuard uses industry best internal and external scanning tools to identify your Cyber-risk strengths and weaknesses and populate easy to use, easy-to-understand smart workflow reports that align the governance, administration, and technical activities to the common objective: avoiding a disruption of critical services.

Click here to learn how we partner with ESA’s to support your members or email David Ludwig at dludwig@resoluteguard.com