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Tuesday, June 22, 2021

How to help protect yourself from a security breach

Your personal information is in a lot of places, including with government agencies, healthcare providers, financial institutions, and stores.

There’s not much you can do to prevent a security breach at any of those places. But you can do some things to help protect yourself before and after a breach occurs. Here are some examples.

security breach meaning

Create strong, secure passwords. That means using uppercase and lowercase letters, as well as non-sequential numbers and special characters.

Use different passwords on different accounts. If one account is compromised, cybercriminals won’t be able to easily access your other accounts.

Use secure websites. Look for “https” in the web address. It indicates a secure, encrypted connection.

Protect Social Security number. Provide your SSN only when it’s absolutely required. Ask about providing a different form of identification.

Install updates. Always update your computers and mobile devices with the latest versions of operating systems and applications. Updates sometimes contain patches for security vulnerabilities.

Stay informed. If you do business with a company that’s had a data breach, find out what information was taken and how it could affect you. Companies sometimes set up a website to keep consumers informed.

Be watchful. Monitor online and monthly financial account statements to make sure the transactions are legitimate.

Sign up for credit reports. Regularly check your credit reports to make sure an imposter hasn’t opened credit cards, loans, or other accounts in your name.

Consider credit services. Credit freezes, credit monitoring, and identity theft protection services can help you keep track of your information.

3 steps to help defend yourself

Helping to defend yourself against a security breach boils down to taking three steps — one before, one during, and one after a breach occurs.

Plan ahead. Your personal information has value. Help protect it by sharing as little as possible. Guard key identifiers like your Social Security Number. Consider the tradeoffs of providing your personal data to organizations, computer app makers, and social media platforms. Read privacy policies and seek assurances that your data will be protected.

Be proactive. When a security breach happens, it’s important to know what personal data was exposed and what you should do to help protect yourself. This might include changing passwords on your accounts, freezing your credit reports, and considering an identity theft protection service to help manage any fallout.

Follow up. Here’s the thing: If your personal information is stolen, you could face the consequences in the short or long term. You might detect suspicious charges on a credit account soon afterward. That might be easy to spot and take care of. But often stolen information doesn’t appear for sale on the dark web until months or years after a data breach. Regularly checking your credit reports or enlisting the help of an identity theft protection service can help spot some problems as they arise.

Monday, June 21, 2021

What are the types of security breaches

Think of a security breach as an intrusion. If someone breaks the window and enters the house, it is a security breach. If an intruder steals your documents and personal information and comes out of the window again, it's a data breach, but more on that later.

Security breaches don't necessarily happen at home, they happen a lot in organizations large and small. A security breach can damage an organization's reputation and finances. If data gets swept out of the process, it can be affected.

security breach meaning

Security breaches and data breaches can happen at scale. Consider the 2017 Equifax data breach, where hackers had access to the personal information of more than 145 million Americans. Alternatively, a Yahoo data breach first reported in 2016 exposed 3 billion user accounts.

What is a security breach by definition? A security breach occurs when an intruder gains unauthorized access to an organization's protected systems and data. Cybercriminals or malicious applications bypass security mechanisms to reach restricted areas. A security breach is an early stage breach that can lead to things like system damage and data loss.

What are the types of security breaches?

Attackers can initiate various types of security breaches. There are three big ones here.

Viruses, spyware and other malware

Cybercriminals often use malicious software to break into protected networks. Viruses, spyware, and other types of malware often arrive via email or by downloading from the Internet.

For example, you may receive an email with an attached text, image or audio file. Opening attachments can infect your computer. Alternatively, you can download an infected program from the Internet. In this case, your computer is infected when you open or run malicious programs. If it is a virus, it can spread to other computers on the network.

most of the organization

Cybercriminals can sometimes create gaps in security by sending emails to an organization's employees, sending fakes. Emails are made to appear as if they were sent by an executive with an urgent request for, for example, employment records, login information, or other sensitive data. To fill the request, the employee replies the information by email, which can be put into the hands of cybercriminals.

This tactic is called spearfishing (when an email is targeted at a specific person).

Attacks often target the financial industry with the goal of gaining access to financial accounts. Alternatively, phishing emails may target you as the account holder. You may receive an urgent email stating that an attempt was made to access your bank account, so click this link and log in now. However, the link is fake and the login information goes directly to the scammer.

Denial of Service (DDoS) attack

A denial of service attack can damage a website. Hackers can flood your traffic and make your website or computer unusable. A DDoS attack is considered a security breach because it can overwhelm an organization's security devices and ability to do business. DDoS attacks often target government or financial websites. Motives can be activism, revenge or extortion. During the attack, anyone doing legitimate business with organizations like you will not be able to access your website.

However, these three examples are just the beginning. There are other types of security breaches. Cybercriminals can also launch ransomware attacks by exploiting software bugs or uploading encryption software to networks. Essentially, it demands a ransom in exchange for an encryption key. Alternatively, an intrusion could occur inside an organization where an employee seeks to access or steal information for financial gain.

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Friday, June 18, 2021

What is Network Operations? & Best Services

System Operations alludes to the exercises performed by inner systems administration staff or outsiders that organizations and specialist organizations depend on to screen, oversee, and react to alarms on their system's accessibility and execution. Staff that have essential obligations regarding system activities are regularly called arrange tasks experts or system activities engineers.

noc vs soc

A Network Operations Center, regularly called a NOC (articulated "thump"), is ordinarily a brought together area where the system activity staff gives 24x7x365 oversight, observing, and the board of the system, workers, databases, firewalls, gadgets and related outside administrations. This foundation condition might be situated on-premises or potentially with a cloud-based supplier.

Some key Network Operation exercises are:

System observing

Episode reaction

Interchanges the board (Email, voice, and video)

Execution, quality, and enhancement announcing

Programming/firmware establishment, investigating and refreshing of system components

Fix the executives

Reinforcement and capacity

Firewall the board

Interruption Prevention System (IPS) and other security apparatus arrangement and checking, as a team with Security Operations

Danger examination and impact sweep investigation as a team with Security Operations

Difficulties Facing Network Operations

As a result of the complexities engaged with the present systems and administrations, particularly considering the reception of cloud-based framework and SaaS applications, there are numerous difficulties that arrange tasks staff face not just connected with having an exhaustive comprehension of the innovation itself, yet in keeping up smoothed out interchanges access between each one of those included.

Some key system activity challenges include:

Absence of joint effort/coordination across groups

Quick pace of progress in the cloud and dynamic asset organization implies that documentation is generally not modern for investigating issues

Investigating is tedious in light of the fact that it frequently includes connecting information over numerous gadgets and device sets and requires manual procedures to show up at sound conclusions

Numerous divergent apparatuses from various merchants being used that may require staff work with various advances, low-level utilities and Command Line Interfaces (CLI)

Issues emerge and afterward vanish when all data is gathered that is important for investigating

Heightening to more ranking staff is required as often as possible to survey underlying drivers

System Operations Best Practices

All around run arrange activities groups grasp an assortment of dependable accepted procedures. These incorporate however are not constrained to the accompanying:

Constantly observing a wide assortment of data and system frameworks that incorporate interchanges circuits, cloud assets, LAN/WAN frameworks, switches, switches, firewalls and VoIP frameworks and application conveyance.

Giving convenient reaction to all episodes, blackouts and execution issues.

Sorting issues for acceleration to proper specialized groups.

Perceiving, recognizing and organizing episodes as per client business necessities, authoritative arrangements and operational effect.

Gathering and auditing execution reports for different frameworks, and detailing patterns in execution to senior specialized faculty to assist them with anticipating future issues or blackouts.

Recording all activities as per standard organization arrangements and methods.

Telling client and outsider specialist organizations of issues, blackouts and remediation status.

Working with inward and outer specialized and administration groups to make as well as update information base articles.

Performing essential frameworks testing and operational errands (establishment of patches, arrange availability testing, content execution, and so forth.).

Supporting different specialized groups in 24x7 operational situations with high uptime necessities. Fluctuated move timetables may incorporate day or night hours.

Out of this rundown of best practices, the present staff is bound to concentrate on arrange execution versus application accessibility. Be that as it may, application accessibility and execution is critical to driving business objectives for undertakings and specialist organizations. The move of utilizations to the cloud will be the key driver in arrange tasks investing more energy in application accessibility and execution going ahead. In particular, arrange tasks groups should guarantee inner and outer systems and administrations don't obstruct application accessibility yet rather quicken its conveyance.