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Today is Groundhog Day*.
A day when Punxsutawney Phil, a 135-year old groundhog in Pennsylvania, predicts the regional weather for the next 6 weeks.
By Chris Flook – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=80320762
What has this got to do with cybersecurity?
In the cyber world, we don’t need Punxsutawney Phil to tell us if winter is coming to an end.
The ongoing winter of unsophisticated cyber-attacks isn’t going to end any time soon if we continue to ignore some simple defences.
Things like**:
- Reminding staff about why and how they are targeted.
- Ensuring large value, or one-off, payments from your bank account require the involvement of at least two staff members.
- Using a unique and long password on every important account.
- Using Multi-Factor Authentication on every important account.
- Keeping software up-to-date so any known security gaps in the code are closed.
- Restricting the use of privileged / administrator accounts.
- Storing backups of your important data / systems somewhere inaccessible to an attacker.
Simple defences like these won’t block every attack.
But without them, we’re guaranteeing that tomorrow will be just like today.
* And 30 years since the we first saw Bill Murray in “Groundhog Day” – Feeling old yet?
** If you want to read more about the simple defences that I believe every organisation must implement, take a look at The Secure Foundation. If you want to learn more about how I could help you, let’s talk.