Here is a short story NOT based on our clients and all characters are fictional.
Meet the characters:
• An evil dragon named Ransom – a metaphor for evil hackers
• The noble knight, Sir Waident – the hero who saves the day
• King and Queen – pragmatic rulers guiding their kingdoms when encountered by evil dragons
• Sorceress NIST – the good witch who helps those threatened by evil dragons
• Realm of SMB – a fictional place of small and mid-sized kingdoms
- Igor the guard – that one employee that opened a phishing email
Having taken counsel from a renowned review scroll, the king and queen once again solicited help from the courageous knight, Sir Waident, a noble and fleet-footed warrior who knew how to conquer the evils of Ransom. For he possessed 15+ years of battle-harden encounters fighting malicious serpents all over Illinois-land and Wisconsin-shire. His reputation precedes him, for he had superb reviews from many kingdoms (He was a solid 5 stars).
Sir Waident surveyed the problem and drew up his plan to restore the kingdom and save the harvest. Thankfully, the kingdom’s backups were located in a secure vault. As a result, Ransom lacked the power and deviousness to breach the kingdom’s treasure. Had the king and the queen not taken Sir Waident’s earlier guidance and incorporated NIST’s spells, the kingdom would be totally scr..…, um, in a more tragic state of affairs. Racing towards immediate danger mounted on his might steed, Sir Waident took out his sword, charged Ransom, and drove him out! He restored the kingdom’s operations in a few hours–a task that could have taken months had it not been for the wise king and queen’s wise and pragmatic preparations!
To cut a long story short, Sir Waident booted the dragon out, because Ransom, the infamous shape-shifter, cannot be killed, only removed. The evil, shamefaced dragon sought more vulnerable prey elsewhere in the Realm of SMB. Sir Waident stayed to help restore the farms (rebuilt laptops, hosts, some VMs, and restored backups). As we know evil Ransom may return any day, Sir Waident left the kingdom under a stronghold of enterprise-grade virus protection, protected pigeon mail (email) monitoring systems, and what-to-do-in-case-of-cyber-attack training. He advised the king and queen to continue following the wise NIST’s recommendations and to sign up for her updates.
And there was peace and harmony in the kingdom once again.
THE END
MORAL: Learn from other people’s mistakes and do not let the hackers fool you. If you have questions about your kingdom’s walls and nightguard call us for a free security check: 630-547-7000 or email us at info@waident.com.
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Your checklist for preventing a Cyberattack:
• Use enterprise-grade virus protection vs a built-in/free one
• Regularly change passwords and use complex passwords
• Use MFA on all external applications or put behind a firewall that requires VPN + MFA
• Invest in better firewalls with IDS/IPS, threat management
• Encrypt backups
• Off-site backups
• Test restores off-site
• Run vulnerability scans and penetration tests
• Don’t be Igor the Guard😊
No one can prevent 100% of cyber-attacks. We can make it much more difficult for a Ransom at every point in the environment: people, endpoint, firewall, network, and strategy.
