November 16, 2015 – Axiom Cyber Solutions

Hackers are Targeting Small Business

“60% of businesses close within six months of a cyber attack.” (The National Cyber Security Alliance)

What side of that statistic do you think your business would fall on?

Do you believe you’re immune from hackers because you’re nowhere near as well-known as Anthem or eBay? You are dead wrong. Smaller businesses do not have the same cyber security resources as larger businesses and hackers are banking on the fact that you are ignoring your cyber security. As a small business, you are a more attractive target because you are more likely to be less secure. Thanks to automation, cyber criminals are mass producing their attacks with numbers in the thousands with little to no investment.

It’s all over the news and almost impossible to escape from. Every day a new story pops up about a data breach or cyber crime. Corporations worldwide are beefing up their cyber security. It is not only the retail and financial organizations, the Pentagon is also following in their footsteps to protect their data.

Cybercrime has cost the US economy $100bn a year, worldwide that total goes up to $300bn annually, according to the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

In fact, McAfee found that almost 90% of small and medium sized business in the US do not use any data protection for their company and customer information. Less than half secured company emails to prevent phishing scams. Where does that leave the hackers? It leaves them to focus on you.

Despite the growing number of cyber crimes, many small business owners believe that hackers will not waste their time on small business. However, hackers are stealing enormous amounts of cash from small businesses and because these are small businesses, they do not get anywhere near the amount of news coverage like a Target or Sony would get. Most of these cyber crimes occur before the business owner can even realize their security has been compromised. The loss of customer data will change how your customers view you and these security threats are not going away anytime soon.

For small business owners, being proactive is an absolute must. Just like in football, your best defense is good offense. Otherwise, the fallout from a data breach can be astounding. You do not want to wait until your data is being held ransom before you think about cyber security. Otherwise, you will face quite the fallout from a breach.

Not only will you have to pay fines and penalties, you will have to conduct a forensic investigation and a PCI assessment. A small business will lose their reputation and lose the faith of their customers. Punishment will come in many shapes and sizes. You may not be able to continue to take credit card payments once a cyber breach has occurred, many merchants will suspend your account once this has occurred. Your payment processor may impose stricter PCI requirements and compliance which of course means it will cost you more money to continue to do business. Anti-virus and anti-malware can only protect a single computer from an attack. It does not protect your network hardware from attempted breaches. You need a good firewall and transport security in conjunction with updated virus and malware protection.

How can Axiom Cyber Solutions help secure a small business?

Axiom Cyber Solutions is offering Cyber-Security Protection for Small Business starting as low as $199 per month. We realize that most small businesses do not have a dedicated IT team and business owners may be handling their cyber security matters on their own. Let us take over and provide you with peace of mind. Axiom will provide your business a firewall and manage it so you don’t have to worry about securing your business. We will assess the security risks for your business and will help implement the right cyber security service for your business.

Axiom’s solutions come in different sizes and all our solutions are designed to deal with the attack vectors of today while being adaptive and flexible enough to continue to secure your network for years to come. For more information, give us a call us at (800) 519-5070. #FightBackWithAxiom

The Reality of Internal Denial of Service

Internal Denial of Service

It’s a term we don’t often hear. An internal denial of service is simply something on the internal LAN that floods the network with traffic causing a loss of connectivity and it happens more than you think.

Sometimes internal denial of service happens by accident as was the case for a client of Axiom’s earlier this year. A switch had gone bad and was multicasting traffic across the LAN to the point that it brought the company’s phones down. Although the phones had their own VLAN, the faulty switch flooded all VLANs making all applications and phones useless.

Imagine a multi-lane interstate. Normal traffic is organized and manageable. When internal denial of service occurs, flooded traffic takes over all lanes and clogs the highway to the point that no one moves. It’s gridlock. In this example, the customer’s internal applications like Email, CRM and ERP were down, the phones were down and their customers from outside could no longer reach the locally hosted web app. It was a nightmare. Everything was down.

Flash forward to this month. We consulted with a private high school. A couple of students decided they didn’t want to take part in exams so they started an application on a workstation that flooded the network with traffic. In this example, the flood again caused the LAN to be saturated with traffic and the online test came to a halt. The students were identified and removed from the school, but the downtime was significant.

This last example is more common. A client had an internal denial of service at the same time that they were being attacked from the outside. Forensic analysis found that an employee’s computer was infected with a malware that remained dormant for months. At some point before an external distributed denial service, an employee clicked a suspicious link and unknowingly became infected with a malware that would later launch the internal denial of service. This act was coordinated by the external group to coincide and took the business out of commission for nearly a week.

The FBI recently stated that 90% of companies would be susceptible to similar malware. (http://read.bi/1vZbFAr) Axiom has found that just as in the case of UK based Internet Service Provider Talk-Talk, DDoS is a precursor to a breach in a large number of cases.

What’s the solution? Axiom has developed next generation denial of service mitigation appliances that stop the internal and external threats of denial of service. By inspecting every packet on the LAN or WAN, our Sentinel is able to respond within 10 milliseconds of an attack. Sentinel will isolate and absorb that traffic so that it cannot affect the rest of your network. Sentinel can mitigate up to 100GB of traffic in a single 1U appliance and can inspect more than 120 million packets per second.

Axiom is on a mission to stop denial of service attacks. Internal, External, Distributed… We have the solution. With the availability of our next generation, multi-core processors and proprietary algorithms we can make DDoS a thing of the past.

Daily Archives2015 November 16