Cybersecurity: strengthen your enterprise, don’t vaporise.

The top 3 security threats are typically things like Cyber Attacks, Ransomware and Social Engineering Attacks. 

To protect your business, you should have strong technical controls and use antivirus software. You should keep your operating systems up to date with the latest security patches. You must know where your critical information is and ensure it's secured. You should also look at developing employee education programmes to ensure your employees aren't susceptible to common scams. 

Each business is going to be different, based on what they do. You really need to take a look at what your major assets are. If your major assets are people, you need to start looking at controls that protect your people. And a lot of the processes and protections against people are generated through awareness campaigns. The big investment, dollar-wise is going to be in technology but that all depends on the business and what you're trying to protect. You don't want to bring in a million dollar security component to protect an asset that's only worth ten thousand dollars.You need to do a risk assessment on the value of your assets and focus on what needs protecting. 

In just 2 weeks, we were able to move 60% of our employees home and because of that, we had to look at system capacity and increase bandwidth to ensure maximum uptime. Today, we've gone to about 80% which is nearly 1,300 users all working from home. Ensuring uptime and productivity is a key part of it.

Customer confidentiality and data privacy continues to be a top priority. There is nothing that we take more seriously than our customer information. For our teams on the ground, we ensure that there are logical access controls. Employees who are supposed to have access to particular customer information do and the ones are are not supposed to,don't. Another area that we looked at was processes for getting you, our customers online and have people use our cash management system. By all accounts so far, our customers have really taken to the system and are adjusting to the new normal. They are getting online, using online and making sure that risks are mitigated. 

We're continuously securing the CMS platform. It's more of a journey and not a destination. We're always looking at things like multi factor authentication and even technologies that go beyond the computer. An example of something that we have in proof of concept mode right now is "customer personification" which tries to verify a user based on how they use the computer e.g how they use the mouse and how fast or slow they type. 

Any cybersecurity professional will tell you the same thing. You weakest link is your people and that's where you need to put a lot of focus. You should have internal policies but it really needs to be driven from the top down. CEOs and senior management need to take that tone and bake security into everything. At the end of the day, your IT team is responsible but señor leadership is accountable. They need to build policies, test people, run phishing campaigns against them, conduct annual training. These are very important steps to prevent different types of attacks.