In our latest blog our Managing Director Tim shares his views on the recent Kaseya ransomware attack, security attacks in general and how to protect your business.
What’s happened
Last Friday, (July 2nd, 2021) you might have seen news about a security incident relating to the Kaseya VSA IT service provider tool. It’s affected potentially thousands of businesses around the world. These kinds of things can be difficult to understand, so we want to share a link to Law Fare’s blog – it’ll give you a very basic, high-level description of what’s happened.
Our response
Once we heard about the issue, we started carefully reviewing all information available as it was released, from Friday afternoon through to today and we’ll keep doing this. Because we do NOT use the Kaseya VSA software, we want to reassure you that this incident doesn’t have any known impact on you or other customers of Axon-IT.
We take all incidents like this seriously, even though it doesn’t directly affect us. All software is potential vulnerable to security attacks. We’ll always keep evaluating, updating, and providing you with the latest security protections via tools and systems to help reduce the risk of a similar attack affecting us in the future. Businesses of all sizes are vulnerable to business interruption and financial loss from cyber-attacks, as well as trying to trick employees based on weaknesses in technology – something we’ll constantly make you aware of.
How we can protect you
We can’t protect you or protect ourselves fully from every possible attack, but there are ways to help reduce your risks substantially. What does this include?
- Technical measures – e.g. next-generation antivirus, monitoring and logging security risks
- Multi-factor authentication
- Training employees to recognise and avoid risks
- Making sure backups are up-to-date and protected from deletion by ransomware attackers
These are things we help clients with every day! We’ve worked with lots of customers over the last few months to help with security incidents that were specific to their work environments. Unfortunately, being a small business doesn’t mean you’re not a target.
These attacks are what keep me awake at night, not just about our business but also your business and our other customers.
Every major security researcher says it’s a “Zero Trust” world and it’s always a matter of when, not if. We’re here to keep your business running with minimal downtime and to protect you from future threats. We can’t prevent all attacks, but we have stopped at least 6 ransomware attacks in the first half of this year alone and many more lesser attacks. We want to reassure you that if you are a target, we’ll make sure your business gets back to normal as soon as possible.
I talk a lot about cyber security – it’s a confusing topic, so I don’t blame anyone for finding it puzzling. The easiest way to thinking of it is like a house burglary – we all know we ‘could’ get burgled (we hope we won’t!) and we make sure we close the windows and lock the front door when we go out. If we’re a little more security conscious we might fit better locks, CCTV and perhaps an alarm. We could even hire a security guard with a Doberman – but that’s perhaps a little over the top. Whatever we do, it can’t guarantee we won’t get burgled but these preventative measures help protect our homes. Your business shouldn’t be any different, which is why we’re always on the ball when it comes to security threats.
If you have any questions or want to discuss IT security for your business, you can call us on 01625 837 800 and we’ll be happy to chat.