Tag Archives: Security Awareness

Password danger is escalating with no ceiling in sight!

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A combination of bad employee behaviour and dark web data spells trouble for businesses! From SMBs to giant multinationals, it doesn’t matter how high-flying a company is, unfortunately password problems will still plague them. 

The struggle to get users to make good, strong, unique passwords and keep them secret is real for all organisations and IT professionals. It can be hard to demonstrate to users just how dangerous their bad password can be to the entire company, even though an estimated 60% of data breaches involved the improper use of credentials in 2020. There’s no rhyme or reason to why employees create and handle passwords unsafely, no profile that IT teams can quickly look at to determine that someone might be an accidental credential compromise risk. Employees of every stripe are unfortunately drawn to making awful passwords and playing fast and loose with them – and that weakness doesn’t look like it’s going away anytime soon. 

Everyone is managing too many passwords 

The average adult has an estimated 100 passwords floating around that they’re using. That’s a bewildering tangle of passwords to manage. The global pandemic helped put even more passwords into circulation as people either working from home or on furlough created an abundance of new online accounts. According to the conclusions of a global study conducted by Morning Consult for IBM, people worldwide created an average of 15 new online accounts, per person, during the main thrust of the pandemic.

Many of those logins were compromised from the start thanks to abundant dark web data. An estimated 15 billion unique logins are circulating on the dark web right now. In 2020 alone, security professionals had to contend with a 429% increase in the number of corporate login details with plaintext passwords exposed on the dark web. That dramatic increase in risk per user comes back to haunt businesses. The average organisation is now likely to have about 17 sets of login details available on the dark web for malicious actors to enjoy. That number is only going to continue to grow thanks to events like this year’s giant influx of fresh passwords from the RockYou 2021 leak. 

Employees are dedicated to making bad passwords 

Research by the UK’s National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) shows that employees will choose memorability over security when making a password every time. Their analysts found that 15% of people have used their pet’s name as their password at some point, 14% have used the name of a family member,13% have used a significant date, such as a birthday or anniversary and another 6% have used information about their favourite sports team as their password. That makes the criminals jobs easy even if they’re trying to directly crack a single password. After all, those users have probably told them everything that they’d need to know to do the job in their social media profiles. 

US companies aren’t any better off. In fact, their bad password problems are just a little bit worse. 59% of Americans use a person’s name or family birthday in their passwords, 33% include a pet’s name and 22% use their own name. We can’t chalk that blizzard of bad passwords up to ignorance of good password habits, because even employees who know better are slacking on password safety. Over 90% of participants in a password habits survey understood the risk of poor password hygiene, but 59% admitted to still engaging in unsafe password behaviours at work anyway.

Password sharing is rampant 

Worse yet, employees are also sharing their passwords with other people at an alarming rate, even if the people they’re sharing a password with don’t work at the same company. Over 30% of respondents in a Microsoft study admitted that their organisation had experienced a cyber security incident as a result of compromised user credentials that had been shared with people outside their companies. 

43% of survey respondents have shared their password with someone in their home22% of employees surveyed have shared their email password for a streaming site17% of employees surveyed have shared their email password for a social media platform17% of employees surveyed have shared their email password for an online shopping account

Based on analysis of the top 250 passwords found through the application of Dark Web ID’s dark web search function that uncovers exposed credentials, these categories of information were used to generate the weakest passwords in 2020 which were: Names, Sports, Food, Places, Animals and Famous People/Characters.

The most common passwords spotted by Dark Web ID by category

Names: maggie
Sports: baseball
Food: cookie
Places: Newyork
Animals: lemonfish
Famous People/Characters: Tigger

Top 20 most common passwords that Dark Web ID found on the dark web in 2020

123456
password
12345678
12341234
1asdasdasdasd
Qwerty123
Password1
123456789
Qwerty1
:12345678secret
Abc123
111111
stratfor
lemonfish
sunshine
123123123
1234567890
Password123
123123
1234567

Every organisation in every industry is in password trouble 

No industry is immune to the powerful lure of terrible password habits, especially that perpetual favourite password recycling and iteration. In a study of password proclivities, researchers determined that some sectors did have a little more trouble with passwords than others though. The telecommunications sector had the highest average number of leaked employee credentials at 552,601 per company. The media industry had the highest password reuse rates at 85%, followed by household products (82%), hotels, restaurants & leisure (80%), and healthcare (79%).

A trove of exposed data about Fortune 1000 companies on the dark web was uncovered by researchers earlier this year, including passwords for 25.9 million Fortune 1000 corporate user accounts. Digging deeper, they also unearthed an estimated 543 million employee credentials from Fortune 1000 companies circulating on commonly used underground hacking forums, a 29% increase from 2020. Altogether, they were able to determine that 25,927,476 passwords that belong to employees at Fortune 1000 companies are hanging out on the dark web. That’s an estimated 25,927 exposed passwords per Fortune 1000 company, marking a 12% increase in password leaks from 2020. 

Busted credentials are plentiful on the dark web 

If data is a currency on the dark web, then credentials are solid gold. Credentials were the top type of information stolen in data breaches worldwide in 2020, (personal information took second place just over financial data in third), and bad actors didn’t hesitate to grab batches of credentials from all over the world. Cyber criminals snatched them up in about 60% of North American breaches, 90% of APAC region breaches and 70% of EMEA breaches. Researchers disclosed that the average company experiences 5.3 credential compromises that originate from a common source like phishing every year, a number that should give every IT professional chills. 

An abundance of records on the dark web has spawned an abundance of passwords for cyber criminals to harvest, and that’s bad news. Giant password dumps on the dark web like the 100GB text file dubbed RockYou2021 have ratcheted up risk too. That giant dump of data is estimated to contain 8.4 billion passwords. Bad actors make use of that bounty quickly and effectively. 

In the aftermath an enormous 2020 hack, ShinyHunters breached the security of ten companies in the Asian region and brought more than 73 million user records to market on the dark web. A group like ShinyHunters will of course try to profit by selling that stolen data at first, but when the data has aged or there are no interested buyers, cyber criminals will just offload it in the vast data dumps of the dark web making it available for anyone to sift through.   

Protect your business from password danger quickly & affordably

With our support we can discover if any of your employee’s reused passwords have been exposed on the dark web so that you can change them right away. 

What next?

By utilising our certified dark web monitoring tool we’ll perform a non-invasive scan of your company’s domain and produce a pdf report that will highlight any compromised credentials.

Request your free live scan today (and get 3 months free on us).  https://netutils.com/dark-web-scan/

NetUtils launches ‘Platinum’ managed cyber security services to help large enterprises rationalise the new normal

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Cyber security pioneer launches UK’s most comprehensive managed service offering 16 core features with 24/7 SoC to help larger enterprises strengthen their end-to-end cyber security posture

Kent, United Kingdom – February 2021, NetUtils, a leading IT specialist has launched the UK’s most advanced and highly integrated managed cyber security service aimed at helping larger enterprises to improve cyber security defences while reducing operational cost and complexity. 

The new “Platinum Tier” includes a fully staffed, 24/7 Security Operations Centre (SOC) and is backed by NetUtils continued certification around the ISO 9001 and ISO 27001  standards and as a registered  Crown Commercial Service supplier.

The new top tier service offers every element a large enterprise should deploy based on best practice methodology and includes Advanced Endpoint Protection, Vulnerability & Patch Management,

Managed Firewalls, Email Security Gateway, Privileged Access Management and Cloud Access Security Broker capabilities. The built-in SOC services provides full-time security monitoring across devices and applications including Office 365 along with structured Security Awareness Training sessions and ongoing helpdesk service. The Platinum tier is available at under £45 per user per month with significant discounts for larger organisations.

“Larger enterprises are faced with the dual challenges of managing more remote staff while still trying to deliver the core IT projects that are critical to the business. Our Platinum Tier Managed Cyber Security services are based on feedback from several enterprise customers around what they need – and is effectively a formalisation of a number of disparate services that we have been delivering successfully for many years.,” says Ashok Thomas, CEO for NetUtils. “When you look at the overall cost and especially when you factor in our 24/7 SOC capability, our Platinum service will typically save enterprises with a 1000 staff or more, hundreds of thousands of pounds each year in operational cyber security costs – with the assurance of transparent SLA’s and round the clock expertise.”

The new Platinum tier managed security services also aim to address several challenges that have accelerated due to the ongoing pandemic including critical digitisation projects, reduction in IT budgets and ongoing cyber security skills shortage. According to recent research by PWC, a consultancy, that questions over 3000 senior executives at larger organisations; 96% of executives have shifted their cybersecurity strategy due to COVID-19 while 55% of respondents lack confidence when their cyber spending is allocated towards the most significant risks.

NetUtils has built a reputation for technical excellence and is the most certified Juniper Networks partner in Europe and maintains over 420 industry and vendor accreditations within its team including CISSPs and CISMPs, Fortinet’s NS7, and Juniper JNCIPs. As part of the managed cyber security services launch, NetUtils has invested over £1.2 million adding more staff, enhanced training, and additional data centre capacity to meet growing demand. 

As David Bundock, COO for NetUtils explains, “Our top tier managed security service helps to address the operational challenges and skills retention issues that larger organisations are facing at a time when external factors such as COVID and Brexit are impacting core business processes. Our technical expertise and ISO compliant processes can help large enterprises improve cyber security though a trusted partnership that allows them to focus on their core business without compromising on active cyber security controls and monitoring.”

More information on the new managed cyber security services including the new Platinum tier is available via https://netutils.com/managed-service-bundles/

https://netutils.com/managed-service-bundles/

About NetUtils

NetUtils are a leading UK specialist integrator of network, security and data solutions for enterprise, telco, MSPs and ISPs. With more than 27-years history and over 400 enterprise and service provider clients including household names across finance, education, public sector, manufacturing, and healthcare, NetUtils brings its customers the depth and breadth of people, technologies and services to improve business performance in this ever-changing digital world.

NetUtils Media Enquiries:

Kara Jenkinson
Head of Marketing
t: 020 8783 3800 e: kjenkinson@netutils.com

w: www.netutils.com

3 Facts About Cyber Security to Factor into Your Strategy Now

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Last week I read this blog titled 3 Big Facts About Cybersecurity In 2020 To Remember For 2021 which talks about phishing, ransomware and The Dark Web. Whilst I agree with these 3 threats, it’s important to remember that a layered security approach for any organisation is key to the sustainability of growth and development. Yes, last year saw a rise of the distributed workforce, the fast adoption to the cloud and a massive increase in COVID related scams, which are still being executed by cyber criminals, thus making your company and all your employees more susceptible and an easy target especially when security most certainly was not and is not top of mind. 

For many the need for business continuity and getting up and running as soon as possible those few days before lockdown announcement number 1 massively outweighed concerns over networking and security. And why wouldn’t it! However now we face being in lockdown number 3, with no real idea of when we will be normal again or what normal might look like and still you’ve not addressed those ‘pesky’ security concerns.

So, following on from the blog mentioned above here are 3 key takeaways so you can start to take your cyber security back into your own hands. Remember cyber security is companywide and not just and IT issue.

1. Phishing Rules the Roost

Most of today’s nastiest threats have a common denominator: phishing. More than 80% of all cyber attacks are phishing based. That means that an essential part of keeping your business safe from cyber crime is keeping your business safe from phishing. Phishing attacks skyrocketed by over 600% in 2020, and that’s not going to go away. 

How to mitigate the risk?

People are a critical layer within your cyber security posture and with greater reliance on email communication, the dangers of phishing are even more apparent for businesses, especially in the form of ransomware. 

By committing your company to Security Awareness Training in this ever changing world will help protect against the growing and varying threats organisations face today. Don’t let those criminals leap to the golden opportunity that increased email usage creates for them to launch phishing attacks – and they’re branching out with more attempts through voice, text, messaging, and SMS.

2. Ransomware is Here to Stay

Ransomware was the most devastating and disruptive single threat type in 2020, and that looks set to keep going through 2021. More than 50% of businesses were impacted by ransomware in 2020. It’s become a favoured tool of hackers from sophisticated nation-state groups to cyber criminal gangs on The Dark Web. Experts estimate that a ransomware attack will take place every 11 seconds in 2021.

Cyber criminals aren’t just using ransomware to steal data anymore. In 2020 there’s been a trend towards ransomware being used to disrupt operations at businesses, manufacturers, essential services, infrastructure targets, and hospitals plus many organisations in other sectors worldwide. Just before the COVID-19 vaccine news started rolling in, cyber criminals were deploying ransomware against hospitals, pharmaceutical developers, laboratories, even cold storage trucking companies. They weren’t trying to steal data, they were trying to disrupt operations at critically needed organisations in order to score a big, quick payday, and they were successful in many cases.

How to mitigate the risk?

  • Don’t click links in emails
  • Scan emails for malware
  • Firewall and endpoint protection
  • Keep data backups, regular
  • Protect your information

3. Dark Web Danger is Real and Growing

The Dark Web is a complicated place, and just like everything else in the world, the chaotic nature of events in 2020 impacted the way it operates too. It hasn’t stopped growing – Dark Web activity has increased by more than 300% in the last 3 years. While it hasn’t been as much of a newsmaker as flashier things like nation-state hacking, make no mistake – it’s still an enormous threat to all businesses, and that threat is only growing larger with time.

The proliferation of information gathered in data breaches, especially in last year’s record-breaking year, provides ample fuel for cyber crime like credential stuffing and spear phishing. An article published on the 3rd February 2021 states more than 3 billion unique pairs of cleartext emails and passwords were leaked online from previous data leaks.

The growth of the cybercrime-as-a-service sector of the Dark Web economy also puts companies squarely in the crosshairs of bad actors. Plus, in a challenging economy, even cyber criminals are feeling the pinch and looking for new ways to rake in cash.

How to mitigate the risk?

Dark Web monitoring solutions are a security essential because it provides your company with something incredibly precious: time. By having your business credentials monitored 24/7/365 with our expert human and machine-powered analysis, you’re making it possible for you to find out if you’ve been a victim of credential compromise fast. Which gives your IT team time to address vulnerabilities before the bad guys even find them.  

No Company Can Afford A Cyber Security Nightmare.

Let NetUtils help you add strong cyber security protection at a price that won’t keep you up at night. To get you started we’d like to offer you a complimentary Dark Web scan and we’ll show you how our solutions can help you secure yours and your clients’ systems and data against today’s (and tomorrow’s) biggest threats fast.

Sources:

Why Are So Many Organisations Turning to Managed Security Service Providers?

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The technology industry is one that never stands still, but the cyber and security space specifically are even more fast paced than most other sectors of the industry. This in many cases can be attributed to the fact that the activities of cyber criminals are squarely focused on breaching enterprise security defences, because this is how they generate their income. Put simply your users and your business is their primary target.

The pressures on IT operations, compliance and security posture are immense. Organisations constantly have to navigate the complexities of industry jargon and trends to keep abreast of the latest offerings and figure out the best fit for their business. This can be a full-time job in itself. But if IT is not your core business, then why should you burden yourself with managing it yourself?

The very nature of a Managed Security Service Provider (MSSP) is to alleviate the pressure by allowing you as a company to spend your time focusing on your core business, customers and innovation, in the knowledge that the necessary tasks that are required to keep your company safe and operational are in hand with the experts.

The Experts

An MSSP is a specialist, who’s core business is IT. As a result, you’re leveraging the expertise of a bigger team, who are up to date in all areas, that is, not just on general industry knowledge or the threat landscape, but also on the specific solutions and applications deployed within your business. It’s our responsibility to make sure the tools we use and the services we provide are always best of breed.

We spend the time and investment to train our teams, to get certified and fully compliant. We spend the time working closely with our vendor partners to understand the best ways of installing and using their products. We spend the time evaluating new and innovative solutions to the market.

We put in all the hard work, so you don’t have to.

Proactive Operational Efficiency

Managing the daily IT related tasks of most organisations can take most of the working day. Focusing on continuous improvements to revenue generating business critical tasks as well as customer service improvements, is what in many businesses determines their bottom line. It should not be surprising to learn therefore that most IT related operational improvements and security tasks can often be relegated to the back of the line. As long as things are working, then in many cases businesses are content and happy to focus their attentions elsewhere. Until of course something goes wrong.

By outsourcing the important IT operational management tasks to a trusted MSSP, you are ensuring that your IT environment remains operational at all times, because it is the responsibility of your provider to take care of security advisory notices, security patching, configuration management, access management, performance management, availability management, audit management and many other mundane but absolutely essential tasks to maintain a highly available and secure infrastructure. It’s our responsibility to be proactive on your behalf rather than reactive.

Speed of Implementation

It is no secret that there is a growing trend for many companies to outsource certain services, be that networking, telecommunications, cloud or security services. Besides the obvious cost savings and controls it affords, it certainly also helps free up internal resources and time. But there is one other major reason why MSSP services are being consumed at quite a staggering rate and that is speed.

Speed of implementation, widely known as how fast one can act on an idea, strategically or tactically, is often times what can set you apart from your competition. With the massive growth of cloud adoption and the improvements in its capabilities, we see a huge increase in the abilities of an MSSP to provision and deliver services to customers that would have previously taken weeks or months in only days and even hours in some cases. The reason for this is often that the provider has already provisioned its service capabilities ahead of time, so the service is simply ready to onboard new customers as and when they are ready. This of course takes a lot of planning and forethought on the part of the MSSP in order to be able to offer these ready to go services, so it can be said that the customers speed of implementing a new or replacement service is directly related to that provider taking earlier action.

Discover NetUtils’ Managed Cyber Security Services to Suit Your Business Needs

Save time, money and resource with our cost-effective cyber security services; keep your users safe, protect your infrastructure, enhance your security and mitigate your risk against cyber crime.

By utilising our expertise and experience you’re leveraging an enhanced team who are constantly trained and certified in all specialist areas. We work alongside industry leading vendor partners and invest the time and resource, so you don’t have to.

Discover the NetUtils Cyber Security Platform here >