5 Best Cybersecurity Tactics to Defend Against Cyber Attacks

The first step to ensuring cybersecurity is understanding your vulnerability. BrunNet’s Vulnerability Assessment provides you with actionable intelligence, it can tell you what devices, systems, and applications in your municipal environment are vulnerable to software flaws, misconfigurations, and other issues. You must be able to identify and understand their categories of risk and security gaps in order to be able to properly defend against cyber attacks. We can help your organization identify and resolve such vulnerabilities, and take proactive steps to protect your data before it gets exploited by attackers.

Phishing attacks are one of the most common cyber breaches organizations face. Hackers strategically attack different departments within different companies and municipalities with phishing emails in order to discover their weakest link. To help reduce the risk and costs associated with phishing attacks, BrunNet offers WatchGuard’s Trophy Phishing resources. WatchGuard sends fake phishing emails to staff to see if they recognize the phishing warning signs, or if they act upon the attack. With WatchGuard’s Phishing resources, you will be able to determine liable employees and provide them with proper training in order to better identify such cyber risks.

Enforcing a password management policy among employees is one of the first steps organizations should make when trying to prevent a cyber breach. Such a policy should require employees to create unique and hard-to-guess passwords with a combination of upper and lower case letters, numbers, and symbols. Additionally, employees should create new passwords every three months, at least. To coincide with this, government computers should have time-out and lock-out features. Time-out restrictions will log users off after a certain period of unattended screen time, while a lockout feature will automatically lock users out of the system after a certain number of unsuccessful password attempts. 

Multi-factor authentication paired with a password management policy might be one of the best and easiest solutions for protecting networks and systems from being breached. Multi-factor authentication requires additional information when users enter their username and password before they can log in to a system or network. Typically, upon attempting to log in, the user will be prompted to provide a security code sent by text message or email to a separate account. Once the username, password, and security code are all input correctly, the user can gain access. Multi-Factor Authentication should be especially prevalent when remote workers request access to municipal networks.

It is no secret that businesses and municipalities hold a lot of important and confidential data and information. In the event of a cyberattack, the loss of such information could be catastrophic. Data backups are an essential part of mitigating the risk of a ransomware attack or a fire, theft, natural disaster, server crash, or user errors. It is recommended that important municipal data and systems are routinely backed up, encrypted to protect from ransomware, and kept off-site. It is also advised that employees working on important information perform routine backs up of their smartphones and tablets to avoid the loss of data in the event of a cyber attack.