Cyber Security on the Cheap

The words ‘Security’ and ‘Cheap’ often instantly arouse suspicion. It will quickly make people question if the product/service being advertised really will secure their assets, as needed. This article however, is not trying to necessarily sell any product, but more just to give advice on what companies can do to mitigate threats to their organisation no matter their financial state.

User Level Security:
For years good practices have been talked about and encouraged in organisations; however, in reality people still don’t follow these recommendations. The best example of this is passwords. Passwords are difficult enough to remember when they’re just a passphrase with a 1 on the end, so when it comes to a random series of different numbers, letters, upper and lower-case characters, it becomes almost impossible to remember. So what is the next logical solution? To write the password down on a sticky note on your computer. All this has done is changed the threat from IT Security to Physical Security. The recommendation for this would be a password vault stored on the user’s computer such as LastPass or KeePass, so that you can store passwords without having to write them down. Be careful to keep an eye out for the latest threats to these programs, and keep them regularly updated, to minimise threats.

Hire a Professional:
This immediately sounds expensive, as industry rates can range from $2000 - $4000 per day. But keep an eye out as there are other companies around that offer competitive rates to this, and still offer a quality service. Using existing IT Staff to look for issues is not as ideal as hiring a Security Expert, but it is definitely not a bad idea. Asking IT Staff to keep systems updated, to shutdown unused ports, and to monitor traffic are all good methods of this.

Software:
Not all good software is expensive. In fact a lot of good open-source security tools can be found online, and installed on a variety of operating systems. If Linux is not an issue to use Kali Linux by Offensive Security, and the Security Onion are great Linux distributions, containing collections of useful open-source security software. Kali Linux comes with lots of software geared at testing security by attempting to break it, while the Security Onion comes with software geared at monitoring and detecting such behaviour.

These are just some of the ways you can mitigate threats to your organisation, no matter the size or the budget. Security is not for the rich, it’s for whoever desires it, and is willing to take steps to improve the security for themselves, or for their organisation.