SDI Employee Spotlight – Jose Amezquita
From the Xchange Apprentice Program to an SDI full-time employee Meet Jose Amezquita, a shining example of growth and opportunity at SDI Presence. Starting...
E-commerce is booming, people have more access to the internet than ever these days and retailers have realized that traditional brick and mortar stores now come second to online storefronts in most people’s mind. Therefore, a high percentage of the workforce will spend their time, if not most of their workday, shopping online on Black Friday and Cyber Monday to take advantage of holiday sales.
Cyber Monday has become the official day for online retailers. While many employees shop online on their company’s network, most are unaware of cyber-attacks and may fall victim to email phishing campaigns, ransomware attacks, banking trojans, as well as the emergence of fraudulent websites that promote special deals like holiday discounted packages.
The fact that unsuspecting customers have a limited window during the workday to complete their online transactions makes it more appealing for hackers to pursue innovative methods that redirect their potential victims to an untrusted site or allow downloads of a file to their company-owned computers. This holiday season, over 50-million cyber-attacks will occur against a company’s network on a simple fact that most employees are not fully aware of their current workplace policy for online shopping, that’s only if a policy does exist.
Fortunately, here are some proactive tips that should be considered by both the end user and employer this holiday season.
The IT, Network/Security and Server Application teams should always reference the “what if” scenario phrase against their current internal processes and/or procedures.
What if – an employee’s hardware were to infect the company’s network? What cyber incident response plan does the company have in place to combat the threat?
What if – there’s a security breach and company data is compromised by some a form of ransomware? This question pertains to both server applications as well as the end user’s laptop.
What if – there is a data breach? Are we using current monitoring tools correctly to be more proactive than reactive?
Many IT, Network and Service/Application teams work in silos — by the time they can react it’s already too late. With the lack of internal collaboration, communication or structured policies in place, every department will have their own budget, which translates to multiple monitoring systems. Point taken that there isn’t just one tool in the marketplace that can do it all. The key is to ensure that all monitoring tool(s) available to an organization is properly configured to report or alert on the following:
Manny Pintado has over 20 years of relevant technology experience within the IT, Network and System Applications, Operations, Satellite and Telecommunications industries for leading global organizations. Proven abilities in strategic planning, managing projects, improving the efficiency of operations, team building and detailing project information to determine effective functions for operations.