A 3-Step Process for Reducing Your Business’ Threat Surface Area

With so many devices now connecting to the Internet, decreasing your business’ threat surface area is more important than ever. Your threat surface area consists of any device that connects to your organization’s IT infrastructure, and if you’re not careful or forget a couple of oddball wearables, you could be looking at a data breach. Today, we want to go over how you can prevent that from happening.

Understanding the Attack Vectors

If you want to reduce your threat surface area, you first have to understand why and how cyberattacks take place and what makes up your threat surface area.

Your threat surface area includes all of the places where an unauthorized party might gain access to your systems or data. This includes outdated software, unpatched systems, open networks, human vulnerabilities, and the sheer number of devices that your company owns. For example, an old operating system with a known vulnerability contributes to your threat surface area, but so too does an employee’s mobile device that they use to check their email while out of the office.

Once you have a clear grasp on the many weaknesses, you can take measures to address them.

Essential Security Measures

With the help of practical security measures, you can shrink your threat surface and make it less likely you’ll experience potential security issues.

First, you’ll want to address any issues with outdated operating systems and software, as those are clearly one of the biggest threats to your company’s security. Once they have been addressed, consider strong access control measures to ensure no one—and I mean no one—has access to data they don’t need to do their jobs. Finally, implement powerful multi-factor authentication methods that require your employees to provide a second form of identity verification. You can also consider network segmentation, which isolates parts of your infrastructure, allowing breaches to be more easily contained and less able to spread.

If you’re really hardcore, you can implement zero-trust policies for your network, which essentially ask users to authenticate themselves any time they access a new piece of data or a new part of your network, practically guaranteeing security.

The Employee Element

Each and every employee you have contributes to your organization’s threat surface area.

Think about it—each of your employees has several devices they use, and each of those employees accesses data every single day. There are countless opportunities for phishing attacks, poor password practices, or straight-up negligence to create opportunities for a security breach. Cybersecurity awareness training can make a big difference, as it teaches your team how to identify potential threats, manage data responsibly, and most important of all, how to react to threats (i.e. report them to IT).

Cybersecurity training should be an ongoing process, too, and you should regularly test employees to keep them on their toes.

Interested in reducing your own threat surface area? White Mountain IT Services can help. Call us today at (603) 889-0800 for a consultation.

White Mountain IT

Related Posts

You Can Embrace Remote Operations Without Sacrificing Cybersecurity… It Just Needs to Be Done Right

Remote work has proven incredibly useful over the past few years despite many employers having various concerns about its implementation. While these concerns vary, one prevalent one is how remote operations impact cybersecurity. If you’re utilizing remote operations to any degree and aren’t concerned about cybersecurity, you must adjust this mindset and correct your approach. How Does Remote ...

Master Your Email with These Tips

For most people, their email inbox can get pretty intimidating. You miss a day of work for personal reasons and you probably need to schedule about double the time getting to all of the updates, responses, and junk that comes in in a short amount of time. In this month’s newsletter we thought we’d go through a few tips that can help anyone better manage their email and keep their accounts secure. ...

4 Essential Cybersecurity Mistakes You Can't Afford to Make

When considering your company’s cybersecurity, it is important not to lose sight of the forest for the trees… or, in other words, not to forget the basics around which the rest of your protections are built. Let’s review four cybersecurity errors that could easily domino into larger catastrophes if not nipped in the bud. Not Training Employees Let me ask you this: Before you learned to tie yo...

The Longer the Better! Why to Ditch Your Short, Complex Passwords

You’ve probably heard a lot of password advice over the past decade, but how much of it is actually good advice that you should listen to? These days, with advanced automated threats able to crack incredibly complex passwords with ease, you can’t be too careful. You might even need to take a different approach entirely… which brings us to the OG password advice: just make it longer. We’re here ...