Maintaining good passwords and Passphrases is mantra of cyber safety

Sandeep Bhargava
Managing Director APJ, Rackspace Technology

Measures adopted: Threat actors can be disastrous to an individual or organization, and it is the job of security professionals to ensure that proper security measures are in place to protect against it. For example, it is a good idea to ensure that the business has backups of its critical data so that an attack does not immobilize the organization for an extended period. 

Things to be kept in mind to safeguard remote workforce: Use firewall protection solutions: Firewall solutions can leverage a single-pass architecture designed to prevent network vulnerabilities, block the download of known malware, and prevent malicious encrypted content from circulating around your network.  

Back up the data. Maintaining recent backups of your data is essential. Companies that follow this fundamental best practice can safely ignore ransom demands and revert to stored files with little data loss.

Keep up with patches and check your security software. Merely keeping up with the latest patches for Windows, Mac, and Linux operating systems and your third-party applications will go a long way to reducing your exposure to ransomware.

Be sure that the security software installed and that it’s up-to-date. New malware surfaces every day, so keeping current with your anti-virus software helps keep your data safe.

Educate staff to spot scams. Employee awareness is crucial in avoiding a ransomware attack. Staff should be coached on how to spot scams and urged to take the time to pause and check emails that don’t look right.

Take the “Security First” approach. Weave security awareness and practice into the process from beginning to end. DevSecOps is a concept that emphasizes the importance of integrating security into all parts of IT system development and operations, rather than leaving them disconnected. While perfect security is not possible, concepts like this bring it closer. 

Educating customers & employees: At the onset of COVID-19 and the shift to Work from Home one of our key priorities was ensuring that an open line of communication was established between Rackspace Technology and our customers. In fact, we looked to over communicate in order to ensure customers knew how and who to reach out to during this time. Over this last year we’ve looked to educate and support our customers, including setting up roundtables on security with global experts available to answer questions and give advice, we’ve ensure customers know who to reach out to in our customer success team in order to guide innovation and secure infrastructure from possible attacks. 

Safeguarding the customers and employees: One of the most important ways to safeguard customers and employees is to put in place policies to guide staff to better help them understand their responsibilities and what is acceptable when they use or share data, emails, internet sites and additional computers and devices.  It’s important to make sure the staffs knows about the threats they can face and the role they play in keeping the business safe. All should know how to maintaining good passwords and passphrases, how to identify and avoid cyber threats, what to do when they encounter a cyber threat and, importantly, how to report a cyber threat.