Fighting cyber-crime is an ongoing task that has only been getting harder and harder to accomplish. DDoS attacks against networks have been getting larger and more complex so it is important to know the right questions to ask when one such attack happens. Of course there are obvious questions like ‘Who is doing the attack?’ ‘How are they doing it?’ ‘Why are they doing it?’ and ‘Where from is the attack coming?’ but here are three other questions you need to have at the front of your mind when preparing for a cyber-attack.
1. How do you protect your networks and applications against modern, sophisticated DDoS attacks?
According to a recent report, DDoS attacks of greater than 50 Gbps have more than quadrupled and companies experiencing between six and 25 attacks per year has ballooned by more than four times since 2015. Defending against this deluge of DDoS is imperative. To do this you need to make sure to utilise three key weapons, detection, mitigation and analytics, when fighting in this war against modern multi-vector DDoS attacks. Powerful DDoS detection and mitigation software is a must as an effective one will help to discover encrypted and harmful traffic, then dispose of it. The best way of doing this is by analysing the common traffic trends during peace time and then running those findings to help eliminate anomalous changes. This will prevent any potentially harmful traffic from entering your network.
2. How do you eliminate the SSL/TLS blind spot?
Recent studies show that roughly 70 percent of all traffic is encrypted. That means if your company is not decrypting and inspecting encrypted traffic, there’s no way of knowing what kind of nefarious files or threats are flowing through unnoticed. It seems what you don’t know really can hurt you! However, by offloading CPU-intensive SSL decryption and encryption functions from third-party security devices, while ensuring compliance with privacy standards, it is possible to eliminate these blind spots completely. There are some great programs out there that can handle this, just make sure you find one that can decrypt traffic because many do not.
3. How can you manage application delivery across hybrid clouds and on-premise?
You’re either already running applications in the cloud, or you plan to in the near future. But the move to the cloud introduces a new set of challenges, one of which is: how do you easily manage your on-premise applications and your cloud applications in a centralised fashion? Well the best way is to use a cloud-based controller that can connect to and manage all of your applications. These programs can configure and manage policies for other applications as well as collect performance data and other analytics. Some can even be self-managed and automate the set-up process of new applications you install, improving efficiency and saving precious time.
Those are just three of the questions to be had about cyber-security in the workplace. No doubt there will be many more. Thankfully many of these fixes can be implemented almost immediately with very little assembly required. So if you are worried about how secure your network really is then just answer these three questions. Ask them to your IT team and see if they can give you an answer. It is important that everyone knows what to do so that you can keep your network safe from any kind of nefarious attacker.
