How safe is your IT security?

   

One of the largest challenges facing small and medium sized UK businesses is IT security. As a business becomes increasingly reliant on the data on its systems, it faces ever-increasing threats to the network and data integrity.

Everyone is aware of issues in the media regarding internet usage and security of our electronic data. These issues are almost the same; it’s just the scale of the solution and the cost that differs. So is it really an issue or are we just scare mongering?

The simple answer is yes, if you don’t take reasonable steps to protect it. Would you leave your home unlocked? Of course not, but this analogy holds true to computers and systems.

How do you ‘shut the door’ to your PC network?

Simple steps will effectively reduce the risk to an acceptable level - we must protect our data and limit the amount of risk, without spending very large amounts of money.

IT systems use a multi layered approach to ensure security, similar to methods used in banks. When it comes to protecting the money, banks place their highest security closest to the actual money, together with the front of house security.

This multi layered approach allows and encourages normal people into the bank, but in turn discourages the robber with a difficult path to the money.

So how does this really translate from IT speak into real world? Firstly email, we all use it, so it is important that we take steps to ensure the emails we receive are relevant to the business:

Spam

We need a device or a service from a provider that “cleans” our emails of spam, and removes viruses at the same time, ensuring what you receive in your inbox is relevant.

These systems aren’t 100% perfect, therefore any system implemented must be able to learn and needs to be simple to use/administer. We need to extend this protection to the actual PC as another layer in the form of a suite of software that blocks and inhibits spyware, viruses, etc.

This software needs to be adaptive to the threats, and it needs to talk to a central system with status information.

Our security doesn’t end there; we almost certainly have internet access at work, so we must take steps to protect our computer network and its data from the outside electronic world:

Firewalls

Firewalls are a device that stops the Internet from getting inside your computer network. These devices vary considerably in features and price and one size does not fit all!

Best practise would dictate a relatively simple (fast) device is placed closest to the internet to undertake simple security blocking tasks (like the front door to the bank), then closer to the users you would place a more complex device (like the bank vault) that can undertake a very fine inspection of information flowing in.

These complex devices can also inspect/block what is going out from your network, which can be a useful productivity and security tool if your staff are surfing the Internet at potentially unsafe web sites.

These devices and ideas are the starting point of formulating an IT security plan and policy, each business is unique and each requirement and its solution is different from the next.

Are the risks real?

Yes they are. The use of professionally written, intelligent and well executed viral code is becoming widespread.

Infections today are less openly destructive than they used to be as the writers now know that they can extract useful and valuable data that has a financial worth, like credit card details. Infected machines allow these people to undertake criminal activities such as money laundering, and allowing terrorism to be funded.

These attacks are not just limited to small time ad-hoc efforts; they can be streamlined targeted affairs for a particular purpose. This type of criminal activity is rapidly becoming mainstream; the number of detected viruses over the past two years is almost equal to all the viruses detected since they started recording such information!

The approach above is typically through email or web sites but we haven’t mentioned direct attacks i.e. “Hacking”. People try and exploit security weaknesses in your Firewall, computers or even people, they could attack your network via a home worker who’s PC is unchecked an insecure. They can also use a “blended” attack where they use a virus to allow backdoor access through your firewall and attack from within! There must be many security hurdles in place to thwart a determined hacker from gaining access to your network.

To put matters in to perspective it is all about what risk your business is willing to accept. This answer alongside your business type and what you do for a business will help determine the solution.

About the Author

This article was written for Bytestart readers by Graham Fern, director of axon-IT.

For more information on axon-IT and their range of services call 0845 313 0025 or go to www.axon-it.com.

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