At the moment the world is abuzz, if you will pardon the pun, with COVID-19 and now the next threat in what seems like a monkey paw year, Murder Hornets. But with these seemingly apocalyptic natural occurrences, where does that leave infosec? What are we doing? How are we being affected?
The answer is that cybersecurity infrastructures are not faring well amid COVID-19 at all, with one study showing that nearly half (46%) of global businesses have experienced at least one cybersecurity scare since the new norm of working remotely. Add on to the fact that with several businesses either going out of business or cutting back significantly to keep their employees on the payroll, cybersecurity budgets are seeing a significant cut across the board. With budget cuts, employee layoffs, and an increasing remote taskforce, how can cybersecurity employees keep up with what bad actors are doing?
Let’s face facts, just because there is a global crisis does not mean bad actors are practicing safe-distancing from our networks. Furthermore when employees do start returning to work, hopefully, this month, how have their habits changed, or are they going to be bringing in nasty surprises for cybersecurity employees while they have been “away”.
Cybersecurity has always seemed like the red-headed stepchild when it came to budgeting concerns, and now with these cutbacks, we are in even more of a pickle. How do we overcome this? The answer is value-added resellers because at the moment every penny counts. The point of a VAR as we have discussed before is to get the best price for a company and do all the leg work for the security team. Now more than ever this valuable resource should be used, not only to ensure the saving of every cent you can but to ensure the right fit. Shelfware is even more dangerous in the current world predicament, and if a tool or program is not the right fit, that is money wasted that could have been used for something that would have been a better fit.
However, there is more to using a value-added reseller than simply saving money. As workers begin to return to their offices, they may be bringing nasty little surprises for analysts to deal with. Unsafe browsing practices while “off-network” for some may have resulted in vulnerabilities and unseen threats. In the coming months, analysts and engineers need to be focused on rebuilding what once was when the world was right, rather than chasing down and trying to determine if a certain product will really fit their needs or not.
However, it is not just the return of employees that will be stressful to cybersecurity personnel, the hurry to catch up on work is also going to cause much undue stress. Several businesses have begun furloughing or requiring cyber-security staff to take mandatory paid time off, and while anyone who works in the cybersecurity space will tell you “vacations” much needed, the sheer number of alerts and issues that will be arising while perhaps entire teams are away is daunting. Take a popular university for example that was while closed, was forced to furlough their entire cybersecurity team for the month of April. The problem is, bad actors were not furloughed during this time, and this left a network sitting vulnerable to threats and alerts piling up. When the team returns, those alerts aren’t going to simply go away, they aren’t going to right themselves, those vulnerabilities aren’t going to suddenly patch and the network be safe once again. No several days worth of work will be funneled into righting perhaps the oversight of management in furloughing these now more than ever essential employees.
Again this is where value-added resellers are going to be a port in the oncoming storm for companies and cybersecurity teams. New tools may be needed to help fix these backlog issues, security concerns once not thought about may need to be addressed, and if you have analysts trying to do research, pricing, and testing by themselves, it will be a losing battle.
Luckily value-added resellers like SecureNation are here to help you weather these upcoming storms. If only we had a way to fix murder-hornets.
