The Growing Cybersecurity Threats and How to Address Them

October is Cybersecurity Awareness Month. As the month winds down, it’s an ideal time to focus attention on a topic of utmost (and ongoing) importance for every business right now: cybersecurity threats.

Statistics are showing that cyberattacks and cybersecurity threats have been on the rise in recent months—and for good reason.

COVID-19 has become the ultimate phishing lure. With people working from home, it’s easy to get distracted. In addition to working remotely, they’re babysitting, tutoring and multitasking—and more likely to fall prey to the ploys of social engineering and other cybersecurity threats. They’re also being inundated with COVID-19-related communications, many of which have been proven fraudulent.

With the network perimeter gone, CISOs have had to take immediate steps to secure endpoints, mitigate threats and maintain business continuity. This has taken a toll on IT budgets, leaving little room for other initiatives. Many CISOs’ fiscal 2020 budgets had already been allocated before the pandemic—to cover the cost of addressing the crisis, they’ve had to put other projects on hold.

Cybersecurity Threats: The Precautions to Take

• Every company should have a security plan and enforce strong and consistent security policies.
• Conducting security assessments is a smart way to detect vulnerabilities in a company’s wired and wireless networks.
• Our solution providers need to protect their own house first—embracing email security and multifactor authentication and remaining vigilant about fraudulent orders.
• A word of caution about ransomware: Businesses that inadvertently become victims of such an attack should not negotiate with the criminals because they could face steep fines from the U.S. federal government if the attackers are already under economic sanctions.

Ingram Micro’s Recent Cybersecurity Initiatives

To help our partners identify gaps in their customers’ security posture—and the solutions to fill those gaps—Ingram Micro has developed a Security Line Card, built around the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Cybersecurity Framework (CSF). Since its introduction in 2014, the NIST CSF has served as a solid framework and source for best cybersecurity practices—promoting safe information sharing and reducing risk to critical infrastructure in both the public and private sectors. This widely adopted framework continues to gain momentum and is central to our approach of building comprehensive, multi-vendor solutions to address today’s cybersecurity challenges.

Ingram Micro has also created its own Cyber Security Delta Force, a team of highly experienced, certified engineers who take a vendor-agnostic approach to security. This team is focused on helping our partners adopt NIST and other leading frameworks, as well as on promoting trending security solutions and overall cybersecurity practice development. This team is available for consultation and can be reached by email at cybersecurity@ingrammicro.com.

COVID-19 will eventually go away—hopefully, sooner rather than later.  Unfortunately, cybercrime and cybersecurity threats will never end. The bad actors will latch on to the latest and greatest topic of the day to proliferate attacks. They’ll continue to become more widespread and sophisticated—and every individual and business has to be vigilant, aware of today’s threats and prepared to respond.

Ingram Micro is committed to doing everything we can to help you, our partners, to be or become highly trusted, proactive security advisors.

Eric Kohl is Vice President, Advanced Solutions at Ingram Micro.

This guest blog is part of a Channel Futures sponsorship.