A message from our Security Operations Centre

Holidays are approaching and now is the time of year when IT staff and business owners start to wind down.

But this is the busy season for ‘holiday hackers’.

The week prior to and during Christmas 2021 we saw a 37% increase of incoming security alerts to our Security Operations Centre (SOC), compared with the rest of December and January.

We are advising clients and all businesses to be extra vigilant over this period and recommend:

Checking your incident response (IR) plan or put an IR in place.

Are you able to execute your existing plan with only skeleton staff on duty? If you don’t have an IR plan in place or simply not sure where to turn for help, we are on standby with our retained incident response with a 1hr response time.

A plan for responding to security alerts out of hours.

If you’re running a SIEM tool, are you able to respond to alerts out of hours or when staff are on leave?

Be proactive with MDR or M-EDR.

If you’ve not considered a managed monitoring service to detect and respond to threats then now is the time. Our SOC in Reading is an extension of your own IT team and we work around the clock, 365 days a year to proactively hunt threats, respond to alerts and take action if required.

Go back to basics

Don’t forget to enable 2FA across all of your apps, make sure all patching of systems are up-to-date and you have strong password policies in place. The ethical hackers in our testing team can also provide a ‘hacker’s eye view’ of your security posture so you have a clear picture of your overall security.

With the inevitable increase in security alerts expected later this month, we are here to help you prepare. Don’t let hackers ruin your holidays!