Organising a Risk-Based Security Strategy for Your Online Business

Cyber-attacks are not only increasing in number, but also in sophistication. This is why businesses need to switch from response-based approach to cyber-attacks, to identifying and preventing them before they occur.

A risk-based approach to security is all about prioritising data theft risks, knowing all the techniques that can be employed to mitigate those risks and evaluating each method’s ability to deal with the possible threats.

Without a risk-based approach, a business is likely to struggle in determining possible threats to its data and dealing with any such threat when it arises.

Protecting sensitive data

Businesses are enjoying the benefits of innovations in technology and the digital world, but many are struggling to assess the risks associated with it.

Having standard security measures in place must be the first thing that businesses must be concerned about. Many organisations use The Standard, which is provided by the Information Security Forum (ISF), as a reference for the protection of their information.

The Standard helps businesses in protecting themselves against the rapidly evolving threats in the cyber world and is considered the gold standard in information security.

Risk Assessment Process

A risk assessment process refers to formulating procedures for evaluating the impact of a cyber-attack on the business, assessing all the potential vulnerabilities and the required treatment in case of attack in order to protect the information.

While formulating a risk assessment process, the ISF Threat radar is worth reviewing. It helps businesses understand potential threats and their impact on the business, allowing them to review the importance of each threat for their particular organisation.

One thing must be clear, that no organisation can defend itself against all kinds of threats. Therefore, each company should look at its resilience and all the plans that it has for recovery and how it plans to minimise the risks in the future.

Training the employees

The human element in the information security should never be ignored. Employees should be any organisation’s biggest control.

Simply making employees aware of their responsibilities with regard to information security is not enough. Positive information security habits should be embedded deep within the company culture. The driver behind these habits should be ‘risk’ and employees should understand how their behaviours and actions mitigate these risks.  

Building Cyber Resilience

Building cyber resilience is critical in today’s world. The traditional risk management isn’t enough to deal with threats today; it should be expanded to include cyber resilience.

Businesses today are not stand-alone any more, they are globally interdependent, which is why cyber security is so important.

Is your business equipped to deal with cyber-attacks of the modern world? Get in touch with us and get a risk assessment consultation. We provide complete cyber security services including penetration testing services, WAF managed service and advanced web security testing.

Why PCI DSS Compliance Matters to Your Business

While most companies are blissfully unaware of PCI DSS compliance, it matters more to their business than they give it credit for!

Businesses that deal with credit and debit cards should know what PCI compliance is. Verizon’s latest report on the matter paints a very grim picture. While PCI compliance has seen a meteoric rise of 167% since 2012, 80% of the companies operating today still aren’t complying with standards!

Today we’ll discuss the importance of PCI DSS compliance and shine some light on how you can make your business compliant to these rules.

What is PCI DSS?

Let’s start off with the basics, PCI DSS stands for Payment Card Industry Data Security Standards. Now that that’s out of the way, let’s take a closer look at why it’s important for your business to strictly follow these standards.

Data sent via credit and debit cards is very sensitive and needs to be handled carefully. If mishandled, hackers can get a hold of this confidential information to commit credit and debit card fraud! This is why businesses that deal with credit cards are told to comply with these industry standards.

By following these set industry tools and measurements, the correct handling of sensitive data is ensured and the chances of hacks are minimised.

Consequences of Violating the PCI DSS:

While PCI DSS compliance isn’t a law, there are still consequences of violating these standards. First and foremost, the billing company can charge you a hefty sum for not abiding by these standards. Moreover, the bank that handles your account can either terminate your contract with them or impose a higher transaction fees.

All these heavy monetary penalties are in place to encourage more and more businesses to become PCI DSS compliant.

How Do I Comply With PCI DSS?

Recent surveys of the industry shows that because of organisations reluctance to become PSI DSS compliant, the number of security breaches increased from 29 million in 2013 to nearly 43 million in 2014!

Whether you accept MasterCard or Visa or both, in order to make sure that your business is capable of resisting data theft and loss, you need to comply with PCI DSS. This means employing a multi-layered security setup that includes but is not limited to network architecture, software designs, and data encryption, etc.

To people not well-versed in cyber-space security and PCI DSS compliance, this can seem like a tall order. This is where we come in. We know that these standards can be very difficult to adhere to, which is why we offer reliable PCI DSS compliance service and consultation services on the matter!

Once you bring Lean Security on board and ask us to make sure that your business complies with these industry wide standards, you can rest assured knowing that your system will be completely secured! So, not only will you be looked at favourably by the bank and the billing company, but you will also foster trust in your customers!

Furthermore, you shouldn’t think of it as a one-and-done job; we make sure that you know of any changes in these regulations beforehand so that you’re never exposed to cyber-attacks!

Contact us today and let’s work together to make your business more reliable and secure!

The Many Benefits of Network Vulnerability Assessment

In today’s digital age, cyber-attacks are inevitable. Recent numbers posted by Barkly paint a grim picture. 56% of the organisations surveyed were victims of cyber-attacks in 2016 alone.

What’s even more troubling is the fact that these companies still haven’t changed their approach or beefed up cyber-security, which has left them exposed to the possibility of even more attacks in the future!

An easy yet extremely effective way of stopping potential hacks is by opting for Vulnerability Assessment. Vulnerability Assessment and Penetration Testing (VAPT) can go a long way in ensuring that your online presence is as safe as it can be.

Here are a few of the many benefits of vulnerability assessment.

Highlights Vulnerabilities:

As its name suggests, vulnerability assessment highlights the weak points in your cyber-security program. Once a chink in the digital armour has been found, it’s flagged and business owners are informed of the possibility of cyber-attacks.

What’s great about vulnerability assessment and penetration testing is that they make use of publicly available tools to find faults in your system. Therefore, if a security company can find problems, hackers can too. You should act on the vulnerability report as soon as possible!

Prevents Losses:

Losses can cripple a company and induce stress in the employees and the business owner. Therefore, it’s in everyone’s best interest to avoid them as much as possible.

Another reason why we highly recommend making use of Vulnerability Assessment services is because they prevent losses. What’s amazing is that not only does it minimise the possibility of financial losses, but it also stops the loss and leak of confidential data!

Protects Your Brand:

Speaking of data leaks and breaches, vulnerability assessment goes a long way in preserving the image of your brand as it prevents client data from leaking out.

While that may not mean too much to you just recall the Sony hacks of 2014, how it destroyed the company’s reputation, and made people think twice before using the company’s products for months! Sony is a big brand and it eventually bounced back, are you confident of doing the same should hackers target you next?

This is where vulnerability assessment comes into play. By telling you of the faults in your systems beforehand, VAPT provides you with ample time to fortify your online presence, and quell cyber-attacks before they occur!

Best Vulnerability Assessment and Penetration Testing Services:

If you’re looking for the best penetration testing service on the market then you’ve come to the right place. We at Lean Security specialise in cyberspace security and promise to make your security concerns things of the past! We offer penetration testing services for multiple platforms such as web and mobile etc so that you are GUARANTEED protection!

What’s great about our vulnerability assessment services is that we perform both internal and external scans. Our comprehensive vulnerability scans help you stay proactive and enable you to snuff out vulnerabilities before they cause you harm! Furthermore, we also offer total protection against malware attacks which goes a long way in ensuring that your business never suffers.

So what are you waiting for? Call us today and get yourself the cyber-protection that you need and deserve!

How to Guarantee Mobile Application Security

Mobile applications are ridiculously popular these days. Make sure yours is safe and secure by following these simple steps.

One of the biggest industries of our time is the mobile app ecosystem. Recent research studies show that there are more than 2.32 billion smart phone users in the world and that these apps are part of a trillion dollar industry! With so many applications on our phones we never even stop to think what would happen if these applications were hacked.

Once an application is compromised, the data on your phone confidential or otherwise is prone to cyber-attacks and leaks! This is why mobile app developers go out of their way to ensure that their apps are safe for the people who download them.

Here are a few steps you can take to make sure that your app is impossible to hack.

Protection Against OWASP Top 10 Threats:

Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP) threats are a grim reality of the times we’re living in. Examples include Remote File Inclusion, SQL Injection and Cross Site Scripting (XSS) etc. While these threats are very complicated and take a lot of time and effort to be addressed, there are many companies out there who do a great job of ensuring that your device is protected against them!

Encrypt Your Source Code:

By far the most common mistake that mobile developers make is leaving their source code unencrypted. This allows mobile malware to spot and exploit vulnerabilities. What’s even worse is that when hackers get their hands on a copy of the source code, they’re able to reverse engineer the app.

Once they have control over the app they can add their malicious code on it and republish these ‘rogue’ apps on app stores. When your clients download this app their confidential data can be leaked. This is why it’s important for developers to always encrypt the source code of the application.

Invest In Binary Protections:

A distinct lack in binary protection can result in leaks of sensitive and confidential data. Moreover, if these safeguards aren’t present, it leaves both the application AND the user exposed to cyber-attacks!

Binary protections are thus a crucial part of cyber-space security. Their absence enables hackers to use your confidential information to partake in illegal activities posing as you! Furthermore, there’s also a very high chance of business interruption! Because of all these reasons, it’s always a wise idea to invest in binary protections!

Bring In The Professionals:

If you’ve developed your mobile application and don’t want it to be used for nefarious means, we have great news for you! We at Lean Security offer comprehensive services for end to end mobile application penetration test!

What separates us from our competitors is that we aren’t content with just testing your mobile application, we even check for vulnerabilities in the network and at the backend web service that you use! Our scans protect your applications from major problems like authorization and authentication issues, broken cryptography and weak server side controls.

So if you’ve made an app that will help complement your business, don’t let it all go to waste! Contact us today and let’s make that application safe not just for you but for your clients as well!

Bulk Up On Web Application Security by Following These 3 Tips

Fortifying a website or online business module against cyber-attacks is easier said than done. While you might think that your business has nothing to offer hackers so it’s pretty safe as is, but that simple isn’t the case! There are countless groups who hack into servers of small businesses and utilise their servers to either relay spam mail or to facilitate the hosting of illegal files!

Therefore, beefing up cyber-security should be your chief concern. If you have no idea how to go about it, follow these simple yet extremely effective tips to improve web application security.

Tip #1 – Software Updating:

By far the easiest way of securing yourself against hackers is by regularly updating your system software. While that may sound trivial to you at first, it’s more important than you think! When a security update is rolled out, the developers update the definitions of security threats. In simpler terms, by updating your computer you’re effectively protecting it against hacking!

To establish the importance of software updates, let’s take Windows 8 as an example. The popular operating system took the world by storm back in 2012. However, after just a few years, Microsoft has ‘abandoned’ Windows 8! They stopped rolling out security updates and people were given the option to either migrate to Windows 8.1 or Windows 10!

Now, the people who didn’t comply missed out on crucial security updates and were left exposed to hacking! All of this could’ve been avoided had they just updated their systems!

Tip #2 – Penetration Testing:

Penetration testing is an important element of cyberspace security. The process commences with a security company attacking your online servers to find points of vulnerability. At the end of the process, you receive a comprehensive report highlighting the weak points of your online presence!

What makes penetration testing services so effective is that these security companies don’t use nefarious means to probe your server; they use the tools publicly available to your clients! Thus, if a security company can locate chinks in your digital armour, there’s a high chance that people looking to hack your services can too!

Penetration testing is thus a simple yet very effective way of finding exposed points and fortifying them!

Tip #3 – Managed DDoS Protection:

No website can be considered completely safe until it’s shielded against DDoS attacks. For those of you who don’t know, a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack crashes your servers down and makes it easier for hackers to leak confidential data. This is why you need protect your clients and your business from these attacks.

A typical DDoS protection service monitors all the traffic on your server, and as soon as suspicious activity is detected, it’s flagged and sent to a remote server so that your website remains unaffected! What’s great about these services is that your regular clients don’t suffer even a momentary dip in speed. To them, it’s just business as usual!

If you’re looking to fortify your online presence, we at Lean Security would love to be of assistance to you! We offer incredible security services like managed web security assessment and penetration testing to provide total protection to your website. Contact us today to learn more about how you stand to benefit from our amazing services.