Daily Archives

September 2, 2020

Network Design

Must Read: Best Practices For SMB Cyber Security

By Featured, Superfast IT Networks No Comments

One single vulnerability is all an attacker needs to crumble your business reputation you built for years within minutes.

With 99.8% of business in Australia being small-to-medium businesses, employing 7.3 million people, small businesses are a large contributor to Australia’s prosperity. It is important that Australia’s small and medium businesses understand their cyber security risks, and what they can do to protect themselves, their customers and their suppliers. A single hack can cost a small business everything. Securing all network elements within your organization is vital to all SMB IT admins. 

The Australian Cyber Security Centre (ACSC) announced the key areas of cyber threats, Malware, Scam Emails, Ransomware and etc. To avoid all possible hacking, it recommends SMB’s to apply continuous cyber security measures at every level.  But not all SMB can afford the whole package of solutions. Which areas should SMB focus and invest most? Here are some aspects to consider to enhance the cyber security of your business.

Email Security

Attackers are now shifting to target individual users instead of enterprise email infrastructure. Malware and fraudulent are mostly spread through your email infrastructure, which you would like to trust. The links, files, or even pictures might help attackers to spread malicious code, which might eventually help attackers to gain access to confidential company data.

Strengthen your security defenses with better control over all aspects of inbound and outbound emails. You need advanced email protection to provide both cloud and on-premise email security solution continually filters and archives malicious mail before it even hit your network.

DNS Server

Domain Name System can boost your network, also could be the honeypot of your infrastructure. Gartner estimated that 25% of corporate data traffic will bypass perimeter security (Firewall). DNS is an open protocol used by almost all applications over Internet. The open nature has made DNS become a leading pathway for ransomwares and other security risks.

Choosing right platform to defend the cyber threats before it even happens. All applications are using DNS as the pathway for services, so does cyber threats. Before even triggering the cyber threats over the Internet, you would be able to block and inspect it, or proxy suspicious request.

It will help the IT admin to stop the attack before it even begins.

Perimeter Security - Firewall

As the heart of the whole security package in most SMB network, firewall plays a critical role and would be the most cost-effective investment to all SMBs. Industry reports indicate that more than half of SMBs suffer data breaches, yet less than 30% have effective protection against cyberattacks. 

Start investing on your perimeter which could be the easiest option to help your IT admin to protect against a variety of malicious data and users and can also offer peripheral security services to your business. Below is an image of an industry leading firewall by Fortinet that could be a great option for your SMB.

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Vulnerability Scan

Vulnerability management involves implementing a tailored solution to ensure the overall risk across your network environment is reduced. A vulnerability management program is to ensure that you stay ahead of any attacks defend all aspects of the network. Scanning and reporting should be based on the needs specific to your organization. This also ensures that you can allocate resources on other essential aspects of the business while we ensure that your network’s vulnerability levels are kept to a minimum.

Cisco

Free Cisco Bug Search Tool By Sprint Networks

By Featured, Superfast IT Networks No Comments

We rely on network devices and the network itself to protect company sensitive data. Due to the complexity and reliance of modern day networks and devices, keeping your network border protected is more importent than ever before. Even for a highly reputed OEM such as Cisco, bugs tend to be a common topic of discussion.  A successful exploit of a bug in your Cisco device could allow an attacker to gain privileges beyond what would normally be authorised for their configured user authorisation level. The attacker may be able to access sensitive information, modify the system configuration, or impact the availability of the affected system. As a system admin/manager it is your responsibility to identify and have an understanding of the bugs in the company system.

We are excited to introduce our new Cisco Bug Search Tool developed right here at Sprint Networks. This tool is currently in Beta, and being worked on to improve user experience around navigation, personalisation and to further add functionality. We also encourage you to provide us feedback on this new tool, as we continue to improve it behind the scene. This article provides a step by step guide on how to get started with the tool.

  • Click on the link below to download the tool. Click on “Cisco Bug Tool” tab and enter in your details, an email will be sent to you with the download link.
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  • Once you download the tool, extract the Zip file.
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  • Open the extracted exe file and choose either option 1 – Find bugs of one device, or option 2 – Find bugs of multiple devices.
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  • We will choose option 1 to keep things simple. Once you enter in “1”, choose your Cisco device software platform. Option 1 – IOS and option 2 – IOSXE.
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  • We will choose option 1 – IOS as shown below. The version of your Cisco device can be found by entering “Show Version” in privileged mode in the Cisco CLI. Enter in your Cisco device software version.
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  • After you enter in the software version, an excel sheet will be generated in the same path as the tool itself. The excel sheet will highlight the severity of the bug and give a Cisco URL to find out more about the bug in depth.
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Please note that this is only a trial version and will not store any of your information.  Sprint Networks do not take any responsibility of any information provided using this tool. Any  information provided will be sent directly  to Cisco Cloud to retrieve the relevant bugs from Cisco PSIRT.

Tool Demonstration

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