Blog / Can Your Cybersecurity Posture Stand Up to… Cats?
A flexible, adaptable cybersecurity posture is key.
Keeping up-to-date on the latest and most dangerous cybersecurity attacks is a key part of my responsibilities at TRINUS. This means plenty of online research about breaches and other cybersecurity events the world over (hackers typically know no borders). By tracking these events, cybersecurity professionals like myself get a bird’s eye view of how situations develop and what your organization may need to help ensure its cybersecurity posture is strong enough to withstand the latest hacks.
So how flexible and adaptable do your processes and systems need to be? Potentially good enough to withstand an attack by one of the deadliest predators known, the domestic cat! That’s right, a Veterans Affairs office in Missouri was taken down briefly by a frisky feline felon. How exactly did this cute clandestine criminal cause such a catastrophe? By jumping on a keyboard of course! Anyone who has a pet cat understands how good they are at not just jumping onto a keyboard unannounced, but also how impossibly perfect they are at choosing the worst time to do so.
Kidding aside, what actually happened? Well, the “victims” haven’t provided an explicit blow-by-blow account of the ordeal, but whatever it was took only a few clicks or keystrokes to destroy. Depending on exactly where the user was in the affected system at the time of furball’s ferocious assault the result could have been something like dropping a database or uninstalling key software. Four hours of downtime would be about right for someone to notice an issue, report the problem, determine the cause, and restore a backup.
One part of having good security is to have a solid understanding of your organization, including your network. To help, consider completing a Business Impact Analysis, or BIA, to determine which parts of you organization are critical, important, nice-to-have, and so forth. For example, it might be annoying that a file server you have for storing important documents gets taken down, but would it really interfere with overall workflow and immediate needs? Sure those SLAs are important, but you don’t need one immediately on hand when there’s an issue. But your helpdesk software? Your online storefront? Your payment processor? Those are usually mission-critical elements a business can’t go without for any extended length of time. Identifying what you need to fix after an attack, cat-related or otherwise, versus what you need to fix right now, will help you plan the best response and generally improve your overall cybersecurity posture.
Of course, in reality most businesses don’t actually need to account for the presence of pets in your cybersecurity posture, but you do need to consider human error. Understanding what could go wrong, which resources are important and taking appropriate actions to make they are protected will go a long way towards minimizing the impact of such mistakes.
Todays Shakespeare quote comes from Much Ado about Nothing, “What though care killed a cat, thou hast mettle enough in thee to kill care.”
If you’re organization is looking to build a cybersecurity posture that can withstand even the deadliest cat attacks, we’d be happy to help develop an exhaustive business impact analysis for exactly these situations. So contact TRINUS today and get yourself some stress-free IT.
