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Improve your security posture.

The world of technology is continuously evolving, from the rise in the Internet of Things (IoT) to the adoption of Software as a Service (SaaS) over traditional in-house applications. And as technologies shift, so does the threat landscape. Yet many organizations adapt their technology without guidance or direction from IT, information security, procurement, or risk specialists.As a Managed Security Services Provider (MSSP), we act as our client’s trusted go-to partner bringing advanced expertise in the current threat landscape. Let us become an extension of your team, whether seeking assistance with 24x7 network security monitoring, Virtual CISO Services, or Penetration Testing.As a Managed Security Services Provider (MSSP), we act as our client’s trusted go-to partner bringing advanced expertise in the current threat landscape. Let us become an extension of your team, whether seeking assistance with 24x7 network security monitoring, Virtual CISO Services, or Penetration Testing.Our core principles are simple. We aim to:i. Be your trusted compliance and risk program advisor.ii. Deliver cost-effective technology to reduce enterprise-wide risk.iii. Provide expert consulting services to support IT teams.iv. Detect and respond to threats on your behalf.v. Bring information security leadership to enterprises of all sizesWhy Choose Us for Cybersecurity Audit & Resilient Enterprise:Cyber Security Services is a specialized consulting firm with a 24x7x365 security operations center headquartered in Columbus, Ohio, and serving clients nationwide. We provide both the industry insight and product expertise you need to manage cybersecurity threats without the added cost of personnel.And we’re vendor agnostic. This means that while other Managed Detection and Response service providers might require the use of their technology, locking you in, our customers are free to use any existing solution they might have without installing a new product. You can also choose any provider’s solution you prefer. For those who don’t already have a solution in place, we can work with you to acquire just the right solution for your environment. And if you change your mind down the road, you’re always free to switch technologies without losing us as your MDR provider.To best protect our client, we use real-time threat-intelligence feeds from both the U.S. government and the private sector to monitor networks, the same intelligence in place within some of the most sensitive environments like the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. Opt for our optional attack blocking at the source, whether switch port or wireless controller, to prevent lateral movement. And get up and running in hours, not weeks. Cyber Security Services can back your organization with 24x7x365 dedicated security coverage, investigating and preventing attacks before they hit your bottom line.

Other

Why Your Business Needs a Computer Network in Office

IMPORTANCE OF COMPUTER NETWORK IN BUSINESSAs a business grows, so does its equipment. The more computers and devices a company has the more spread out the programs and information become. Unless you have your computers networked together.Computer networking is a group of computers that are configured together while not necessarily in the same physical location. When your computers are connected, the transmitted data between the computers make for more seamless communications and operations across the company. BENEFITS OF COMPUTER NETWORKING IN BUSINESS  It’s also very cost-effective as it allows computers to share hardware and software licenses, cutting back on those company expenses.File sharing allows for improved communications on a cohesive network. Consistency across individual computers with a central database creates cohesive operating systems. The benefits for business are larger storage capacity, effective communication, flexibility, and saving money on the costs of software. File sharing allows for improved communications on a cohesive network. Consistency across individual computers with a central database creates cohesive operating systems. The benefits for business are larger storage capacity, effective communication, flexibility, and saving money on the costs of software. Large Storage CapacityWith computer networking, your critical files are all a part of central file servers. Your employees can access these files and learn from the data for improved business operations. A central server lowers the number of storage systems you need for the company’s data. You gain storage space with an increase in employee productivity with access to files. Improved Business CommunicationInformation is the basis of communication. Modern networking allows the transfer of information in real-time anywhere with internet access. When your team has access to network files from any device you have more flexibility with remote workers and employees that need to work outside of the office.The more information available to employees, the more independently they can work. Downtime is a revenue killer. Network access to employees creates the company growth needed to reach long-term business goals.  If you have any issue with one device, you can access your information when you log into another device. This creates network security where you don’t have to worry about losing critical files. Flexibility and ConvenienceAccess to information through the network cuts down on steps that employees take to get the information they need for their daily tasks. When computers aren’t connected you need to transfer files through a USB drive or messages. With computer sharing employees can take files from any other connected computer as if it were on their own. This speeds up the daily tasks of your employees and creates a very functional workflow. Cost Benefits of Computer NetworkingA quality computer network allows for resource sharing across devices. You will need less hardware when your computers are connected and hardware is pricey equipment. Employees won’t need separate printers or backup storage when their computers are connected. You won’t need to install as many software updates and employees can share document scanning software. The ability to share technology assets among employees is one of the biggest cost benefits of this networking solution. Networked Versions of SoftwareBuying software for every computer and device isn’t the most cost effective way to get your employees the tools that they need. Many software companies offer versions of their software that were made for networks. This way you can purchase a single license for the product you need. You can then have it running on the central server that the individual computers are connected to.This puts an end to carrying around a USB drive and trading it with the next employee that needs the license. When you have a team of people with access to the tools they need, you have an efficient team of self-starters.  Improved Customer ServiceWhen your employees have access to company information they are better able to serve customers and clients. They can pull up all the information they need on the customer and provide answers to their questions quickly. They can also add information about the customer into the system so that other employees can be updated in real-time. There are many benefits to computer networking. There are also areas of this network type that need attention to make sure your systems are safe and promote business growth. Choosing the Best Computer Networking MethodThere are a lot of options for your networking system and an IT provider can help you make the best decision for your individual company. More freedom comes with modern computer networking, and you no longer have as many restrictions over what hardware is compatible with the network.THE PERFECT NETWORK NEEDS TO BE DONE RIGHThis way you can have different operating systems across a variety of devices. You can have equipment from different providers working together with one central server. Network SecurityWhen your computers are connected they could be open to more cyber threats. When you have one computer that has an issue it can spread to the rest. Corrupt files are not isolated when you have computer networking. This is not a problem when you have IT support to keep your system as a whole safe. IT consulting will give you all of the information you and your employees need to keep your company data safe. Employees may exchange corrupt files when they don’t know how to recognize and avoid these incidents. Proper training of employees will keep your company data safe while remaining accessible to promote employee productivity. Company security policies are crucial for a company of any size.  GroupOne provides custom IT security plans to protect your company. We get to know you and your business goals to create technology strategies for the growth stage of your company. We know how important company efficiency is and we help provide you with the most cost effective computer networking and support needed to grow a successful business.

Network Security

Network Security Monitoring

Recently I've been studying about Network Security. For a year, I've been using ettercap for pentesting and investigation, I even wrote a Lex app for it, but recently I've found a tool which is pretty similar but way better, logs are pretty organized and have better commands. I must say I will be using linux, there are options for network monitoring in Windows, but I'm not going to talk about them in this article.First of all, network security monitoring allow us to detect and respond to intrusions. The range of the NSM data is:Full content: all the information that cross the networkExtracted content: high level data stream, such as images and such.Session data: Record of the conversation between two nodes (this is the logs that bro generates and the part that I will be focusing).Transaction data: Similar to session data, but focusing on understanding the request an replies.Statistical data: Traffic resulting from various aspects of an activity.Metadata: Studying further the data results of the monitoring and understanding them.Alert data: Intrusion detection.And now I'm introducing Bro tool. Bro it's pretty easy to install. After downloading and opening the directory on the terminal, we can read the INSTALL instructions simply doing cat INSTALL , but it's a classic "./configure, cmake, make". If you have a problem, you should check if your network is wlan0, if not, change it. This took me a while to figure out.Once we installed it, we go to the directory where we saved it. In my case, it's /usr/local/bro but wherever. in the .../bro/bin you shoul see a lot of executables. We will be focusing on broctl, sudo that thing! sudo ./broctl.You should see something like this:Now we are starting. on the bro terminal we will write start that will start the scanning.n another terminal we locate again our bro directory and then we go to .../bro/logs. We should see a log with the date and a directory called current. We are gonna check current (cd current). In that directory we should find a lot of directories, but we are going to center in http.log. The directories are zipped so first we are using sudo gunzip *.log.gz to unzip them. now lets cat http.log.There we can see a lot of information divided in paragraphs. We should clearly see the GET requests in the network. If, for example, we enter www.testmyids.com in the browser, and doing again the cat http.log thing, it should allow us to clearly see the request for a favicon failed. A nice tip would be watching the x509.log directory, too. It contains information about the certificates of the places visited, which tell us the users are entering twitter, facebook, google... etc.When we want to stop we only write "stop" in the bro terminalThere are plenty more commands for bro that will be useful for us to check. You could spend a while analizing all the data, and I assure you, you can get conclussions easily due to it's well organized system.

Other

Mobile App Security Risks and How to Mitigate Them

Mobile app security is a moving target. The need for better functionalities and features along with rapid deployment of software updates often comes at the expense of mobile security.One of the major concerns for mobile app development is the rising mobile app security risks, particularly to prevent data breaches.According to a study, over 10,573 malicious mobile apps were blocked per day in 2018.As technology advances, it has not only become easier to build and deploy apps, but also easy to crack a mobile application’s security as developers are still writing insecure code.Some attackers might try to crack a mobile app to find out more about the special features and other information about your mobile application. Others might do it to breach backend services.But how do you avoid such mobile security threats?Let’s find out.Top Mobile App Security Risks and Ways to Mitigate ThemHere are the top mobile app security risks and ways to mitigate them:In a common mobile app, data is typically exchanged in a client-server fashion. When the application transmits data, it traverses through the internet and the mobile device’s carrier network.1. Insecure CommunicationAttackers might exploit mobile security vulnerabilities to intercept sensitive information or user data while it is traversing across the network.What are the threat agents that exist in insecure communication?• Malware on your mobile device• A malicious actor who shares your local network (monitored or compromised wifi)• Carrier or network devices (proxies, cell towers, routers, etc.)Mobile developers often use SSl/TLS only during authentication but not elsewhere. This leads to an inconsistent security layer which increases the risk of exposing sensitive data such as credentials, personal information, session IDs, and more to interception by attackers.Having a SSL/TLS does not imply that the mobile application is entirely secure. You need to implement strong security protocols throughout the mobile application and its network.How Can You Prevent Insecure Communication?Only establish a secure connection after authenticating the identity of the endpoint server. While applying SSL/TLS to your mobile application, make sure you implement it on the transport channels that the mobile app will use to transverse sensitive data such as session tokens, credentials, etc.Use strong, industry standard cipher suites with appropriate key lengths. Apart from this, also consider using certificates signed by a trusted CA provider and refrain from allowing self-signed certificates. You should also consider certificate pinning for sensitive applications.Remember to account for third-parties like social networks as well by using their TLS versions when a mobile application runs a routine using webkit/browser.2. Lack of Input ValidationConsider applying an additional layer of encryption to any sensitive data before it is even given to the SSL channel. If security vulnerabilities are found in the SSL implementation, the encryption layer will act as a secondary defense against attacks.Input validation is the process of assessing input data to ensure that it is properly formed, preventing malformed data that might consist of harmful code or may trigger malfunction in the mobile app.What is the impact of poor input validation in mobile apps?Why is it a mobile security threat? Here’s why:When the mobile application does not validate input properly, it puts the application at risk of exposure to attackers who might be able to inject malicious data input and gain access to sensitive data in the app or breach backend data stores.Ideally, input validation should occur instantly after the data is received from an external system. This includes data from third-party vendors, partners, regulators, or suppliers, each of which could be compromised to deliver malformed data.While input validation is not sufficient to be used as a primary defense against preventing mobile app security risks, it is a significant way to filter out malicious data if implemented properly.How Can You Prevent Weak Input Validation?\You can implement input validation by using programming techniques that facilitate the effective enforcement of data correctness such as:• Minimum and maximum value range check for dates and numerical parameters along with length check of strings• Input validation against XML Schema and JSON Scheme• Minimum and maximum value range check for strings, minimum and maximum length check for dates and numerical parameters.• Regular expressions for any other structured data covering the entire input string (^...$) and avoiding using "any character" wildcard (e.g. as . or• Array of permitted values for small sets of string parameters (e.g. hours of days)Alternatively, a more efficient way to prevent attacks caused by poor input validation is to only allow known good rather than only rejecting known bad. This can set up much more stringent controls if done properly.If the input data is structured like social security numbers, dates, email addresses, zip codes, etc, then the mobile app developer should be able to build and implement a strong input data validation pattern on the basis of regular expressions.However, if the input data comes in a fixed set of options, such as radio buttons or drop down list, then the input data should match exactly as one of the options available to the user from the mobile application.Final ThoughtsIt is not possible to learn about all of the mobile app security risks that exist. But with the help of the above information about the most common mobile app security risks, you can secure your mobile apps from the biggest security threats.

Web Application Security

Why Is Penetration Testing Important For Your Website?

We often see news headlines about security breaches in big companies and the loss such breaches amount to. In today's world, hackers have advanced tools and techniques to identify even the smallest vulnerabilities in a company’s internet-facing application. They exploit these vulnerabilities to compromise the security of a system. What’s even worse is that the IT teams or network admins often identify the attack after it’s too late. And that’s exactly where the penetration testing comes in.What Is Penetration Testing?Penetration testing or pentesting is a popular security practice. Like we mentioned earlier, hackers look for vulnerabilities in an application or a network which they can exploit. The purpose of a penetration test is to identify these vulnerabilities before hackers do and patch them up on time. Pentesting involves a team of ethical hackers attempting to infiltrate all the security defenses and gain access to the application.Penetration testing is different from a vulnerability assessment scan. A vulnerability assessment will only give you a list of vulnerabilities. On the other hand, a penetration test will list out the vulnerabilities, their severity, and all possible fixes for them. Moreover, penetration tests usually comprise both human and automated tests. All this makes penetration testing a superior and efficient security practice.Why Penetration Testing is required?Penetration testing is popular for good reason. You can reap so many benefits from performing pentests regularly. It truly is an asset to your security system. So, let’s get right into the various benefits of penetration tests:1. Allows you to fix vulnerabilitiesPenetration testing uncovers even the smallest vulnerabilities on your application. Moreover, the vulnerabilities found will be classified into low risk, medium risk, and high risk. Using this information, you can prioritize the vulnerabilities and allot resources accordingly.Fixing these vulnerabilities will strengthen and reinforce the existing security system and strategy. Moreover, it gives you an opportunity to fix issues you didn’t know existed in your IT infrastructure.We are also seeing lot of traction for Smart Contract Audit as blockchain technology is rising.Furthermore, pentesters also reveal the damage that can occur, if a hacker was to exploit the vulnerabilities. Knowing this can help you prepare for a cyberattack accordingly. Lastly, most penetration testers like Astra provide assistance with fixing the loopholes they found. After a pentest, you are likely to receive a comprehensive report with all the information you need.i .Protects your business from potential attacksAccording to CNBC, hackers target small businesses 43% of the time considering just 14% of them are prepared to defend themselves. However, by conducting penetration tests, you can always stay a step ahead of hackers. You can shut all possible entries to your system and keep intruders out of your business.ii. Data ProtectionSensitive data falling into the wrong hands is every business owner's worst nightmare. Indeed it can definitely take a massive toll on the business itself from which it may never recover. Penetration tests can safeguard data by preventing any possible attack. For this reason, performing a penetration test is an absolute necessity.iii .Compliance with security regulations and lawsPenetration testing helps you with the requirements of PCI-DSS, GDPR, HIPAA, ISO-27001, etc. These are data compliance laws that are introduced by various governments and organizations in order to protect data. If a business is not compliant with these regulations, it will be subjected to severe ramifications in the form of hefty fines and bans.if a successful cyberattack was to take place, the company has to pay fines and compensations. Furthermore, they will have to spend a very significant amount of money for fixing the damages caused by the attack. They will also have to spend money upgrading the existing security system seeing as it wasn’t very effective in keeping hackers out. Moreover, when a cyberattack occurs all activities will cease costing their business a lot of money.According to Cybersecurity Ventures, around the globe cybercrime costs will hit $6 trillion annually by 2021. Here are some of the types of attacks you can face and the average cost of dealing with them:Ransomware attack - $133,000 per yearMalware attack - $2.6 million per yearData breaches - $3.92 million per yearPhishing - $17,700 per minuteFor better protection, it is always recommended to audit for your cloud infra too to ensure that all ports are secured, data is encrypted and best security practices are followed.ConclusionRoutine penetration testing should really be a priority if you are a website owner. It can reduce the chances of receiving a cyberattack by a huge margin. Ideally, this itself is reason enough to start conducting penetration tests. 

IOT Security

IoT Security: What Your Business Needs to Know

The internet of things (IoT) remains a popular subset of the information technology (IT) realm. However, despite its advancements, IoT is still in its infancy. By 2027, the global IoT market is estimated to be worth over $1,463.19 billion USD. With massive leaps in IoT technology and a rapidly changing landscape, IoT security is a budding concern. Here's what you need to know about IoT security.IoT Security Is a Difficult TaskIoT security is tough to implement. A major contributing factor is the complexity of IoT and its many factors. Instead of the back end, there's network security and physical device security to consider as well.The current landscape values ease of use over security. As Manuel Pais points out in DZone's guide to IoT, there's an onus on plug-and-play capability. This prioritizes operability and usability over security.But what's most important for security is testability and configurability. As such, it's necessary to account for testable, configurable software just as much as operable software. Security threats originate from potential DDoS attacks as much as the intentional abuse of hardware and software.What makes IoT security such a tough challenge is that it includes the entire framework from IoT hardware and software to the network.Separate Sci-Fi From RealityArtificial intelligence (AI) is steadily progressing. Still, despite improvements made to the likes of Cortana and Siri, it's nothing similar to Hal 9000 or the T-1000. Similarly, separate reality from fiction to determine the reality of threats posed by IoT security.In 2017, Vizio's smart televisions were found to spy on owners and capture data, which was sold to advertisers. Three years prior, internet-connected fridges were linked to a botnet attack that sent more than 750,000 spam emails.Although there's an increased reliance on interconnected devices, there are steps you can take to protect your business:Digital signatures: From a software perspective, digital signatures provide added security. Digital signatures attached to software ensure they don't run unauthorized programs.Connectivity: Firewalls remain essential in IoT security. A firewall filters protocols to check that network-enabled devices interface properly, and as such, may identify network-based security threats to IoT devices, data, and the network. But within connectivity, there are various protocols used by IoT devices and software; these include Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, NFC, Ethernet, and more.Update selectively: Updates and patches may fix vulnerabilities. A subtle hack threatening users of multimedia software, such as VLC, Kodi, and Stremio, left more than 200 million devices, including many IoT gadgets like Raspberry Pis, vulnerable.Consider the entire infrastructure: IoT isn't merely about the hardware, software, or network. Instead, IoT is its own environment. Consider each component, from the physical hardware and its placement to software to the network. Accounting for IoT systems as a whole insulates you from vulnerabilities.Think about misuse: A 2017 Burger King ad set off users' Google Home AI hubs in what could have been the largest publicity stunt of the year. This follows a 2014 Xbox ad where 'Breaking Bad' actor Aaron Paul accidentally turned on Xbox consoles with a voice prompt.Data security: Data security is arguably the most prominent area of IoT security. All IoT devices gather data, but it's the transfer and recording of the data that presents the threat. Consider how data is transmitted and stored when accounting for data and analytics security in IoT.Internet of Threats: What You Need to Know About IoT SecurityIoT security is a hot topic. But consider real and present threats rather than far-fetched sci-fi scenarios that could inflict a lot of pain and damage to your business. Awareness of IoT connectivity, the complete hardware, software, and network environment, and the latest vulnerabilities goes a long way toward protecting yourself against IoT threats.