In the dynamic world of IT management, streamlining tasks and enhancing efficiency isn’t just beneficial; it’s essential. Copilot, Microsoft’s generative AI assistant, is transforming how IT managers and professionals handle their daily workload. By integrating Copilot into your IT operations, you can elevate your productivity and precision to new heights.
Start Your Day with Copilot, Not Coffee
As an IT manager, mornings can be hectic, filled with catching up on missed meetings and setting the day’s agenda. With Copilot’s integration with tools like Jira, you can have a prioritized list of tasks and updates ready before your first cup of coffee. No need to sift through countless emails or dashboards—Copilot does the heavy lifting, ensuring you start your day efficiently.
Streamlining Stakeholder Communications
Preparing for stakeholder meetings can be overwhelming, requiring you to stay on top of every message, document, and task. Copilot’s seamless integration with communication platforms like Teams helps you summarize key points and action items. This ensures you enter each meeting fully informed and ready to engage effectively.
Streamlined documentation and reporting
IT Managers are often bogged down with processing documentation, reporting, and preparing presentations. Copilot’s assistive features in Word and PowerPoint transform these manual, time-consuming processes into quick, effortless tasks. You can generate comprehensive proposals and presentations from your data, complete with key insights and actionable steps, all while maintaining focus on content that resonates with your stakeholders.
Analyzing IT strategies and technical reviews demands attention to detail and the ability to categorize information by impact, initiative, and financial implications. Copilot in Excel serves as your analytical partner, helping you summarize complex data into coherent, stakeholder-friendly tables saving you time and presenting data effectively.
Wind Down with Effective Feedback and Followups
As the working day nears a close, providing feedback on initiatives and projects is crucial. Drafting clear, concise, and actionable emails to stakeholders ensures continuous improvement and engagement. Copilot’s functionality within Outlook simplifies this process, keeping your projects on track and your team informed.
Copilot Advanced IT for Efficient IT Managers
For IT managers, Copilot is more than just a tool—it’s a digital assistant that adapts to your needs, streamlines your workflow, and empowers you to focus on delivering value and innovation within your organization. Every minute counts, and Copilot ensures your business keeps pace and sets efficiency standards for the entire organization.
By integrating Copilot into your working day, you get more than just a license; you gain a competitive edge.
Interested in learning how Copilot can elevate your IT operations? Contact us for licensing details and expert Copilot consulting services to harness the full potential of your IT infrastructure management.
Microsoft’s artificial intelligence assistant Copilot is well known for its ability to cut through mundane tasks enabling people to draft content and summarise meetings quicker and in context but its newest version, which went live this year, has major implications for improving enterprise efficiency and productivity. Here’s how:
Assisting Software Development:
Copilot can help complete lines of code, debugging, or even writing entire functions and GitHub Copilot can help programmers simplify their coding process. So instead of spending time on routine coding tasks or searching for bugs in code, developers can focus on complex problem-solving and innovation.
Helps Content Creation:
Copilot applications like Jarvis and Copy.ai make it easier for writers to create copy. These tools help generate marketing copy and more so that writers can focus on research, strategy, and execution.
Assisting With Legal Documentation:
Corporate or contract law professionals can use Copilot to automate the review and drafting of legal documents. AI speeds up this normally time intensive task and lowers the chance of human error.
HealthCare Diagnosis & Treatment Plans:
Copilot can help medical professionals in diagnosing conditions and creating personalized treatment plans. Combining Copilot with a medical database offers quick access to relevant information, which leads to faster and more accurate diagnoses and more effective treatment strategies. The result is improved patient care experiences.
Copilot can help customer service representatives deliver faster and more accurate support. AI can suggest the best responses or solutions by analysing customer queries and improving customer satisfaction. Copilot skims available information to provide a detailed summary and overview helping businesses maintain high service levels.
Creating Personalized Learning Experiences in Education:
Using Copilot in education enables faster creation of learning materials and the ability to cater to individual learning styles. Currently, learning materials are created for mass consumption but not everyone learns at the same pace or at the same level. Through Copilot and adaptive AI, a more tailored approach to distance learning can be created so that students at all stages of the learning curve have content available to them through more accessible means.
Predictive Modelling & Data Analysis in Finance:
Banking, investment, or insurance professionals constantly make decisions based on data. Using Copilot automation to improve the data analysis enables faster identification of trends and quicker strategic decision-making.
Digital Marketing Campaign Optimization:
Copilot can optimize advertising campaigns and strategy planning to enable digital marketers to analyse their audience faster and with more depth. Automation can analyse data from a previous campaign and suggest improvements, target demographics, and content strategies that lead to higher engagement rates and ROI. Marketers can then consistently refine their efforts to reach wider audiences and gain maximum impact.
Improving Supply Chain Management Logistics:
Automation delivers a competitive edge in logistics and distribution. Planning optimal routes, managing inventories, and predicting demand take considerable time and manpower. Through Copilot, operations are more efficient, costs are lowered, and operators can pivot to meet demands faster while preparing for future demand.
Architects and designers can use Copilot applications to enable more efficient design processes by providing real-time suggestions and automate parts of the design process. Professionals then have more time to explore creative solutions while project development and client presentations become much easier to shape.
Want to know more about how Copilot can supercharge your efficiency and productivity? Contact us for expert Copilot consulting. email: sales.uae@cobweb.com or call +971 4 455 3100.
As cyber attacks become more advanced and intricate, being clued up on the different kinds of threats you’ll face is vital.
There are a plethora of different attacks in the arsenal of the modern attacker, so knowing what you’ll be up against is important for any modern organisation. By preparing yourself and knowing what you’re up against, you can ensure that you’re secure.
That’s why in this article, we’re going to go over the eight most common forms of cyberattack that you’ll face in 2023, and how you can get started in protecting yourself today.
Phishing
Phishing — the most common form of attack — is trying to trick someone to get their details. Usually using realistic-looking important emails from what would be a reputable source, a phishing attack aims to trick the victim into thinking that they’re someone else.
For example, common phishing attacks tend to be scammers pretending to be Amazon or a bank, trying to get card details off of unaware victims. These scams are easy to fall for if you’re not vigilant.
Malware-based Attacks
Malware is software that is used in a malicious manner. This will be software within your system that is usually built to do damage to your infrastructure. With this, hackers can easily cause significant damage throughout your system and steal your data.
Malware traditionally comes in the form of a trojan attack — named after the trojan horse, in which the malware is bundled with another piece of harmless software. This is an easy way to get the ‘payload’ (the virus) into your system to wreak havoc.
Enforcing security compliance throughout your organisation and educating on the dangers of downloading files from unknown sources is the best way to stop malware from entering your organisation.
Investing in good antivirus software throughout your business is also a way to stamp out malware at the roots. If you’re looking to get started with good antivirus software, get in touch with us today.
Denial of service (DOS) attacks are attacks that aim to simply disable the day-to-day infrastructure of a business. DOS attacks will usually send lots of requests to a server with the aim to overload it. This will deny service to your whole organisation and can be very crippling.
Tools like Azure DDOS Protect offer protection from DOS attacks by enforcing limits on the number of requests that can be sent to your server in one go. These attacks are simply stoppable by having the correct security — to make sure that you’re secure against DOS attacks, get in touch today.
Spoofing
Spoofing attacks are the type of attacks where the attacker masquerades as trusted personnel to push someone to do something. This attack uses social engineering to take advantage of a victim and manipulate them to the attacker’s ideal outcome.
IP Spoofing attacks are a specific kind of spoofing attack that comes with your typical DOS attack. This is when packets are altered to appear that they’re coming from a trusted network, to gain access to the server. This is why monitoring network activity within your organisation is crucial.
Credential Stuffing
Credential stuffing is when an attacker uses stolen credentials to try to log into as many websites as possible. The aim is to target those who reuse credentials — when the credentials are breached on one website, credential stuffing allows the attacker to try to access other websites and accounts using the same credentials.
If a victim is successfully breached, a hacker could potentially gain control of every account they have — including work accounts. This is why encouraging and enforcing good password hygiene is crucial (as well as ensuring password changes are enforced throughout your organization).
Supply Chain Attacks
Supply chain attacks are intricate attacks in which an attacker would target a third-party organisation to try to launch an attack into your system by infecting their services with some kind of payload.
This is usually to try to cause crippling damage to your organisation in a completely unexpected way or to cause damage to multiple organisations at once.
The aim of this is to access a secure system from a much less secure breach point, to try to gain access to the organisation and breach through the security that is currently protecting your system.
Insider Threats
Insider threats are when an insider — someone within your organisation — does something to harm your organisation. This is uncommon, but can sometimes happen as part of revenge attacks or other forms of corruption.
The number of types of attacks that can occur from an insider is endless — from theft, to sabotage, and even physical violence, these can be hard to protect yourself against.
The best way to make sure that this isn’t a threat to you is to make sure to monitor staff and security and ensure that employees only have access to what they need to complete their tasks.
Manin-the-Middle Attacks
A man-in-the-middle (MITM) attack is when something is intercepting communications between two points. This can be either to collect information or possibly even sabotage the communication between two points.
This is an attack which is often not used due to the keyway to beat it — end-to-end encryption. End-to-end encryption is a must for any modern organisation, as it ensures that all data is transmitted between two points securely.
How We Can Secure Your Business
Cybersecurity knowledge is of utmost importance for any organisation looking to fend off any attackers and malicious users. By educating yourself and your organisation on these threats, you can ensure that your organisation is prepared and protected going forward.
There are software and tools available to help counteract cyber-attacks, and they can be a huge help in keeping your organisation secure. If you’re looking to get started with security tools, get in touch with us today. We’ll be able to help secure your organisation and ensure that your security posture is unbreakable.
In today’s digital age, email has become the backbone of business communication. With an astounding 361.6 billion emails sent and received daily—a figure projected to reach 392.5 billion within the next two years—it’s clear that email is indispensable in our professional lives. However, this massive reliance on email also presents a significant drawback: it has become the preferred entry point for cybercriminals aiming to infiltrate sensitive data, often leading to devastating consequences for businesses.
The email security landscape is deteriorating rapidly as cyber threats become increasingly sophisticated. Alarmingly, over 90% of cyberattacks begin with a simple email, with many attacks cleverly designed to bypass standard defenses like Microsoft’s. As cybercriminals up their game, it’s critical that businesses also strengthen their defenses.
Enter Mimecast: AI-Powered Email Security for a New Era
At the forefront of this battle against email-borne threats is Mimecast, a leader in email security solutions. Recognizing the escalating dangers, Mimecast is harnessing the power of artificial intelligence to fortify its defenses with the new Mimecast Email Security Cloud Integrated (CI) solution. This cutting-edge tool is specifically designed to enhance and extend the protective capabilities of Microsoft 365, making it a vital asset for any organization looking to bolster its email security.
Mimecast’s approach to email security is all about flexibility and effectiveness. Whether a business requires advanced administrative controls for a complex email environment, or a quick-to-deploy solution optimized right out of the box, Mimecast delivers top-tier security tailored to meet diverse needs.
In a world where remote work has become the norm, employees and organizations are more vulnerable to email-based cyberattacks than ever before. Business Email Compromise (BEC) and other sophisticated threats are now rampant, as cybercriminals exploit the distractions and less secure environments of remote workers. With workers logging in from various locations—be it home, hotels, or coffee shops—sometimes even using personal devices, the risk of inadvertently opening a malicious email or clicking a harmful link has never been higher.
Mimecast’s CI Solution – a Game-Changer
For IT and security teams, the challenge of securing email has never been more daunting. With attack volumes and sophistication on the rise, businesses need solutions that are both robust and easy to manage. Mimecast’s newest offering, Email Security CI, is an integrated cloud solution that enhances Microsoft 365 protections without requiring an MX record change. It deploys in just minutes and offers out-of-the-box optimization, making it an ideal choice for teams seeking to simplify their email security management while ensuring comprehensive protection.
Mimecast’s Email Security CI solution provides organizations with world-class security without forcing them to choose between different protection strategies. Whether a business opts for a secure email gateway or an integrated cloud email security approach, Mimecast ensures that their email remains secure against even the most advanced threats.
The Growing Importance of Secure Email
In a world where remote work has become the norm, employees and organizations are more vulnerable to email-based cyberattacks than ever before. Business Email Compromise (BEC) and other sophisticated threats are now rampant, as cybercriminals exploit the distractions and less secure environments of remote workers. With workers logging in from various locations—be it home, hotels, or coffee shops—sometimes even using personal devices, the risk of inadvertently opening a malicious email or clicking a harmful link has never been higher.
Organizations across all sectors and regions must prioritize email security to protect their data, their reputations and bottom lines. The stakes are high, and the consequences of a successful cyberattack can be catastrophic, potentially leading to financial loss, reputational damage, and in the worst cases, job losses.
Join Our Webinar: Safeguard Your Business
It’s clear that the challenges in email security will only continue to grow. To help businesses stay ahead of these threats, Cobweb & Mimecast are jointly hosting an exclusive webinar on Wednesday, September 25th at 3 PM GST. Titled ‘Email Security 2024 – Threats & Cost-Effective Solutions,’ this webinar will delve into the most pressing cyberthreats targeting email and provide actionable insights on how to keep your business secure.
During the session, you’ll discover:
The evolving cyber threat landscape
The benefits of Mimecast’s new Email Security Cloud Integrated solution
How Mimecast CI can be deployed in under 5 minutes to defend against all email threats, including social engineering and insider risks
Why additional security layers are crucial for comprehensive protection
Attendees will also have the opportunity to access a free 30-day trial of Mimecast’s email protection and pose their most pressing security concerns to Mimecast’s experts.
Don’t miss out on this opportunity to strengthen your organization’s email security. Sign up below and take the first step toward safeguarding your business.
This increase in effectiveness is in part due to the advancements in AI technology used within modern cybersecurity solutions. This allows them to stop zero-day exploits and reduce the chance of businesses falling victim to a variety of attacks.
However, as these low-effort attacks are no longer viable for cybercriminals, some have shifted their focus away from targeting technology to hacking humans. These are known as social engineering attacks. In this blog, we will explore some key social engineering tactics, find out what is at risk if your business falls victim to one of these attacks, and what steps you can take to reduce your cyber risk.
What is Social Engineering?
Social engineering attacks are a broad category of cyberattacks that include some form of psychological manipulation to trick employees into sharing confidential or sensitive information. These attacks rely on human interaction and can be conducted via email, phone call, SMS, instant messaging or in-person communication.
Whilst a well-crafted social engineering attack does take time and expertise, they are a common method for cybercriminals, as it is easier to exploit vulnerabilities within humans than in software. For example, it is much easier to trick an employee into sharing their password, rather than brute forcing a password. Did you know that an 8-character password has over six quadrillion possible combinations?
Social Engineering Tactics
The first stage of any social engineering attack is investigation. In order to craft an attack, the bad actor needs to have an understanding of the target organisation and employee. This stage is also known as open-source intelligence (OSINT) gathering, as the collection of data is gathered from publicly available sources. Some of these sources include public social media accounts, Google Maps images of office spaces, company websites and viewing EXIF data from images.
Once the bad actor has researched their target, the next stage begins, the hook. This is when the cybercriminal engages the target and starts manipulating them into forming a relationship or trusting them. A common method to develop this trust is reciprocity, whereby the bad actor gives the target some information or does a favour for them, knowing that in the future the victim will be more likely to reciprocate and share sensitive information.
Once the cybercriminal has been able to expand their foothold, they can execute the attack. This may include a phishing attack, credential theft, planting of malware or physically entering an office space. Depending on how effective the investigation and hook were, the target may not even realise they are under attack.
If this is the case, the final stage is to exit. This is where the cybercriminal removes traces of malware, covers their tracks and ends their relationship with the target individual.
To illustrate the potential fallout from a social engineering attack, and some of the common forms of attack, we have 3 recent examples.
DoL Brand Impersonation
In late 2021, email security provider INKY detected several phishing emails that were impersonating the United States Department of Labor (DoL). The phishing emails targeted stakeholders, asking them to submit a bid for a government project.
In order to ‘submit the bid’ they had to open the attached PDF and click the ‘BID’ button. This took the victim to a malicious website, with the same HTML and CSS as the real DoL website. From here, they were prompted to log in with their Microsoft 365 credentials, and upon submission, the hacker was able to harvest all the credentials, without the victim even knowing.
Source: INKY
AI-Based Vishing Targeting UK Energy Firm
In 2019, the CEO of an unnamed UK-based energy firm was contacted by who they thought was their boss, demanding a €220,000 bank transfer to a Hungarian supplier. The call did not raise suspicion for the CEO, as the person on the other end of the phone had the same accent and intonation as his German boss. However, this was not the case, as it is believed that the voice on the other end of the phone was an AI-based voice generation software.
The attack was successful, and the money was transferred to a fraudulent account. This is a prime example of a novel social engineering attack, as it was only successful as the attacker had previously researched the victim, and crafted the attack to manipulate the CEO.
Business Email Compromise Costing Facebook and Google $100 Million
A few years ago, a Lithuanian man crafted the largest social engineering attack of all time. He created a fraudulent company, pretending to be a computer manufacturer working with Google and Facebook. He then targeted specific individuals within those two companies, invoicing them for goods and services that a real manufacturer had provided.
Over 2 years, the man was able to fraudulently obtain over $100 million from Facebook and Google and was only caught 2 years after the attack.
How to Protect Your Business
It can be difficult to protect your business against complex social engineering attacks, especially as security solutions cannot supply 100% protection against many of the tactics used in these attacks.
However, email security and phishing prevention will not stop vishing attacks, in-person attacks, or phishing attacks not carried out via corporate email. In order to safeguard against these attacks, businesses need to have a strong cybersecurity education and awareness training program. This will ensure that employees are aware of common social engineer attack methods, and how to detect and report them.
Finally, it goes without saying that all businesses should have multifactor authentication enabled. This simple control can stop 99.9% of account compromise attacks and does not take long to enable. With MFA, even if an employee shares their password with a bad actor, they will not be able to log in without the additional authentication method.
How We Can Help
For businesses without security expertise, social engineering attacks can be difficult to protect against. Especially if your business does not already have a comprehensive cybersecurity awareness training program.
If you are concerned about your organisation’s security posture, contact us today and we can help ensure you’re doing everything you can to reduce your overall cyber risk.
While the internet has many benefits for modern businesses, there are also some issues to be aware of within the online space. With this, it’s vital to be aware of the malicious actions that a bad-faith actor can take to, at worst, damage your company.
Emails are one of the most vulnerable points at which your company could be in danger. With many different attacks and vulnerabilities involving social engineering, even a simple click on a link within an email could cause tons of damage. But some methods are more dangerous than others.
In this article, we’re going to go over the difference between spam emails and phishing emails, and how you can protect your business from them.
What is a Spam Email?
Spam email (or junk mail) is a type of email that is quite common online. In fact, you probably have at least some spams within your email ‘Spam’ folder right now.
These kinds of emails are simply just a form of mass marketing, that is used to advertise a service (whether it be a legitimate service or a scam) for sale to a large number of people with ease.
Email spammers tend to acquire their victims’ email addresses from a wide range of sources and constantly bulk-send advertisements to their list of emails, not caring about who’s on there.
Commonly, you’ll see spam emails advertising adult websites, gambling websites, and insurance websites. These are usually scams, though it’s incredibly easy to tell that these emails are spam and will be put into your email client’s spam folder automatically, so you don’t have to manually delete them.
However, even newsletters and other opt-in emails from legitimate places are seen as spam. Generally, spam is just unwanted/unsolicited emails, and there’s nothing inherently malicious about another email saying that there’s a sale at a clothes shop — even if they can be annoying.
Phishing is much more dangerous and malicious, however…
A phishing email is an email that is designed to intentionally deceive the recipient into giving access to an account or service. This social engineering scam is one of the most dangerous online attacks, as it takes advantage of unsuspecting or vulnerable people first and foremost.
Unlike low-effort spam mail, these emails are designed to trick unsuspecting victims into handing over sensitive information such as passwords, bank information, and even administrative access to a business system in the worst case.
The key to phishing scams is that they look legitimate at first glance and are designed to trigger the recipient to panic. They’ll often say something like “Your account has withdrawn £1294.90” and look deceptively similar to an email from a bank — in the example of a bank phishing scam — and will redirect you to a fake login portal to try to get you to enter your bank login.
These emails are easy to spot to the trained eye — as we’ll go over further on — but even those who are experts can be tricked. For example, famous cybersecurity expert and scam exposer Jim Browning fell victim to a very realistic-looking phishing attack that temporarily restricted access to his whole YouTube channel.
This video is his recounting of the scam, and is a great example of the types of high-level phishing attacks that you may encounter:
Key Differences
With these attacks becoming harder to spot every day, it’s important to educate yourself on how to stop them. To do so, you need to know the key differences between general spam and phishing.
Spam emails will generally appear (and often will be) benign, but phishing emails will use specific language to create a sense of urgency.
Where spam emails will often be incredibly low quality, phishing emails will look realistic to try to convince you that it is in fact a real email.
Phishing emails will always try their hardest to emulate coming from a real company — such as the actual layout of the email and the email address (a phishing email may use — in the example of Lloyds Bank — Admin@LIoydsBank.com (the second L in the ‘Lloyds’ is actually i).
Otherwise, there isn’t much of a difference between the two, as phishing is generally considered to be a type of spam email. However, while spam is usually annoying and harmless, phishing is deadly and dangerous.
How to Protect Your Business
There are several steps that your business can take to protect itself from spam and (more importantly) phishing.
1) Recognise the Signs of a Phishing Attack
Phishing attacks will often have some telltale signs that will be able to signal to you that they’re coming from a malicious source.
Check the email domain and use Google to verify the domain of the company that the email is ‘from’. For example, if you get an email from Admin@L(i)oydsBank.com, check their official website to see what email address domains they use.
The emails will often visually look off too. The layout may be slightly different to a normal piece of comms from said company. Trust your gut here — if something seems off, it usually is.
Check for misspelt words and misentered URLs. Any mistake in the email is a massive red flag for a phishing attack.
Look at the language of the email. Is it what would usually be sent by the company trying to contact you? Are they being pushy? Again, use your judgement here.
Generally, when using your judgement, be suspicious of any email you receive in general. Make sure to do the correct research before taking action.
2) Ensure Company-Wide Training and Security Compliance
It’s great that you know the signs. But, if your employees don’t, they could fall victim to an attack without knowing.
Ensure that each employee is trained on phishing and cybersecurity.
Create company-wide rules on risk factors such as external links and online forms.
Restrict the ability of employees to download files from unauthorised sources.
Stress the importance of good cybersecurity practices throughout your workplace.
By ensuring that everyone is prepared and knowledgeable about the risks of phishing, you protect your company.
3) Implement System-Wide Measures to Protect Your Company
Even with all of this, humans make mistakes. Sometimes, you’ll click a bad link by accident. Ensuring that there are systems in place for this is important.
Implement an email security solution which blocks phishing emails before they reach an employee’s inbox.
Ensure that there’s good system-wide antivirus software.
Back up your important files and data regularly, to restore your system in the event of an antivirus account.
Enforce good password hygiene to ensure that breached passwords can’t be re-utilised.
Need a Hand?
With the looming threat of phishing and spam being a serious consideration for any business, knowing how to protect yourself is vital for the success of any business. Knowing the key risk factors and threats that could put your business in danger is important, as acknowledging these risks is the best way to stop them.
Are you looking to implement securities and strengthen your company’s vulnerability against social engineering attacks? Get in touch with us today! Our experts are here to help and can easily make sure that your company has every base covered.
In the fast-paced digital world, email remains a cornerstone of business communication. Every day, a staggering 361.6 billion emails are sent and received globally, a number set to rise to 392.5 billion within the next two years. This exponential growth highlights the increasing reliance on email in our daily business operations. However, with its ease, speed, and cost-effectiveness comes a significant drawback—email is the preferred entry point for cybercriminals looking to exploit vulnerabilities and gain access to sensitive data. The consequences of these breaches can be devastating, ranging from reputational damage to operational disruptions, and significant financial loss.
Alarmingly, over 90% of cyberattacks start with an email. These attacks are becoming more sophisticated, often designed to bypass even the most robust defences, such as those provided by Microsoft. The evolving threat landscape demands a more advanced approach to email security—one that not only addresses current threats but anticipates future risks.
Harnessing the Power of AI with Mimecast’s Cloud Integrated
As cyber threats continue to evolve, Mimecast is at the forefront of email security innovation, leveraging the power of AI to strengthen defences. Mimecast’s Email Security Cloud Integrated solution is specifically engineered to enhance and extend the protections offered by Microsoft 365. This cutting-edge solution empowers organizations to stay ahead of cybercriminals by providing a robust, flexible, and highly effective defence against email-borne threats.
Mimecast’s approach to email security is focuses on customer needs, offering solutions that cater to various organizational requirements. Whether a business operates within a complex email environment requiring advanced administrative controls or seeks a solution that can be deployed in minutes and optimized out of the box, Mimecast delivers best-in-class security tailored to meet these diverse needs.
Why Secure Email is More Critical—and Challenging—Than Ever
The shift towards remote working has made organizations more vulnerable to cyberattacks. With employees accessing business emails from home, hotels, coffee shops, and even personal devices, the risk of falling victim to email-based threats has never been greater. The distractions of working outside a traditional office environment can lead even the most cautious employees to inadvertently open a malicious email or click on a harmful link.
In this landscape, relying solely on platforms like Microsoft 365 for email security may not be sufficient. Mimecast offers a more comprehensive approach, ensuring that organizations do not have to choose between security and flexibility. Whether through a secure email gateway or an integrated cloud email security solution, Mimecast provides world-class protection that is both effective and easy to manage.
Mimecast’s latest offering, Email Security Cloud Integrated (CI), is designed for simplicity and effectiveness. It does not require an MX record change, deploys in minutes, and provides optimized protection right out of the box. This makes it an ideal choice for IT and security teams looking to bolster their defences with minimal administrative burden.
Discover the Future of Email Security—Join Our Webinar
To help organizations navigate the increasingly complex email security landscape, we are hosting an exclusive webinar with Mimecast on Wednesday, September 25th, at 3 PM GST. Titled ‘Email Security 2024 – Top Threats & Smart Solutions’, this webinar will provide invaluable insights into the most pressing cyber threats facing businesses today and how to safeguard operations.
During the webinar, industry experts will cover:
The 2024 cyber threat landscape
The benefits of Mimecast’s new Email Security Cloud Integrated solution
How Mimecast CI can be deployed in under five minutes to protect against all email threats, including social engineering and insider risk
Participants will also gain access to a free 30-day trial of Mimecast’s world-class email protection and can also engage directly with Mimecast experts about their specific threat concerns.
Don’t miss this opportunity to strengthen your email security strategy. Sign up today and ensure your business is protected against the cyber threats of tomorrow.
The recent CrowdStrike outage was a significant disruption for many organizations, shedding light on the substantial consequences of critical system failures. Unlike cyberattacks, this incident demonstrated that even non-malicious failures could have extensive impacts. Here, we delve into the lessons that businesses should learn from this event to fortify their systems against future disruptions.
Build a Resilient Culture
One of the primary takeaways from the CrowdStrike outage is the importance of having a resilient culture within an organization. It’s not just about having a crisis management framework but regularly testing it to identify and address any vulnerabilities. This proactive approach ensures that when a real crisis occurs, the organization can handle it effectively and minimize damage.
Downtime: The Stark Reality
Regardless of its cause, downtime can have devastating effects on a business, including:
Loss of Revenue: When systems are down, business operations halt, leading to immediate financial losses.
Inaccessible Data: Critical business data becomes unavailable, affecting decision-making and productivity.
Diminished Customer Confidence: Customers may lose trust in the reliability of your services.
Loss of Business: Prolonged downtime can drive customers to competitors.
In the case of ransomware attacks, the situation can be even worse. Such attacks often leave organizations with no viable workarounds, causing severe operational disruptions, data loss, and financial repercussions.
The CrowdStrike outage highlighted the vulnerability of even the most robust systems, underscoring the need for strong cybersecurity measures to prevent attacks and ensure quick recovery from unforeseen failures.
“It Won’t Happen to Us”
The financial impact of IT downtime is staggering. Companies are losing billions annually due to unexpected system failures like the CrowdStrike outage. Despite this, many organizations still fail to improve their ability to address these issues promptly. The reality is that the chance of downtime is increasing, and the mantra “it’s not if, it’s when” is becoming commonplace among cybersecurity experts.
Small businesses are often prime targets for malicious emails, with one in 323 being harmful. Additionally, the average office worker receives 121 emails per day. Alarmingly, one-third of small businesses with 50 or fewer employees rely on free consumer-grade cybersecurity solutions. The Hiscox Cyber Insurance Readiness Report 2023 revealed:
Cyberattacks rose for the third year running, with 53% of firms suffering an attack, up from 48% last year.
One in eight attacked businesses suffered costs of AED 1,200,000 or more.
In three years, the proportion of firms with fewer than ten employees attacked rose by more than half to 36%.
One in five firms received a ransom demand, but those paying fell from 66% to 63%. Less than half of those who paid recovered all their data.
These statistics emphasize the critical need for robust cybersecurity measures and quick incident response protocols.
Who is Responsible?
Clear accountability within an organization for managing cybersecurity risks is essential. Typically, the IT Lead is responsible for the overarching cybersecurity strategy, but every employee has a role in maintaining security protocols and reporting suspicious activities. As Microsoft advises, regular data backups and having a well-defined disaster recovery plan are crucial.
Lessons Learned & Moving Forward:
The CrowdStrike outage serves as a wake-up call for businesses to reassess their IT strategies. To mitigate the risks associated with IT downtime, consider the following steps:
Invest in Robust Cybersecurity Infrastructure: Ensure your systems are protected against both external threats and internal failures.
Implement Proactive Threat Detection: Continuously monitor for potential vulnerabilities and address them before they cause harm.
Develop Swift Incident Response Protocols: Have a clear and practiced plan for responding to IT incidents to minimize downtime and recovery time.
Cybersecurity Accountability: Clear accountability in managing cybersecurity risks is crucial, typically led by the IT Lead, ensuring no single point of failure.
The CrowdStrike outage has provided valuable lessons on the cost of downtime. No one thinks it will happen to them—until it does. By learning from these experiences and taking proactive measures, businesses can better safeguard their operations and minimize the financial and operational impact of future disruptions.
As a Managed Service Provider (MSP), we are committed to providing and maintaining secure and resilient IT infrastructures. If you’re interested in mitigating the risk of downtime and want a no-obligation discussion around email security, backup & disaster recovery, or security awareness and testing for staff, contact us now: email: sales.uae@cobweb.com or call +971 4 455 3100.
Whichever study you choose to pay attention to, the number of companies moving their IT operations, either fully or partially, to managed service providers exceeds 80%. I remember reading a Jump Factor report from 2021 which mentioned that 90% of IT and Business leaders were making this choice. More recent research suggests that little has changed, and I think we can all agree that’s a huge majority!
The benefits extend far beyond just addressing skills gaps and saving costs. It’s about concentrating your resources, becoming faster, fostering innovation, accelerating transformation, and gaining that competitive edge.
In a recent study by PwC, I found that among the top 20% of high-performing companies, all of them were turning to MSPs, or at least to some extent.
The real question
So, as an MSP, convincing businesses to engage with one is often pushing on an open door. The question shifts from “should I be engaging with an MSP?” to “which one?”. Seeing as there are 150,000 MSPs globally, it’s safe to assume there is a wide choice! The difficulty is knowing which MSP fits your business best.
How to find the right MSP
Partnering with the right Managed Service Provider can significantly enhance your organisation’s success, not only in the IT department but throughout the entire business, so it’s vital you choose the right one for you.
Define your objectives: Start by outlining your IT needs and objectives. Identify your pain points and improvement goals. If unsure, most reputable service providers offer consultancy and assessment services to help you get started and you shouldn’t be pushed into buying a service straight away – in fact a credible MSP won’t want to do that. They will need to understand your direction and outline this journey
Evaluate expertise and experience: With numerous MSPs available, their size, skill, and experience vary widely. Inquire about their track record in assisting organisations similar to yours.
Seek comprehensive offerings: A quality MSP should provide a holistic approach to IT Management, including Proactive Monitoring, Security Solutions, help desk, Cloud Services, Backup/Disaster Recovery, and more. However, comprehensive offerings does not mean a ‘jack of all trades’. Rather, you should make sure they cover a suite of services which cover your needs.
Consider scalability: On the assumption that your business will grow and change, your MSP should be flexible to be able to meet these changes. How do they adapt to new technologies? How do they adjust their service levels and offerings not just to meet the changing nature of your business but the wider IT and IT Security world?
Evaluate availability: Do you need a 24/7 offering and if so, do they offer that? Asking about their average response and resolutions times is a good idea.
Prioritise security: Cyber threats are a major concern for any organisation today, large or small. News of attacks go way beyond just IT press and are a serious threat to your company’s credibility and very existence. Ask how they intend to strengthen your own security protocols and ask about their own security practices – Do they practice what they preach? A robust security should absolutely be your top priority – and theirs.
Emphasise communication: It’s very easy to engage with an MSP and sign a contract, but a good MSP will offer timely and transparent reporting and regular updates on the status of the infrastructure they manage. So ask yourself, are their channels of communication open and clear?
Demand personalisation: All businesses are different, and as such, a good MSP should be able to demonstrate how they are able to tailor their service to your needs. IT Managed Services are not a one size fits all and are not an all or nothing.
Check references: Ask them for testimonials and references from companies similar to yours. Most providers will present and measure customer satisfaction, the good ones will compensate their staff on those metrics. So, ask to see them.
Evaluate cost and ROI: While cost matters, it shouldn’t be the sole deciding factor. Consider how the MSP’s services will contribute to your ROI by saving time, resource optimisation, and other areas. Assuming they seem proficient enough in getting to this point, they should be able to offer you some valuable guidance here.
Review SLA/Contract: Obviously, the points on which you have agreed with the MSP should reflect in the Service Level Agreement and specific delivery points should be in the contract document. Read it carefully. Remind yourself of what you were looking to achieve and make sure this aligns.
In conclusion, your agreement with an MSP forms the foundation of a strong partnership. Choosing the right MSP should be a strategic decision that impacts your business’s efficiency, security, and growth. With multiple options available, following these guidelines and conducting your own research will help you find the right fit. I sometimes talk about the utopian objective finding excellence in IT, the right MSP should help you towards that.
