Broadcasting live from Houston. From the space city to the world. You are watching now. Media, television.
Sherman: [00:00:28] Welcome back to Biz Talk with Sherman I’m your host Sherman on from Hutong insurance Services. Want to thank all of our guests that came and shared their story, shared their expertise. Also want to be able to thank a lot of our sponsors. Really appreciate all of you for being able to make sure that this show can go off without a hitch. We want to thank our producers, Gustavo and and the entire team, Danny, behind the scenes and of course, Cliff running everything. So that’s why we look so good. Everybody. There’s an entire team that makes this happen. So really appreciate everybody in making that go forward. So last expert here, this is an extremely crucial piece, folks. If you’re in the business world, if you run anything through a laptop or a cell phone, this is becoming an extremely vital part of your of your business. So your tech, your biz. Roland Parker, welcome back to the show.
Roland Parker: [00:01:18] Hey, Sherman, Great to be back.
Sherman: [00:01:20] Okay. Super loaded question here. So I’m going to kind of let you run with this one is how can a business be more secure when it comes to their technology and it needs.
Roland Parker: [00:01:31] Okay, so let’s start off with email security. And you may think, well, that’s a strange one to start on, but it’s so important because of the things that we’ve seen happen recently. And I’m going to give you a good example. A company’s email got compromised. They didn’t know about it and they carried on as if nothing was happening. The bad guys didn’t do anything to begin with, but what they did is that they were watching and waiting. And when that company sent out an invoice and it was a pretty sizable invoice to their customer, the bad guys then spoofed them, which means that they pretended to be them and they then sent another email which had copied their signature, their logo, everything down. But it was coming from a different email. And they said, By the way, don’t forget we’ve changed our banking information. The customer then said, okay, well you need to fill out these forms. They didn’t realize that they were no longer corresponding with the real person, but with the bad guys. They then said, Here’s the information that needs to be filled out. The bad guys filled it in, submitted it, and they then went and submitted this huge amount of money and it went to the bad guys when the customer was then getting Ahold of them and said, Well, you know, this hasn’t hit our bank yet. Well, it could take a day or so. By the time they waited, the money was gone. So how can you protect yourself against that type of scenario? And we see it happen all the time. You’ve got to protect your your email from being compromised.
Roland Parker: [00:03:14] So first thing is two factor authentication. You’ve got to have that so that if somebody gets access to your email or tries to get access, it’s going to notify you. It’s going to come up on your cell phone and then, you know, okay, it could have been compromised. Let’s go put security. The second thing is you’ve got to have an additional email security program. We use something called graphis. And what that does is it uses AI technology to filter through, looks for any bad links or attachments or things that are embedded in an email so that when you open it, it’s actually going to block it straight away. And if it’s got any known bad things, it doesn’t even hit your inbox. So that’s the first thing. The next thing is you’ve got to have some type of employee training. So you’ve got to have an employee training program where you’re testing your employees to make sure that they know what to look for, what what to look out for. And we can send false phishing attempts. So it’ll come out looking like it’s it’s a phishing and we get to see who’s actually opening it, who who are the culprits in the company who are clicking on things. So that’s the first thing. Email security two factor authentication and put on a program like graphics that’s going to use AI to protect your environment. So let’s move on to the next thing. Well, look at your IT security as a whole and start putting up your defense layers. So put in a good firewall, not just a Windows firewall or one that comes from your ISP, but a good firewall like a sonicwall or a barracuda that’s going to filter out the bad guys and then put on a program called Zero Trust.
Roland Parker: [00:05:12] We use threatlocker. And what that does is it locks your machine down. Why is it important? Well, if you click on a link, click on an attachment, go to the wrong thing. What it’s going to do is it’s going to prevent that executable from. Running. The bad guys can’t get their program to run on your computer because it blocks out everything except known good programs. Well, you’ve got a winner. Zero trust means zero trust. Apart from your known good programs, nothing else will run going on from there. So you’ve got your your firewalls, you’ve got your zero trust, and then you’ve got to move on to what is known as the next gen antivirus. So, Sherman, you know about antivirus. Everybody’s got some type of antivirus program. The problem with antivirus programs, it can only do so much. They the bad guys release something. The antivirus guys. Okay, this is going to be bad. And then they release your patch for your antivirus. The problem is there are always 1 or 2 days or sometimes a week behind the bad guys. They are following the bad guys. So you have your your zero day virus. That means nobody knows about it yet. It’s just been released. You’re going to be impacted. So your next gen antivirus, we use a program called Sentinel one. And what Sentinel one does says if something happens to get past your firewall, to get past your antivirus, to get past your zero trust, we’re going to use a detection to notify.
Roland Parker: [00:06:51] Okay, something is changing. And then we have remediation. This is known as endpoint detection and remediation. What that does is it’s going to isolate that machine. They’re going to be notified. Something’s going on and they can remediate. Let’s quarantine that machine, Let’s stop the spread from getting further. And if we can stop it from spreading, your whole environment is protected. So go through that again. Get your firewall, get your zero trust, get your next gen antivirus with endpoint detection and remediation and then finally, you got to have your backups. So we use a program called a Kronos, which it’s not only is it doing an image based backup, but it is also scanning that for malware or ransomware because the last thing you want to have happen if something gets passed, every single defense and the only thing you can now do is recover from your backup. Can you imagine how disastrous it would be if your backup was corrupted and now you’re held to ransom and there’s nothing you can do? So you’ve got to have a program like a Kronos. There’s some other good ones that are out there. We just like a Kronos. We’ve tested it. We’ve had real life scenarios where we’ve had to recover people and it’s worked and it recovers the entire image, which means that you’re not sitting there just trying to recover your data. You’ve got all your programs, your system, everything the way it was, gets restored in perfect condition. So this is.
Sherman: [00:08:35] Interesting that you brought this up when we’re on commercial break there, that your business really used to be kind of focused really on that it support. But it’s really gotten much more into the security just based on what’s happening right now in the environment.
Roland Parker: [00:08:48] Absolutely. And we’ve really seen a big increase during the post Covid or Corona type environment where the bad guys have been hyper focused on the US and Western Europe. And and this is this is warfare. They are attacking our businesses and we’ve got to protect our assets. We’ve got to protect our businesses from this massive wave of attack that are coming in. Anybody can go down and get a new computer. Anybody can get your computer fixed or get it repaired. The important thing is security keeping your assets and your employees safe and your credibility, because once you suffer something like that, your whole credibility could go down in the market. You could lose customers, you could go out of business. This is a big thing. And you’ve got to look at protecting your assets, your employees and your credibility, and you’ve got to do it now.
Sherman: [00:09:45] Wonderful. Thanks again for coming in and just sharing those vital things. Roland, really appreciate you coming on the show. This is our episode, everybody. Biz Talk with Sherman. Thanks again to all of our guests and we’ll talk to you soon.
Roland Parker: [00:09:56] Sherm’s out. Thanks, Sherman.