From all of us at CSI we wish you a Happy Thanksgiving.
We are thankful for all of you. We are proud that we first started working with K-12 school districts in 1980 and 43 years later all of those earliest clients are still with us today. A lot has changed in all those years.
The 2023 reality is that while you are off at conferences and enjoying downtime with your families, the bad guys are gearing up to take their next shot to breach your network.
Each and every holiday I personally see an uptick in attempts at bad things happening.
The bad guys are counting on reduced staffing, personal distractions, and a nice block of quiet time to do what they do.
It is important that you have someone on your staff paying attention during these long breaks.
I like to scan "everything" with whatever I have to scan going into these breaks to make sure no threat actor is setting up inside your networks for an attack.
Remember 70% of the successful attacks started via email and 70% of the successful exploits leveraged known vulnerabilities that already had patches available. Patching your servers and workstations for both OS and third-party apps significantly reduces your overall attack surface.
The time to attack now is down in many cases to only a few hours from establishing a foothold in your network to launching their attack.
If you are a CSEDR or Huntress client you have the SentinelOne Vigilance SOC and/or the Huntress SOC overseeing those servers and endpoints 24x7x365. That is a very good thing.
If not, you really need to think about that for your servers and at least machines that work with money and personally identifiable information.
Enjoy the holiday, but be vigilant.
If there is any way we can better help you keep your district secure, please let us know.
-Scott Quimby, CISSP
P.S. The next CSI Cybersecurity Event is Wednesday, December 6th. Contact Lisa for details.
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