3 steps to stop cyberattacks: prevention, detection, and reaction

Posted:
03/24/2021
| By: Kevin Prince

If youre reading this right now, that probably means that you already understand the dangers of cyberattacks, but you don’t fully understand how to stop them. To simplify things, cybersecurity companies essentially live by three steps: prevention, detection, and reaction. A lot of individual cybersecurity tactics include one or two of these steps, but not the full coverage. With SIEM solutions from Fortinet and StratoZen ConnectWise, youll put yourself in the position to eliminate all serious threats. 

With each step comes different responsibilities and work requirements, and to really get into the nuts and bolts of these steps, well have to break it all down for you. 

Prevention 

The first step involves taking preventative measures into your own hands. Without specific expertise in cybersecurity, this is likely the only step you might be able to initiate on your own. The purpose of the preventative step is to protect your infrastructure from outside threats. This is accomplished by setting up your edge devices (firewalls, servers, wireless router connections, etc.) with software that recognizes specific cyberattacks and blocks them out. Usually, this prevention step is used to protect the information that is constantly being updated or changed within your network. While you might be able to manage setting up a preventative system, without outsourcing this work to a cybersecurity company, you might miss something after you make any updates or changes in your devices and the information they hold. 

Detection 

The next step is intuitive: detection. Once your preventative measures are taken and you start blocking any incoming attacks from the outside, you may start to feel invincible. However, you need this next step. As mentioned before, with constant updates being made in your network, your preventative tactics might fall behind and miss something. But thats not all. What can be really threatening is when an employee from the inside of your network invites malware or a bug of some sort in from the inside. This can happen when they access a site that is not trusted. When this happens, a cybersecurity company with SIEM solutions will detect the breach and isolate the attack so it doesn’t spread to other devices. With a cybersecurity company on your side, not only will they be able to isolate the attack, but they will see the attack immediately. Without a professional protecting your network, that breach may not be recognized for hours, days, weeks, or even months later, and by that time it would be too late. 

Reaction 

What most companies or individuals miss out on when they try to handle cybersecurity on their own is the benefits that come within the reaction step. With full SIEM coverage, after an attack makes it through the preventative and detection steps, all thats left to do is find a solution to stop the attack. After an attack is detected and isolated, a cybersecurity company that uses SIEM solutions will have a report that details the type of attack and what the best solution is going to be. In other words, a cybersecurity team will react to the attack and come up with a way to stop it. By this point, without experts working out the problem for you, you really are at risk of falling victim to a cyberattack. 

Whether you fully intend to implement all three steps or not, there is only so much you can do if you dont have a cybersecurity company on your side. You might be able to study enough to set up preventative measures and start recognizing threats, but will you be able to stop the attack in time? There are now university degrees that are dedicated to cybersecurity. It isn’t something you can learn over a few days and weeks by reading the manual. Besides, these attacks are time sensitive. For this full-proof three-step service, contact us for any and all of you inquires.