Top 3 ways to protect your server from cyberattacks

Data is in the crosshair of all cyber criminals. Although everyone understands that there are hacker exploits happening, the very many different methods continuously evolve and change. This requires businesses and organizations to be aware of how cybersecurity practices also change. At just mid-year through 2022, ransomware attacks have decreased, however other cyberattack trends have already exceeded the previous year’s term. From SonicWall’s mid-year Cyber Threat Report, we can see that ransomware has decreased by 23%, but other attack trends such as encrypted threats and IoT malware are on the rise.

Encrypted threats and IoT malware attacks increases over 70% since 2021.

What is ransomware and what is the difference from other cyberattacks?

Ransomware is a type of malicious malware that is designed to lock down access to your device or data, such as important files and folders, or the entire system. Once infected, it encrypts your data, and you cannot access or even use it. The controller of the ransomware will then demand for a ransom so you can access it again. This method requires hackers to reach out to the data owners. With crypto currency prices dropping and government sanctions making it harder to move money on the web, ransomware activity is decreasing and bringing hackers attention to other methods.

What is an Encrypted Threat?

Transport Layer Security (TLS) is used to create an end-to-end security tunnel of data sent between applications over the Internet. Attackers hide ransomware, malware, etc. hoping that the victims have legacy firewalls and older traditional security measures that lack the capability to detect or prevent these threats over HTTPS traffic.

What is IoT Malware?

IoT malware is simply put, malicious software designed to gain access and damage your computer or device. This is susceptible to IoT devices that are always connected to the internet and lack security.

What is Cryptojacking?

Cryptojacking is a type of method where there is unauthorized access to a device to use the resources to mine cryptocurrency without your notice.

Poor user practices, weak passwords & access management, open RDP access, and lack of funding for IT security solutions are leading causes of ransomware infections

3 ways to protect your data

With technology constantly evolving, it’s important to follow and stay updated with cybersecurity best practices to keep your business and personal information protected.  Here’s the top 3 ways to protect your data, and also how Hosted~FTP~ protects you in the Cloud:

1. Back up & disaster recovery

Backing up your data will let you do a clean wipe of your system and easily recover everything from before there was an attack. A cybersecurity best practice is to have your data backed up in 3 different locations: 2 different servers and 1 offline. Hosted~FTP~ has full backup of your encrypted files and our RDS database that contains all account metadata for full DR capabilities. This provides an extra level of assurance that in the extremely unlikely event that an entire AWS region is damaged or destroyed, your files will be safely stored and available in a separate region.

2. Intrusion detection & data encryption

Another cybersecurity best practice is limiting access to your data as much as possible. Hosted~FTP~ uses the latest tools to conduct penetration and vulnerability scans to ensure that we are protected from all malware and hacker exploits. Firewalls are used to lock down access to servers and databases, both by IP address/range and port. Only authorized servers and static/elastic IP addresses are permitted through the firewall, and only on the minimum set of ports required to operate the service.

3. SSO & advanced security features

To continue to restrict access as much as possible, adding additional security features such as Single Sign-On (SSO), enforcing password policies, Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA), and IP whitelisting can further secure your data from being breached. These features as well as SSH key pair via SFTP protocol are all easy to setup with Hosted~FTP~.

Hosted~FTP~  securely protects your data in transit and at rest

Hosted~FTP~ takes security into account at every step of the service. From our cloud infrastructure to the user end point, we encrypt all data (including metadata) with 256-bit AES encryption – in transit, upon arrival, and at rest. We take the extra step to encrypt your data again when it reaches our servers. We utilize industry standard toolsets to conduct vulnerability scans and get a complete picture of the configurations in our cloud environment to identify and correct any potential misconfigurations and respond to industry standard security policy and compliance changes. Hosted~FTP~ uses the latest tools to conduct penetration and vulnerability scans to ensure that we are protected from all malware and hacker exploits while using 100% Amazon Web Services. Security is more than just a feature for Hosted~FTP~ – it’s what we do.