COVID-19 Response Roundup: Kaseya, ScanSource, Atera, More

COVID-19 increasingly is becoming a cybersecurity threat, as just last week the federal government released an alert encouraging organizations to adopt a heightened state of cybersecurity when considering alternate workplace options.

Between unsecured employee personal devices and increased collaboration app usage, attackers are using COVID-19 as their way in via malicious campaigns ranging from email phishing to malware, and ransomware to spoofed website domains. And while large enterprises may have strong security strategies in place to deal with these attacks, many SMBs and midsize companies struggle with the cost of protecting their business online.

Kevin Lancaster, Kaseya‘s general manager of security solutions, tells us it’s critical for organizations to develop security awareness programs that educate employees on phishing scams, ways to avoid unintentional downloads of malware, and the security policies of the company in order to build organic internal security measures.

Kaseya’s Kevin Lancaster

“The loss for a dentist’s office being down for one hour today is the equivalent of an entire brokerage firm’s loss 10 years ago — its that dramatic,” he said.

Employees must have an appropriate level of awareness regarding IT security and understand their individual responsibilities when it comes to securing the infrastructure of the organization, Lancaster said. Many security breaches that involve internal actors are the result of negligent behavior on the part of employees, not malicious activity, he said.

“Despite your best efforts, there may come a time when your company falls prey to an attack,” he said. “And when that happens, it’s important for IT professionals to draw an incident response plan that enables employees to strategically evaluate the aspects of the business that could be at risk and mitigate damage after a breach.”

Lancaster suggests five ways small businesses can improve their security:

• Adopt a backup strategy. Backing up servers, backing up locally and offsite, and using an onsite appliance are the three most popular backup strategies.
• Outsource security tasks to MSPs. Prioritizing cloud security tasks to MSPs that provide efficient cloud security solutions with features like security assessment, identity management, multifactor authentication (MFA), single sign-on, business continuity and compliance can greatly improve your defense against a cyberattack.
• Achieve higher IT operational maturity to combat and lessen outages and data breaches. The relationship between outages and data breaches is significant.
• Hold your employees more accountable than ever to be trained on proper security measures.
• Implement an automated patching process to ensure critical software vulnerabilities are addressed before an exploit occurs.

Also this week, ScanSource has released a new resource guide for partners aimed to help them navigate through all of the COVID-19 information. The guide provides an overview of the new legislation – Families First Coronavirus Response Act (FFCRA) – as well as insight on small business loan programs, stimulus programs, travel restrictions, insurance regulations, COVID-19 Q&As for HR and operations teams, and general tips for working remotely.

John Eldh, ScanSource’s chief revenue officer, tells us his partners, like most people, are being inundated with news, updates on state and federal actions, travel guidelines and many other COVID-19 things that are taking their time away from growing their business and focusing on their people.

ScanSource’s John Eldh

“We wanted to provide a quick reference with the best information we have received that would help them understand how some of these changes may impact them, while also providing what we believe are best practices on working from home, precautions to take during this challenging time, and guidelines to consider when handling sensitive situations,” he said. “Our hope is that by having this information in one place, our partners can quickly turn to the guide for insight. Our goal is to continue to update the guide as the situation evolves for our partners.”

ScanSource is talking with its partners every day to better understand what their challenges are — not just …