CNN has been buzzing all day on the 24 hour news cycle of cyber attacks on Dyn—a company that provides DNS services for many of America’s largest companies and biggest websites. What I wanted to discuss this week is reflect on what happened last week and inform you on how to respond—to protect your business interests from cyber attacks—both directly toward you and your interests.
But First, what the heck is DNS?
DNS stands for domain name system. Essentially, it is the phone book of the internet. For instance, when you type google.com into your browser, the google.com address you type in is actually translated into an IP address (generally having an xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx, where each ‘xxx’ is a number between 0 and 255). DNS helps us all out by letting us typing in human-readable URLs rather than strings of meaningless numbers.
What happened this past week with the DNS Cyber Attack?
Early Friday, millions of Americans had panicked when hundreds of websites—ranging from eBay to the New York Times—were not available. The reality is a company called Dyn fell victim to a cyber attack. Dyn is a DNS service company that translates readable website names to IP addresses. Because of the attack, Dyn was unable to translate IP addresses of its customer’s addresses.
Was your business affected?
The short answer is that you might have noticed a disruption to several services. (But let me dive in a little bit more…). If your business has a website—if it is hosted in an affected area– it likely was down. If you have phones hosted in any of the areas affected, you probably noticed that they weren’t working.
Should you worry about attacks on DNS-translating companies like Dyn?
Denial of service attacks happen all the time. The magnitude of this one was incredible. There are so many providers that your business is dependent on. If Dyn had been using fitSentinel, they wouldn’t have had this problem.
What can you do?
You need to seriously consider that the larger the company, the bigger the target for cyber attacks. If components critical to your business are hosted by large companies, you may be party to more targeted cyber attacks.
Remember, ALL cyber attacks are potentially perilous to your business. Someone is looking to get in—to your data, to your financials, to your stored Social Security numbers, credit card numbers and personal information. While this DNS attack was certainly fixable, what I want to make sure is that all of my clients are safe—that they have the right security measures (both from training and systems) to protect them from villainous people trying to get through your gates every single day.
Are your computers protected by the latest state-of-the art fitSentinel security? If not, how do you know you’re secure? How certain are you that a cyber attack or phishing attack won’t compromise your company’s personal data? Why take the risk of one of your users accidentally clicking on the wrong link in an email or downloading the wrong attachment?
How sure are you that you are and will continue to be PCI, HIPAA or FINRA compliant? Contact us TODAY for a network security assessment to find ways to improve your network and protect your customer, staff and business data!
