The security of your data and networks is paramount to the success of your organization. Unauthorized access to your systems and networks can lead to data breaches, financial losses, and reputational damage. To protect your data and networks from unauthorized access, you must take a multi-layered approach that includes physical security, encryption, auditing, and more. The first layer of security is physical assets.
It helps prevent malicious outsiders from gaining unauthorized access to devices such as routers, computers, firewalls, and wiring closets. The physical layer requires controls and barriers, such as locks, biometric authentication and identity verification. Learn more about how Code42 Incydr can help you detect and respond to unauthorized access to your organization's data, devices, systems, and networks. One of the most effective ways to protect your data from unauthorized access is to encrypt it.
Encryption is a process of transforming data into an encrypted format that can only be read by authorized parties that have the key or password to decipher them. Encryption can protect your data from being intercepted, copied, or manipulated by hackers, malware, or other threats. You can encrypt your data on several levels, such as your hard drive, your files and folders, your emails and messages, or your cloud storage. There are many tools and software that can help you encrypt your data, such as BitLocker, VeraCrypt or Signal.
A sixth way to protect your data from unauthorized access is to audit it. Auditing is a process of reviewing, analyzing, or evaluating your data or data activities. Auditing can help you identify and delete any unnecessary, outdated, or sensitive data that you no longer need or use, and that may pose a risk to the security of your data. Auditing can also help you monitor and track any suspicious or unauthorized access or activity to data, and to report or respond to any data breach or incident.
You can audit your data using tools or software that can scan, delete, or encrypt your data, by checking your account settings and permissions, or by reviewing your records or data reports. A defensive and proactive approach to preventing unauthorized access can protect information and systems from disclosure, modification, destruction, and disruption. To hide the Wi-Fi network, configure the wireless access point or router so that it does not transmit the network name, known as the service set identifier (SSID). Any access to an information system or network that violates the security policy stated by the owner or operator is considered unauthorized access.
The above is a small example of the questions you should ask yourself to determine the appropriate level of access, security, and oversight needed to protect your school's data, whether on-premise or in the cloud. Illegitimate access to this data may not be technically “unauthorized” because the data is created and evolves too quickly to be officially classified as sensitive, protected, or of great value. By following these recommended steps, you can demonstrate that you're applying and maintaining appropriate security procedures to protect your data, whether it's on-premises or in the cloud. Once a person has gained unauthorized access to data or computer networks, they can cause harm to an organization in a variety of ways. It is closely related to authentication - a process that verifies a user's identity when accessing a system - while most unauthorized access occurs in a digital sense; the unauthorized actor uses a compromised credential to access data or computer networks from their own device; the physical security of their workplace remains essential. Consider using tools such as enterprise password management or identity and access management (IAM) to centrally manage user credentials and ensure that they conform to best security practices.
The key to mitigating damage is to ensure that your security team can get quick answers to those critical questions. Security teams must have continuous visibility into all data and file activity across all users and devices on and off the network. There are many conventional security technologies such as DLP (Data Loss Prevention) and CASB (Cloud Access Security Broker) that promise to alert security teams to unauthorized access to data or unauthorized access to a computer network. Whether in the form of unauthorized access to data or unauthorized access to a computer network; it is the archetype of data security risk. Software updates are essential for maintaining the security and performance of your devices and applications. While it's a simple idea; the challenge is defining what constitutes unauthorized access; how to prevent it; how to detect it; how to respond when it unavoidably occurs.
