Cyber Security is a team sport, Stack Your Team!

Security is a big field that continues to grow year after year. Companies around the world keep innovating and creating products that are prime for hacking. When you take a hard look at how to protect yourself, you begin to feel like this is just a big game of chess, moves and countermoves. Luckily though, you can turn this game of chess into a team sport. Adding a chess grandmaster to your team only seems fair.

When you listen to the news, they are always saying “…Hackers from the group Anonymous…” or “…this breach is the latest in a set of targeted attacks by the group Lulzsec” (yeah, remember them?) or even “…the Russian hackers…”. Never once do you hear a report about “George hacked Sally”. It’s always plural. They are all in teams and ready to play against you.

So, does your company take the team approach? I often hear from my sales team “I just got off the phone with [insert company here] , and we have a meeting with John. He is in charge of security.” My first question is “Is he bringing his team?” Often “John” is the only security person, and he just got hired.

Running the day to day here at Milton, I see many companies that struggle with putting together a team. Lack of skilled employees and trouble with purchasing the right equipment limit the success rates of many companies. I have a piece of advice for these companies. Your team doesn’t all need to be in house personnel. Choose security companies to help fill out your team.

When we describe security companies, they fall into two categories, Red Team and Blue Team. For those who may not be familiar with these terms, these started off as military terms, where Red Team represented the attacking team, while Blue Team was the defending team. Your company might hire a Red Team company to help you find where you need improvements. Hopefully after that testing, you don’t ignore the problems, and you immediately hire a Blue Team company to help fix the problems.

These companies usually have focus in a few areas at which they excel in. It’s ok to hire a few of these companies to help. The more the merrier. The more eyes watching over your company, the more likely you will find and stop the threat.

Many of our customers have started taking to hiring multiple vSOCs that specialize in specific areas. In the past, these companies would have been competing, but now there is benefit in having more than one. Here at Milton, our vSOC can handle data from all sorts of sources, and our absolute biggest strength is NAC. With our NAC as a Service we can take our monitoring to the next level and provide action to what we find. Since NAC is complicated, our vSOC analysts, handle the hard stuff, and together the team is successful.