With the holiday season now in full swing, we wanted to share some helpful cyber safety tips and guidance when it comes to your cybersecurity strategies (or lack thereof). The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, as well as the FBI, have already issued a warning to critical infrastructure entities and public and private sector organizations to be on alert against ransomware and other cyber threats during the holiday season.
Based on our experience with ransomware cases at Alvaka Networks, as well as recent trends, bad actors tend to launch severe and high impact attacks during times when there is a decreased readiness to respond, like holiday weekends…that way, they can maximize their time to encrypt and destroy before you detect there is a problem. Unfortunately, we’ve seen many companies that are not adequately prepared for this type of event.
Because of this, we not only want to spread holiday cheer, but also cyber awareness. Check out the video below, where our President & CEO, Oli Thordarson, shares important information and guidance for improving your cybersecurity posture, so that you can minimize your risk during the holidays and beyond.
Check out the below links for more information on cybersecurity, including ransomware prevention and recovery:
- Ransomware Resource Center
- How to Reduce the Risk of Ransomware & Other Cyber Attacks
- Why You Need Cyber Breach Insurance
- How Much Cyber Insurance Do You Need?
- CISA’s Resource Center (Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency)
We wish you a happy and (cyber) safe holiday season!
Smoke testing is a term used to describe the testing process for servers after patches are applied. 
Estimating an average time for patching servers and PCs can be a bit tricky. It can vary from one month to the next, depending upon the number and complexity of the patches released by your software vendors. You must consider all versions of operating systems and have a complete inventory of all your application software to do this job correctly. Our experience has shown that manual patching of systems takes on average of about 1.5 hours each.
This is a basic cost calculator for you to compute your typical monthly cost for patching your servers, PCs, laptops, tablets and associated application software. It also forms the basis for you to begin calculating your Return on Investment for software patching, or for comparison with alternatives to the manual process of patching operating systems and application software—such as Patch Management as a Service, also known as Vulnerability Management as a Service.