Why Internal Threat Detection is Just as Important as External Threat Protection

We all know the dangers of doing business with the Internet. Even a small business has sensitive information that could potentially be stolen. While it’s important to take preventative measures to keep threats out of your infrastructure, it’s equally as important to have measures put into place that can detect threats within your infrastructure.

There are numerous threats that can infiltrate your network and lay dormant, waiting to strike at an opportune time. Other threats will lay low on your network and slowly leech data to send to hackers. Some examples are trojans, which will infiltrate a system and create a backdoor that can then be used for future attacks or data leakage. Either way, the important thing is that you need to be able to identify attacks that have managed to thwart your defenses before it’s too late to do anything about it.

Breaches are Inevitable
To understand why threat detection is so important, you need to take on a mindset that you can, and probably will, be hacked sometime in the near future. Even large organizations and enterprises experience hacking attacks, and that’s in spite of enterprise-level security solutions that are designed to prevent breaches from happening in the first place. Think about Sony and the United States Office of Personnel, as well as major health care providers like Excellus BlueCross BlueShield. These companies and organizations didn’t anticipate that they would be hacked, and they paid the price for it.

Thus, you need to expect the worst in order to keep it from happening, and you need to ensure that you’re prepared to handle the worst in this worst-case scenario. This preventative mindset is a common theme in IT security, as it’s much easier to keep problems from happening than it is to react to problems that have happened.

What You Can Do
While preventative measures are effective at keeping most security problems handled, it’s important that you also put a significant effort into detecting threats on your network before any significant damage can be done. CIO recommends what they call a preventative “triad.” This includes protection, detection, and reaction. Not only do you need security solutions, but you also need monitoring tools to detect and eliminate threats.

Working with Preferred gives you access to enterprise-level security tools that can assist with all three. A Unified Threat Management (UTM) solution includes a firewall, antivirus, spam blocking, and content filtering solution into one convenient package, while a Remote Monitoring and Maintenance (RMM) solution allows for proactive reaction to detected issues on your company’s network. Combined, these solutions can help your organization retain optimal protection from most any threats.

To learn more, reach out to us at 708-781-7110.