Hackers, cybercriminals and malicious nation state actors are getting better at finding vulnerabilities and compromising our networks.
The hacking community is becoming just as robust and resourceful as legitimate businesses and attacks are increasingly more advanced than ever before.
Bad actors are also getting smarter and realizing that it’s much easier to compromise the systems of managed service providers (MSP) to access the networks of possibly thousands of their customers.
“MSPs are under attack,” Amelia Paro, channel development manager at ID Agent, told attendees of the ASCII Group’s MSP Connect virtual event. “You are a goldmine.”
According to Paro, cyberattacks have increased by 600% since the start of the pandemic, and 90% of those attacks that result in data breaches were conducted with a phishing email.
“Those are staggering numbers,” Paro says. “They’re terrifying, but it really illustrates the fact that security, compliance and zero trust are no longer an option.”
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Service providers need to run on the concept of zero trust: the understanding that everybody has been compromised. That means both you and your customers are equally vulnerable to cyberattacks and data breaches regardless of your size.
As the worlds of pro AV and the IT industry continue to merge, audiovisual systems are being deployed on the network with increasing regularity. It would behoove most technology integrators to at least be well-versed in IT and cybersecurity, if not offer their own kind of managed IT services.
According to Paro, service providers need to relay that message of increasing cyberthreats to their customers, and some may need to go as far as to include a denial of service agreement if a customer refuses cybersecurity solutions. ID Agent includes a denial of service agreement template in its platform.
“You got to make sure that the right people have the right secure access to the right machines with the right privileges and then constantly monitoring for that compromise,” Paro says.
“Because it’s not just to protect your customers — it’s also to protect you, the MSP.”
