Cyber Security
Guard your student and staff data with rigorous digital protection
Meaningful Cyber Security is critical. The personal student and staff data stored in your SIS is a big target for criminals and the number of breaches grows every year. There have been over 500 documented attacks in the last five years and districts have lost over $2 million dollars in ransom payments for stolen data. Other criminals simply steal identities, hurting your employees and the families of your students.
Macro Connect’s five critical Cyber Security areas of focus are built on a framework developed by the NIST, the National Institute of Standards and Technology. In short, these five areas cover the primary actions taken before, during, and after a cyber security incident. They help all businesses, especially Credit Unions and other financial institutions, to limit the risk of a breach, mitigate the impact of a breach, and get back to business should a breach occur. These five areas are:
Identify
Arm yourselves with the tools and resources you need to identify weak points before an incident occurs. The best case scenario is a lock-tight system that never experiences a breach.
Protect
Develop and implement safeguards to reduce your risk of an incident, whether that is blocking attacks or training your staff to operate safely.
Detect
Adopt measures to detect and flag suspicious activity before it penetrates your network so that you can stop an attack in its tracks.
Respond
Craft a plan to guide your actions in the event of a breach so that you can move quickly and intelligently during stressful situations.
Recover
Design a plan that helps you both restore your financial services and improve your security measures to prevent future incidents.
Education
The most effective defense in Cyber Security is likely education. You can buy fancy tech at the network level, but many data breaches caused by user error. Everyone in your school or district has a role to play in keeping data safe so we work to increase awareness of risks and train staff in ways to avoid or reduce those risks. We combine onsite and virtual training to show your team the most common tactics used by cyber criminals and how to recognize them, avoid them, and report them. With increased awareness of the risks, your staff will gain a certain level of suspicion that can help raise red flags sooner.
Learn more about our Usecure training program and how it can help keep your school safer.
Prevention
Our security experts provide an ongoing support as you make decisions and establish digital policies for your school or district. Through our Security Alignment Manager (SAM) Audits, we’ll be there to identify gaps in new or even existing processes and help you close them to eliminate unnecessary risks. Our best practice guidelines and experienced team will also help design and maintain a hardware and software environment that is secure against intrusion even when some mistakes are made. Things like firewalls, password protection software, and data backups help guard against unavoidable human error.
Learn more about our SAM Audits and how they can help identify and close gaps in your Cyber Security defenses.
Detection
Advanced software and regular monitoring by our Support team will detect signs of malicious activity quickly so that we can try to stop it before damage is done. Monitoring measures also help identify gaps in the system so that we can secure them, avoiding issues from happening in the first place.
Let’s Get Started!
Let’s get your school or district secure. Need help with an assessment of your current risks? Need to implement new security measures? Need to train your staff in best-practice threat detection? Macro Connect can help! Give us a call for a free consultation to see how we can help you secure the valuable data you’ve been entrusted to protect.