Discover the top 10 Cyber Security Solutions for your business - safeguard your data, operations, and employees from cyber threats. Trust the expertise of Ciptor's cybersecurity professionals.

In our increasingly digital world, cyber-attacks on businesses are on the rise. However, there are ways to safeguard your company. Security experts Mikael Zaman Rodin and Tobias Gurtner from Ciptor emphasize the importance of a systematic and active approach to cyber security.

"Cyber security encompasses a wide range of factors, including technology, behavior, and knowledge. All of these aspects must be addressed, and companies must have safety measures in place. Mistakes can easily be made by users," explains Gurtner.

To help you protect your business, here are the experts' top tips for implementing vital IT security solutions.

1. Security Governance with IBM Security™ Verify Governance

Revolutionize risk modeling with a fresh perspective. Effortlessly track and analyze user access and activity with our cutting-edge solution. Say goodbye to outdated separation-of-duties policies and embrace a more effective approach. Introducing IBM Security™ Verify Governance: the innovative system that aligns with your business activities and simplifies compliance management. By associating specific tasks to purchase orders, we provide a seamless experience that speaks the language of auditors and compliance managers. Say hello to a more efficient and accurate way of managing risk.

Why IBM Security™ Verify Governance

• Enhance User Satisfaction and Efficiency with Streamlined Provisioning and Self-Service Requests.
• Ensure Regulatory Compliance and Data Security with Automated Audits and GDPR Controls.
• Mitigate Business Risks and Identify Violations with Effective Access Controls.
• Gain Insight into Risky Users and Insider Threats with Identity Analytics.
• Lower Operational Costs with Automated Processes and Streamlined Identity Lifecycle Management.

2. IBM Security® QRadar® SIEM

Boost your security defenses against evolving threats
Cybersecurity attacks are getting increasingly sophisticated and relentless, requiring tremendous effort from security analysts to navigate through numerous incidents.

With IBM Security® QRadar® SIEM, we harness the power of machine learning and user behavior analytics to analyze network traffic and traditional logs. This enables our analysts to receive precise, contextualized, and prioritized alerts, making threat detection smarter. Our solution empowers you to respond swiftly to threats while safeguarding your bottom line.

Why IBM Security® QRadar® SIEM,

• Boost Efficiency, Reduce Risk, and Save Time!
• Find out how analysts saved an impressive 14,000+ hours over 3 years by eliminating false positives. Read the Forrester TEI study.
• Experience a mind-blowing 90% reduction in incident investigation time.
• Safeguard your organization with a remarkable 60% reduction in the risk of a major security breach

3. AI Digital Fingerprinting from NVIDIA®

Supercharge your cybersecurity with NVIDIA's digital fingerprinting AI workflow. As connected users and devices multiply, enterprises are drowning in data that they can't keep up with. But with our innovative technology, you can quickly identify and act on threats. By utilizing unsupervised learning and our Digital Fingerprinting solution, every user, service, account, and machine on your network will have a unique mark. Plus, our intelligent alert system provides valuable information for taking immediate action. Don't let data overwhelm your security – choose NVIDIA's powerful solution today.

Why AI Digital Fingerprinting from NVIDIA®

• Efficiently reduce massive amounts of data
  Transform up to 100 million weekly events into 8-10 actionable events daily.
• Rapidly uncover cybersecurity threats
  Cut detection time from weeks to minutes.
• Enhanced performance with NVIDIA GPU acceleration
  Achieve complete data visibility across your entire enterprise with NVIDIA GPU acceleration.

4. Passwordless Authentication

Cyberattacks are increasing, particularly credential attacks. With stolen passwords easily accessible and automated attack tools, it's no surprise. 34% of respondents reported credential stuffing attacks, a significant increase from last year. Phishing attacks are also at a record high, with 89% of respondents experiencing at least one. Remote Desk Protocol attacks and push attacks are continuing to impact businesses. Overall, remote workers are frequently targeted, with a rise in push attacks and ongoing pressure from RDP and MitM attacks. The time has come to address the serious threat of weak passwords. In the past year, cyberattacks have been fueled by inadequate password protection, leading to significant damage. Just consider the Colonial Pipeline breach, which was caused by a compromised password and resulted in the shutdown of fuel supply operations.

Why Passwordless Authetication

• Reduce Account-Takeover Fraud by 98.4% with our Solution
• Say goodbye to Phishing Attacks
• Enhance Desktop Security by eliminating password login
• Improve User Experience and reduce frustration
• Cut password reset tickets by 95% and save $7070 per request.

The NIS2 Directive is the EU-wide legislation on cybersecurity. It provides legal measures to boost the overall level of cybersecurity in the EU. The EU cybersecurity rules introduced in 2016 were updated by the NIS2 Directive that came into force in 2023.

NIS2 categorizes entities into two groups: important and essential. Both groups must meet the same requirements, but there are differences in the supervisory measures and penalties. Essential entities must comply with supervisory requirements from the start of NIS2, while important entities are subject to ex-post supervision, meaning action is taken if evidence of non-compliance is found.

The scoping exercise for competent authorities has been simplified by NIS2. A list of sectors has been defined and any large (headcount over 250 or revenue over 50 million) or medium (headcount over 50 or revenue over 10 million) enterprise from those sectors is automatically included in the scope. However, small or micro-organizations may still be included if they fulfill specific criteria demonstrating a significant role in society, the economy, or specific sectors or services.

MFA for Critical Infrastructure: Advice from a CTO

Tobias Gurtner
CTO, Ciptor IT-Safe

Implementation of an authentication solution requires careful consideration of security, encryption, and best practices. You need to do it efficiently, without risking security or user experience.

Throughout my 15+ years of experience in leading engineering teams, I have deployed over 10,000 authentication projects. My key insight is to enable our clients to focus on their core business while we concentrate on creating a secure and robust infrastructure. By establishing a strong foundation, our clients are able to seamlessly scale and integrate external technologies in-house, with MFA.

Plan for MFA

Before you decide to invest in MFA to secure your critical infrastructure, don’t do the mistake and build it yourself or buy it from an outdated technology platform. Let me explain why.

When it comes to securing your system, building a solution from open-source materials, or purchasing a basic MFA platform that lacks updated cybersecurity features might seem like a no-brainer. However, it's crucial to be aware of the potential risks and the needs of protecting your system accordingly. In today’s digital world companies experience more breaches and the cost of a breach continues to rise. The cyber criminals are highly skilled and trained and they have access to sophisticated tools. This requires your team to tackle these issues and create solutions to resolve them. Common issues include:

• Stolen or compromised credentials
• Ransomware
• Business email compromise
• Account takeover
• Password spraying attacks
• Credential stuffing
• Financial fraud
• Content scraping
• Denial of service attacks
• API abuse
• Phishing
• Vulnerability in third-party software
• Malicious insider
• Brute force
• Man-in-the-middle attacks
• Social engineering
• Malware

Use of stolen or compromised passwords remains the most common cause of a data breach and it had an average cost of USD 4.5 million (IBM cost of a data breach report 2022). Tools like AI, Bot Detection, Detection of Breached Passwords, DarkNet Alerts and Automated Threat Reports help significantly but for that you will need a team that understand complex cybersecurity models and have the latest technology in place.

Identity and Authentication Team

If you don't have a dedicated Identity and Authentication Team in place, you need to pull engineers from other projects to build these systems. However, this will impact engineering productivity and affect your company's growth. While customers demand for more features in your core offering, the best engineers are preoccupied with addressing such identity and authentication issues. Identity and authentication capabilities is time and work intensive and should not be a part of any companies core product.

The Identity and Authentication Team has a fundamental responsibility of protecting an organization's digital assets, making sure only authorized individuals can access sensitive information and resources. Roles that typically are included:

• Identity Manager: Developing and implementing processes and tools for creating, managing, and revoking user identities within the organization's systems. This may involve user provisioning, role-based access control, and managing user directories or databases.
• Authentication Manager: Evaluating, selecting, and implementing secure authentication methods. The team ensures that the chosen authentication methods are aligned with industry best practices and meet the organization's security requirements.
• Access Control Manager: Defining and enforcing access control policies that determine who have access to specific resources and data within the organization. This includes implementing mechanisms like access control lists (ACLs), permissions, and authorization frameworks.
• Security Auditing and Manager: Conducting regular audits and assessments to identify potential security vulnerabilities in the identity and authentication systems. The team monitors logs, user activity, and access patterns to detect and respond to any suspicious or unauthorized behavior.
• Incident Response Manager: Developing and implementing incident response plans specific to identity and authentication-related incidents. This includes procedures for handling compromised accounts, password breaches, or unauthorized access attempts.
• User Education and Awareness Manager: Promoting security awareness among users, educating them about best practices for authentication, recognizing phishing attempts, and safeguarding their devices and accounts.
• Compliance and Regulations Manager: Ensuring that the identity and authentication systems comply with relevant regulatory requirements, industry standards, and data protection laws. The team stays up to date with evolving regulations and adjusts security measures accordingly.
• Collaboration Manager: Working closely with other IT teams, such as network security, application development, and system administration teams, to integrate identity and authentication solutions into the overall IT infrastructure and ensure a secure environment.

Innovate without compromise

Identity and Authentication are today top-of-mind and a strategic part of companies roadmap. Keeping up with market trends is key to your business, that is how we all drive growth. Make sure your developers are 100% focused on your core business, don’t take their valuable time and attention away from it. Competition is high today, and your end users have endless online options. For businesses to stay competitive, they are creating new ways of accessing their services such as mobile apps, e-commerce, and more. With so many ways to connect to digital platforms, customers need fast and secure access to them. Identity and Authentication Management is a constantly evolving field, and it can be challenging for businesses without internal resources to create a solution that meets all requirements while ensuring security. Choosing the right solution helps to prevent lost revenue, missed deadlines, and keeping customer trust.

Getting Customer Identity right is hard, particularly when you’re reinventing it from scratch. Identity and Authentication is our core product, and we want to help you deliver your innovative business using our innovative identity and authentication solutions–without compromise.

We are always working hard to enhance our services, enabling businesses to operate efficiently and safely. To improve productivity, we have added more capabilities to our CaaS (Cybersecurity as a Service). You can now create a unique identifier for each device based on its software, hardware, and network configurations. This identifier can be used to detect unauthorized access attempts and block them before they cause harm.

We are proud to be a trusted Identity and Authentication partner for our customers, delivering frictionless, scalable, user-friendly, secure, and highly extensible platforms for customer and workforce applications. We prioritize security in our product development, ensuring that each feature is secure-by-design. Our solution is tried and tested, securing organizations globally, with deployments in complex environments such as finance and banking, critical infrastructure, and government. Our security and engineering teams monitor activity and infrastructure, 24/7, 365 days a year.

FROM PASSWORDS TO PASSWORDLESS AUTHENTICATION

Ciptor ITSAFE is a cybersecurity company specialized to help organizations to protect themselves against cyber-criminals and cyber-attacks such as Ransomware and Phishing attacks, by liberating on IAM, Passwordless Authentication and Digital Fingerprinting. Cyber threats are a growing risk for everyone, and it needs to be taken seriously from the board level in any company to proactively managing the risk against cyber-attacks seeking to compromise or steal digital information from your company

Cybersecurity is the application of technologies, processes, and controls to defend infrastructure such as systems, networks, programs, devices, and data. It aims to reduce the likelihood and impact of cyber-attacks that could lead to unauthorized. access to sensitive client information and the disruption of business activities due to interference in critical infrastructure and corporate networks.

DIGITAL FINGERPRINTING

Digital fingerprinting is a technique used in cybersecurity to create a unique identifier for each device based on its software, hardware, and network configurations. This identifier can be used to detect unauthorized access attempts and block them before they cause harm. Digital fingerprinting is particularly useful in combination with IAM and Passwordless Authentication systems, were biometrics or hardware security keys are used instead of passwords.
By creating a unique digital fingerprint for each device, unauthorized access attempts can be easily identified and blocked, reducing the risk of cyber-attacks. Digital fingerprinting can also be used in threat monitoring, where changes in a device’s fingerprint can be a sign of a potential security breach. Overall, digital fingerprinting is an effective cybersecurity measure that can improve the protection of sensitive information and reduce the risk of cyber-attacks.

FROM PASSWORDS TO PASSWORDLESS AUTHENTICATION

Password authentication is a widely used technique for verifying a user’s identity in cybersecurity. It involves the user providing a password to gain access to a device, system, or network. Passwords are vulnerable to hacking and phishing attacks, which can compromise sensitive information and disrupt business activities. To address these vulnerabilities, password authentication systems have evolved to include stronger password policies, such as minimum password length, complexity requirements, and periodic password changes.

However, even with these stronger password policies, passwords remain vulnerable to attacks. Passwordless authentication is an alternative approach that removes the need for passwords altogether. Instead, biometrics or hardware security keys are used to verify a user’s identity. These methods are considered more secure than passwords because they cannot be easily stolen or guessed.

Passwordless authentication is becoming increasingly popular, and many organizations are adopting this approach to improve their cybersecurity. By removing the need for passwords, the risk of cyber-attacks is significantly reduced, and the protection of sensitive information is improved.

Overall, password authentication and Passwordless authentication are important techniques in cybersecurity. While password authentication remains prevalent, the adoption of Passwordless authentication is increasing due to its improved security and protection against cyber threats.

Basic questions to reflect and then act upon regarding your Cybersecurity Situation:

1. Do you have a comprehensive plan in place to address potential cybersecurity risks facing your organization?
2. What kind of authentication and login methods are you currently using, and what level of protection do they offer?
3. How do you ensure the proper inventory and management of devices used by your employees and stakeholders?
4. Are your digital records and data classified according to PII, proprietary, sensitive, or transactional information, and how are they protected?
5. How often do you assess your network, infrastructure, and user architecture to identify vulnerabilities and ensure proper security measures are in place?
6. What policies do you have in place to restrict access to web/mobile applications, and do you follow a least privilege access policy?
7. How do you enforce password policies, and who has access to password information?
8. How do you ensure the proper storage and use of sensitive data, and what policies do you have in place to protect against data breaches?
9. What security measures do you have in place for computing devices used remotely, and how are they managed?
10. Have you established and tested business continuity and disaster plans, as well as cybersecurity breach incident response plans?
11. How do you ensure the proper disposal of sensitive information, both digital and non-digital?
12. Who are your third-party partners and vendors, and do you have agreements
in place with each independent contractor?
13. What measures have you implemented to improve cybersecurity awareness
among employees and stakeholders, and how do you monitor digital threats both internally and externally?
14. Which devices and assets are most attractive to potential cyber-attacks, and
what measures have you taken to protect them? 15. What is the likelihood and potential cost of a cybersecurity breach, and how do you prepare for and address such incidents?
15. What is the likelihood and potential cost of a cybersecurity breach, and how
do you prepare for and address such incidents?

THE PARTNERSHIP BETWEEN NVIDIA AND CIPTOR IT-SAFE

NVIDIA, a leading technology company known for its innovations in AI and GPU technologies, has partnered with Ciptor IT-Safe to offer enhanced security solutions to businesses and organizations. Ciptor IT-Safe is a Swedish/Swiss company that specializes in data security solutions for businesses and organizations.

The partnership between Nvidia and Ciptor IT-Safe aims to provide businesses with a comprehensive security solution that includes the latest AI and machine learning technologies. NVIDIA’s Morpheus technology, which uses digital fingerprinting, behavioral analysis, and signature-based detection to identify and respond to cyber threats, is a key component of the partnership.

Ciptor IT-Safe’s expertise in data security and its range of security solutions, including secure file transfer and encryption, complement NVIDIA’s Morpheus technology. The partnership will enable businesses to benefit from a complete security solution that addresses the most common threats to their data and networks.

Cyberattacks are on the raise!

The long-standing, oft-deferred security threat posed by password-based authentication is now front and center. Some of the most damaging cyberattacks in the past year were caused or enabled by weak password protection. For example, the Colonial Pipeline breach that shut down fuel supply operations to the eastern United States was traced to a single compromised password. This untenable risk, along with growing regulatory pressures such as the the 2021 Executive Order on Cybersecurity’s Zero Trust mandate, are prompting more organizations to turn to passwordless options. There’s growing recognition that passwordless security approaches can provide significantly better protection and user experience as well as cost savings. To further clarify the state and direction of passwordless authentication, we conducted our second annual survey among IT and security professionals across the globe.

As organizations look for opportunities to do more with less, they’re no doubt considering how security teams can contribute. With that in mind, I’d like to share priorities for 2023 that will pay off in the long run:

• Traditional multi-factor authentication (MFA) methods are increasingly under attack. These include Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) attacks, account takeover (ATO) fraud, phishing, man-in-the-middle (MitM) attacks, credential stuffing and push attacks.
• Remote work continues to be the main driver for passwordless authentication, especially against the backdrop of the significant increase in phishing attacks in recent years.
• Organizations face serious security gaps due to insecure authentication methods based on secret-sharing.
• Protect against identity compromise. 
• Modernize identity security to do more with less.
• Protect access holistically by configuring identity and network access solutions to work together.
• Verify remote users in a cheaper, faster, more trustworthy way.

Credential attacks are on the raise

Given the vast troves of stolen passwords on the dark web, easily available automated attack tools, and people’s penchant for password reuse, it’s unsurprising that credential stuffing attacks and phisihing continues to grow. Phishing remains at an all time high with 89% of respondents revealing that their organizations experienced at least one phishing attack due to the HYPR, 2022 State of Passwordless Security Report.