Ensure They Can’t Hack IT This Holiday Season

The holiday season is the ideal time to relax, but it’s also the ideal time for hackers to compromise your systems. According to a recent study of 900 IT and security professionals worldwide by cybersecurity company Semperis, 86% of ransomware attacks on businesses happen during a holiday or weekend.

Being the victim of a cyberattack may seem like something that only happens in the news, but it can happen to anyone. Many companies have suffered cyberattacks this year, such as AT&T and Ticketmaster, according to CBS News, and yours could be next if you don’t fortify your systems for the holiday season.

While Nagios Monitoring Solutions aren’t cybersecurity tools, they can help you strengthen your IT infrastructure against malicious attacks. For a deeper look into how Nagios can support your cybersecurity efforts, read our other article Supporting Cybersecurity with Nagios Monitoring Solutions.

Supporting Cybersecurity with Nagios Monitoring Solutions During the Holiday Season

Nagios XI

Nagios XI, our enterprise-grade IT infrastructure monitoring solution, can help protect you against cyberattacks through its ability to monitor and alert on nearly anything. XI can alert you when there are indicators of a possible attack, including unexpected file updates or changes in file size. With Configuration Wizards, you can also easily configure XI to monitor website defacement and operating system error logs. For example, when you monitor your website for defacement, you can input specific strings you do not want to appear on your website. If XI finds one of those strings on your website, it will notify you so you can quickly jump into action and resolve the issue.

Nagios Log Server

Nagios Log Server, our log monitoring solution, also helps with cybersecurity because it can store large amounts of log data and provides you with the ability to audit, report, and alert on it. These capabilities are important for your cybersecurity because they enable you to inspect your log data to identify or prevent security issues.

For instance, if you want to view the activity logs on an individual workstation to check data on access or permission attempts, Log Server can create an audit trail for you with its reporting feature. With near-instant alerting, Log Server also enables you to react quickly to any issues arising in your log data to speed up the time it takes to resolve an issue.

Log Server can also integrate with Nagios XI so you, or rather XI, can take action based on the log data it receives. By using this integration, you can create event handlers in XI to auto-remediate certain issues in your IT infrastructure based on log data it receives from Log Server. One example of how you can utilize this integration is if Log Server detects suspicious login attempts on a server, it can trigger an alert as well as an event handler in XI to will stop a running Service. As a result, you are able to prevent your IT environment from being compromised by someone who is trying to access your system.

Nagios Network Analyzer

Nagios Network Analyzer can help with cybersecurity as well because it monitors your network traffic and bandwidth and alerts you when critical thresholds for them are breached. With insight into both of these important parts of your network, you have the power to expose potential threats if they arise.

Whether abnormal activity is happening in your network or bandwidth usage is exceeding thresholds, you will be aware of whenever it happens because Network Analyzer will alert you and enable you to start investigating what’s happening. It’s essential you are aware of when these kinds of activity happen because these can indicate a malicious actor is inside your network. With an alert from Network Analyzer, however, the malicious actor won’t be in there long.

By integrating Nagios solutions into your cybersecurity strategy, you will have greater insight into what is happening in your IT infrastructure so you can avoid being part of the 86% during this holiday season.