How Web Security Software Can Help Businesses

To do business on the internet, companies need to allow internet browsing and email communication across all departments and staff. While internet access might be necessary for business productivity, it adds enormous risks to the business. Web security software is necessary to protect users from phishing, malware, ransomware, and other web-based threats.

Almost 4000 new threats are introduced daily, and every 14 seconds, a recent victim falls for one of these threats. The cybersecurity landscape continues to change every year, so businesses must adapt and have data protection solutions that evolve with changes to malware, ransomware, phishing, and social engineering. 

 

Why Open Internet Access is Dangerous to Business Data Protection

Needing antivirus on workstations is common knowledge for most business owners, but more than antivirus is needed to stop current sophisticated threats. The more users added to the environment, the higher the risk and the larger the organization's attack surface. Company growth is every organization's goal, but the chances of a data breach continue to increase as an organization hires more employees and leaves them with unfettered internet browsing access.

Not every domain host malware, but many domains contain inappropriate content that could lead to other issues, including litigation, human error, added costs, or wasted productivity hours. Domains in specific categories should never be available to users. Still, unfettered internet access gives employees full browsing permissions for gaming, adult content, entertainment, and other content that might not be suitable for business activity.

The biggest threat from internet browsing is malware and phishing. Drive-by downloads hosted on malicious domains could encourage employees to transfer executable files to a local workstation and execute it. Executing malware on a local workstation can quickly spread malware across the network including ransomware, data eavesdropping software, software that connects a workstation to a botnet, or provides remote control to attackers.

Phishing is the primary concern for most organizations. Humans are every company's weakest link, and attackers know it. With the right spear phishing campaign, an attacker could steal credentials from a high-privilege user account or install malware on an executive device. High-privilege user accounts aren't always necessary for data theft, making the entire process easier for the attacker. With lower privileged users, attackers can still scan the network for higher privileged user credentials, elevating the attacker's permissions to more critical resources such as databases storing customer data, intellectual property, files with sensitive information, or trade secrets.

Credential theft has led to some of the world's most significant data breaches, so anti-phishing strategies must be a component of good business cybersecurity strategies. Businesses should install web content filters to block phishing, web-based attacks, and malware from malicious domains. Web content filters block users from accessing specific domains based on corporate administrator configurations. Web content filters categorize domains so administrators can block a long list of websites based on their categories. For example, adult content can be blocked in the security tool's configurations rather than forcing administrators to block every adult content domain individually.

With the dangers of open internet access, it's still a research tool and a necessity for business protectivity. Without internet access, organizations limit their potential to lose technology resources across the staff. Staff members only need partially unfettered access to internet resources. Still, they need access to various resources to develop ideas, communicate with vendors, and find business opportunities. It's important to point out that internet access is necessary, but web content security and web access control software should be included in an organization’s cybersecurity and data protection strategies.

 

How Does Web Content Security Work?

The best web content filters work at the DNS layer. When a user types a domain name into their web browser, the first step is to perform a DNS query to find the IP address for the domain name. Every fully qualified domain name (FQDN) has an IP address assigned to it when the domain owner registers it and hosts it on a server. The hosting provider usually owns the IP address, but it's possible to host a domain on a private business server locally.

The lookup of an IP address linked to a domain is where web content security works well. The web content filtering software intercepts the DNS query and determines if the domain is on a blacklist or whitelist. Both blacklists and whitelists are configured by the corporate administrator maintaining the web content filter software, but these configurations are flexible to meet unique business requirements.

If a domain is listed on the configured blacklist, a warning page is presented to the user in the browser. Attempting to access the blocked domain is also logged so administrators can get analytics on everyday activities and users accessing blocked domains. Several users accessing the same malicious domain on separate occasions could mean the company is the target of a phishing or malware attack.

Adding DNS-based web filters doesn’t interrupt standard internet browsing or applications using internet queries to perform business activities. Users still access websites quickly if they are allowed or added to the web filter’s whitelist. No interruption happens, provided users do not access blocked domains, so the entire web content filter process is invisible to users on the corporate network. 

Web content filtering isn't the only cybersecurity strategy to protect employees from web-based attacks. Corporations also need data protection strategies, security awareness training to help employees stop attacks, email filtering to protect from phishing messages, and storage security such as encryption to protect from a data breach after a compromise. The TitanHQ suite of solutions covers all these security issues and more.

 

How TitanHQ Can Help

TitanHQ has a suite of products that help businesses protect their digital assets from common web-based attacks. Web-based attacks are more than delivering malware from a malicious domain. Attackers have several options to bypass corporate security infrastructure and find ways to trick users into installing malicious software. Malware isn’t the only payload, so organizations must use a layered cybersecurity approach that spans multiple vectors, systems, and human vulnerabilities. TitanHQ has several solutions that cover all aspects of malware delivery and phishing vulnerabilities.

SpamTitan – Phishing and Spam Protection

Email-based attacks are the most common delivery method for malware, ransomware, and credential theft. Human vulnerabilities are the most significant risk for organizations and are often the target of the world's biggest cyber threats. Ransomware delivery usually starts with an email message, and exploiting human errors is a primary strategy for ransomware authors. The best defense is to stop these attacks at the core of their delivery, meaning employees should never receive them.

SpamTitan is an email filtering system that blocks malicious email messages from reaching the targeted recipient’s inbox. Using artificial intelligence, SpamTitan analyzes incoming email messages, marking the message safe or as a potential threat. If the message is considered a potential threat, it's routed to a quarantine where administrators can further review its content. 

With SpamTitan, users don't receive messages flagged as a potential threat. The quarantine strategy removes the human error element from data breaches, which significantly reduces the risks of being a victim. The email filtering solution takes responsibility from the employee and lets artificial intelligence handle threats instead. Corporations lower common human error vulnerabilities by eliminating the employee's responsibility for identifying and stopping an email-based threat. 

Malicious messages with embedded phishing links are also a threat to web-based threats. SpamTitan identifies email messages with malicious embedded phishing links and blocks them to protect users from credential theft and drive-by downloads. Administrators can configure email filtering software with blacklists, whitelists, and customized settings to support specific business requirements.

WebTitan – DNS-Based Web Content Filters

It’s common for employees to use internet access for business productivity, but giving them unfettered access without any monitoring and filtering could lead to credential theft, phishing, or drive-by downloads for ransomware and malware. Corporations need a web content filter to block malicious websites, but traditional filters aren’t enough. Traditional filters need constant updates and often become outdated without administrators constantly installing updates.

The WebTitan solution is a DNS filtering option for blocking malicious domains with constant automatic updates. WebTitan runs in the cloud and blocks malicious domains during the DNS lookup. Because it runs in the cloud, WebTitan has the latest list of malicious domains from TitanHQ's threat intelligence. The advanced system keeps corporate users from accessing today's and tomorrow's web-based threats.

Leaving users with unfettered internet access can be a considerable vulnerability that must be controlled with web content filtering systems. WebTitan is a convenient yet effective cybersecurity tool that pairs well with SpamTitan email filtering solutions. Using both WebTitan and SpamTitan solutions, corporations significantly reduce their data breach risks from web-based threats.

EncryptTitan – Encrypt Email for Compliance and Security

Developing compliant processes and building data loss prevention in system workflows requires a solution built with data protection and compliance in mind. Many businesses need on-site staff to evaluate and identify better data loss prevention opportunities and ways a corporation could lack compliance regulations. EncryptTitan removes much of the overhead when dealing with email cybersecurity and encrypts email data at rest. Data at rest is any information stored on a drive, either in the cloud or on-premises. EncryptTitan encrypts it, which is a significant component in compliance with regulations such as HIPAA.

The EncryptTitan solution integrates directly into email workflows and includes an Outlook plug-in to give users control over encrypted data. Although EncryptTitan works well with Microsoft Exchange email platforms, it’s also platform agnostic and works with any operating system environment. The pre-built data loss prevention (DLP) policies provide administrators with an easily configurable system for any corporation new to DLP and compliance regulations.

Because EncryptTitan is cloud-based, it’s scalable with large storage silos. Email messages can build to terabytes or petabytes of data, depending on the corporation's retention policy. Cloud-based storage scales with even the most prominent businesses, so storage capacity is always maintained by physical on-premises hardware. Administrators can keep email records for years without worries of running out of storage capacity. EncryptTitan integrates directly with cloud-hosted email platforms, so the transition to encrypted data at rest requires only a few minutes with flexible configurations out-of-the-box.

SafeTitan – Security Awareness Training for Employees

Although businesses should eliminate human intervention in their cybersecurity workflows, they should still educate employees on common threats, especially social engineering, and phishing. It's not uncommon for organizations to be targets for social engineering and phishing several times a day. Employees should know to identify these threats should email filters allow a false negative threat to access employee inboxes. A good failsafe is security awareness training.

The SafeTitan security awareness training program is a combination of educational tools, quizzes, gamification notifications, phishing simulation exercises, and reporting for stakeholders. SafeTitan has several effective tools and simulation templates to help educate employees using real-world scenarios. Real-world scenarios include common phishing and social engineering strategies, but SafeTitan includes the latest threats and zero-day attacks.

Businesses with SafeTitan implemented also benefit from user notifications so that users can learn from their mistakes and continue their education throughout their workday. Notifications are non-intrusive and integrate with several platforms, including Microsoft Office 365, Teams and Azure AD, Google Suite, and ADFS. The cyber knowledge assessments allow users to prove their phishing and social engineering recognition abilities, and stakeholders can identify any additional opportunities for education from users struggling with concepts.

SafeTitan also benefits managed service providers responsible for hundreds of clients and their cybersecurity. A managed service provider (MSP) will find that their clients will appreciate the benefits of better cybersecurity education to help them better protect data and the business brand. Data loss prevention (DLP) is improved, and overhead from the incident response is reduced when compromises are reduced. 

ArcTitan – Email Archives for Compliance and Legal

Large organizations with legal teams and investigations into email conversations need a compliant way to archive emails for future litigation responses. Backups are necessary for compliance and disaster recovery, but email archives are backups with a specific purpose. Archiving email requires indexing functionality to quickly search, export, and secure messages from unauthorized access.

Indexing and search performance are necessary for email archives, which is why archive files are a separate strategy from simple backups. Backups are necessary for quickly recovering data, but executives and legal teams must be able to find specific information contained in email archives. The ArcTitan solution integrates with a business email platform and automatically archives data based on an administrator's configurations.

ArcTitan has an interface for administrators to configure permissions and secure email backups so that only authorized individuals can access archives. Legal teams can quickly open the cloud-based email archive interface, perform queries for specific content, and export it for investigations, litigation, or subpoenas for information. The ArcTitan platform is also fully compliant with various regulatory requirements, including GDPR.

The discovery process for litigation can take weeks, but ArcTitan reduces overhead for research and speeds up the process, eliminating overhead and costs. Easy administration doesn’t require much overhead from staff responsible for configuring and monitoring backup and archiving solutions, so the time-savings also reduce infrastructure costs. With ArcTitan, enterprise legal times have a faster way to comply with requests and investigate incidents involving email messages more quickly.

 

Data Protection, Filtering, Compliance, and Backups with TitanHQ

More than one cybersecurity strategy is needed to protect from the numerous attacks in the wild. It takes several strategies and layers of security across the entire business environment to cover all the threats targeting a business. Small and large businesses are targets for cyber threats, so no business owner should disregard data protection and compliance requirements. Small businesses are a bigger target for threats because they often don't have the educated staff and expensive technology to stop sophisticated threats. Business owners and managed service providers should always consider cybersecurity a priority for their IT budgets and integrated technology.

For any corporate administrators struggling to decide on the best configurations for their environment, TitanHQ has world-class support to help any enterprise deploy the various platform solutions. TitanHQ suite of cybersecurity software only takes a few minutes to deploy, and configurations out-of-the-box are often sufficient to get started. Whether administrators choose the pre-built configurations or customize them, TitanHQ support is always available to help with deployment, installations, and troubleshooting.

Content filtering, email filtering, data protection, compliant solutions, and encryption are what TitanHQ's suite of products can bring to an organization. All our solutions are rated well across several feedback channels, and we strive to provide the best customer support for managed service providers and business stakeholders. 

To take a look into the various cybersecurity strategies TitanHQ has to offer, browse the TitanHQ site and view our products. To get started with web content protection and filtering, sign up for a free trial.