Companies undertake a wide variety of “housekeeping” duties to make operations run more efficiently. The general concept is applied to accounting, budgets, human resources, and literal workspace clutter. However, one area is often missed, one that in today’s corporate climate may be more critical than all the rest - malware.
Malware and its innumerable strains likely plague your organization right at this very moment. In some cases, it’s sitting in a staff member’s inbox, ready to be clicked. In others, an advanced threat has already been introduced into the environment and is lying in wait until a certain date or event triggers execution. Even if your business has a disaster recovery plan in place it may not be enough to quickly recover from the attack and achieve business continuity. What should you do? Start cleaning your house today with the following expedient steps.
5 Quick Steps to Ridding Your Business Environment of Malware and Other Malicious Documents
1. Alert Staff and Make Them Advocates
Put everyone on notice - the hunt for malware is about to begin. This will pull the threat from their periphery and put it front and center where it needs to be. Better yet, make them advocates in the purge. This can be accomplished by arming them with information about what to look for.
When communicating the action plan, include this guide to identifying advanced phishing schemes. This will help stop impending attacks today and will make staff more conscious of the emails, texts, and messages that reside in their workstations, laptops, and mobile devices.
2. Perform a Malware Audit
With in-office and remote staff and stakeholders alerted and on standby, it’s time for a malware audit. This begins by figuring out where your company stands with respect to cyber threat protection and acceptable use policies for devices, data, and the entire network. Are you secure in some areas but lacking in others? Once identified, focus on areas where you lack, no matter how seemingly small and inconsequential they may be. All it takes is the introduction of one malicious document to bring down an entire company.
An internal audit can be performed in an hour when you have IT personnel on hand. It won’t be as comprehensive as an assessment from a cybersecurity professional (more on this below) but it’s an effective start.
Are you somewhat confused about how to conduct this audit? Don’t worry, because you probably already have instruments in place to assist. Keep reading.
3. Use the Tools You Have Available To You
Many businesses are unaware of the fact that they may already have security tools that they can employ today. For example, do you have a Microsoft 365 subscription? Then you have access to Microsoft Secure Score. To review your score, you must be a Global Administrator, Security Administrator, or Security Reader in Azure Active Directory. If you’re not, find the in-house IT person who is and start leveraging Secure Score today.
There are other ways to leverage Office 365 and Microsoft 365 Business plans in malware protection. This includes creating rules and conducting the following tasks:
If you don’t have a Microsoft subscription, you can get one quickly by connecting to Fully Managed. We are an MS Gold Partner and Certified Cloud Solution Provider. When you subscribe through us you can leverage the power of Microsoft products and services to remove malware from your corporate environment.
4. Check for Updates (and Initiate)
Beyond MS 365, your business may depend upon other forms of software-as-a-service (SaaS) for productivity. This software most likely has malware protection in place, but it’s only effective when it is updated with the latest security patches to address new threats. Check for updates on all software products, back up data (to the cloud), and initiate. Remember to change all settings so that future updates occur automatically to ensure real-time threat protection.
5. Bring in a Cleaning Crew
You don’t use your day to day staff for office sanitation, so don’t depend solely on them for malware cleaning. Instead, bring in outside IT support to conduct this critical task which will begin with an in-depth audit of your systems. Even your in-house IT team will benefit from the assistance. Outside IT support will afford your company access to advanced tools and expertise that comes from over a decade in cybersecurity intelligence. This is the quickest and most seamless way to scrub malware free from all operations. Contact Fully Managed today to get started.