Keep calm and carry on: Five tips to better protect yourself during the current Russia-Ukraine Crisis

By Christopher Budd

The current Russia-Ukraine crisis is unprecedented. One aspect of the current crisis is the very real concern around increased cyberattacks on an unprecedented scale.

The concern is reasonable: there’s simply no way to know what’s going to happen next. And the concern stems not just from nation-state actors and their proxies: cybercriminals, hacktivists, and vandals also thrive in times of chaos and uncertainty like this.

With all these unknown and unknowable cyber risks and threats swirling around, it’s understandable that people are worried and even afraid and not sure what to do.

The important thing to remember is that we do know what we can do to better protect ourselves during this crisis. These are the same things that we can and should be doing every day and during every crisis. We just need to remember them and act on them.

Focusing and executing on five specific, concrete areas of action can help you better protect yourself and your organization from attacks during this time of increased uncertainty:

1. Alert and educate your users about the increased risks

2. Update systems, mobile, IoT and network devices and apps

3. Run and update security software

4. Secure remote access accounts and devices

5. Make and verify backups

Alert and educate your users about the increased risks

User education is always a key part of any cybersecurity program. People form the last defense against attack. With all that’s going on, many people may not be thinking about the increased cybersecurity risk and their role in helping to protect themselves and their organization. Help people understand we’re in a time of increased risk and that they need to exercise even more caution than usual against phishing, malicious links and attachments.

Update systems, mobile, IoT and network devices and apps

Keeping systems up to date with patches against vulnerabilities is always important but right now even more so. While people have gotten used to updating their mobile devices and computers using automatic updates, it’s important to also remember to update IoT devices, routers and remote access software and devices. Make it a priority to ensure that you’re updating everything, not just mobile devices and computers.

Run and update security software

Having security software on all your endpoints is important to provide protection against attacks. Out-of-date or misconfigured security software however not only fails to protect but can give a false sense of security. Take time to ensure that you not only have security software in place but that’s it’s fully up-to-date and configured properly. Take the time to verify you’ve got automatic updates working on your security software either by logging into it or through the management console.