Linux server security services

[Security]

Do you do business globally? Any business owner enjoys the thought of having sales pour in from all over the planet, but when we stop to think about it, this is really not practical. Most small businesses speak just one or two languages, have a small number of locations in one or two countries, and are probably not prepared to export products and services globally. If your business focus is Canada and the USA, for example, then you should only have your servers accessible to customers in those countries. Opening your servers to the entire world is an open invitation to hackers and robots who are seeking to harvest or steal your data, and even if they don't succeed, their activities may impact server performance for legitimate customers.

Data. Bank.

Whether you are just developing your business or are well established, the data you store in your servers is a valuable asset. If a server's data is stolen or lost the damage to a business can be incalculably high. If someone gained access to your e-mail server might it damage your reputation or reveal trade secrets? Don't get fooled into thinking you are not safe in a large enterprise because it was not long ago that Yahoo got hacked and had over a billion account records stolen, Telus had its records stolen, and many more. Most large enterprises are responsible and report when they are hacked, in order to warn customers, but there are times when a security event is hidden. We have personal knowledge of one large enterprise whose name is like Amazing that got hacked in 2012 and lost unknown numbers of customers' credit card details, but if you search you will find no mention of it.

If the big enterprises fall prey to hackers, then how can ISP Ltd. hope to help your small business to avoid the same trouble?

The fact is that big enterprise is always pushing to reduce the cost of labour and improve the return to share-holders. If they can reduce staffing through automation, by putting more responsibilities on people, and by hiring less qualified staff, they will certainly do it. It is common practice to put senior-level people on a project at the start and then replace them with junior-level people for on-going maintenance. This is what leads to disasters.

At ISP ltd we do not have any junior resources. We are a small business like yours, so every customer is very important to us. Even though we work carefully to make sure the job is done right, we don't have the pressure of share-holders demanding us to work more quickly than we feel is required to get a job done right. Our only pressure is in serving our customers with the highest-quality work. Large enterprise moves with incredibly slow speed at times, so even though we take care to work meticulously and thoroughly, we can still respond more quickly to your requests than a large enterprise ever could.

Them: Robot

There are thousands of robot scanners that scour the Internet continually. They probe for vulnerabilities and attempt to scan or download web sites. If you offer an on-line service, they will attempt to harvest your data. They are a moving target. Every day they will arrive from different hosting companies in different countries. Hundreds of specialised search engines and research facilities looking for your data to harvest and sell, or looking for weak spots in your digital armour that they can either exploit or hope to sell you a product to fix.

Designing security solutions for this rapidly increasing problem is something ISP Ltd has been working on since its inception in 1999. Today we use a combination of system and application firewalls to provide our customers with an effective security perimeter that will block undesired traffic, thereby freeing your server resources to provide for your customers, sales prospects, and employees.

Consider this example: Here is a 9-second window of activity, using one of our proprietary tools developed in-house, on the web server of a customer of ours that only serves clients in the USA, Canada, and the UK.

In this small sample you can see attempts to send spam, robots attempting to scan web sites, unregistered networks attempting doing port scans to see if they can find vulnerable services to exploit, and more. Everything was caught by the first of our server security tools. Attempts that pass through the first security layer then face additional application-level security layers that they must also get past.

You may wonder if a simple firewall product that you could buy on-line would also do such things, but the answer is definitely "no". A pre-packaged product would not know which countries you want to serve, and probably would not even offer the ability to set rules based on this. Even if it did, the rules need to be updated regularly, because IP address blocks are bought and sold between countries frequently. A block of addresses that are in South American one day might be bought by a company in the USA a week later.

As we have done for ourselves and others, we can tailor a security solution for your Internet services that will keep your data safe and your services available to your customers.

Please call and talk to us about how we can manage and protect your Internet services. See the Contact page for hours and phone numbers.