A Day in the Life of a Cyber Superhero

My day-to-day role covers a lot of bases for NYES Digital. My primary responsibility as a Principal Support Officer is to look at some of the more problematic or advanced incidents that our customers raise with us.

My cyber security background puts me in a great position to be the technical lead for any incoming cyber incidents.

How do you usually start your workday – any specific routines or priorities?

From a security perspective, we have a few systems that I like to check daily to make sure everything is ticking over as expected. The first thing is our RMM system, Datto. Using the tools and reporting in Datto, I like to look through on a morning to make sure everything looks as it should.

I then perform a similar check with Sophos, our antivirus software. Again, just to make sure everything looks as it should.

The final check I like to perform is the Office 365 health check. Office 365 provide a portal that let you see every ongoing fault with the entire suite. This can be really handy in quickly ascertaining if something is a user issue, or a global issue that is already being looked at by Microsoft.

What are the key tasks or responsibilities you handle daily?

My key responsibility every day is to provide cyber advice to our first line agents and to our customers. The cyber security landscape is constantly changing so, being armed with up-to-date information is key in preventing and dealing with cyber incidents.

Can you give an example of a challenging cyber threat you’ve dealt with?

A handful of our schools have their own ‘administrator’ account that allow them to create accounts for new staff and provide password resets quickly. Recently, we had a cyber incident where we believed the victim of a cyber incident just so happened to be on the administrator account.

A compromised administrator account poses a massive danger, so we had to act quickly and confidently to disable the account and perform the anti-virus checks on the potentially affected devices. Our geolocation tools showed us where this attack had originated from and with the 365 reporting, we were able to see what files had been accessed.

The additional complexity of this particular incident helped shape our response to future incidents and helped us to create our own scripts to assist with future cyber incidents

What advice can you give to schools to help lower the risk of a cyber attack?

The number one type of attack we see affecting schools are phishing attacks. The number one way that schools can protect themselves from this kind of attack is to think before you click.

Only click on links in emails if they come from someone you trust. Phishing attacks are getting more sophisticated so if you would like some training on spotting phishing attempts, look into buying BoxPhish through NYES Digital for companywide training on Phishing.

Finally, if you do click a link in an email by mistake, the very first thing you should do is to ring our helpdesk and let them know. Tel: 01609 53 6086

Dealing with these things quickly is very important, so the sooner you can let us know, the better.

What should schools do if they think they have had a breach?

If schools think they have suffered a breach or any other kind of cyber incident, the first thing they should do is ring the helpdesk on 01609 53 6086.

Our first line agents will help take all the information and take any immediate actions that are required.

If you would like further information on cyber protection that NYES Digital offer, please take a look at the following article: Cyber Security Defences

Or check out the NYES Digital service page: NYES Digital

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