Thwarting One of Today’s Biggest Business Threats: Cybersecurity Breaches

Cybersecurity breaches can severely cripple an organization, and in some cases, put it out of business entirely.

Secure Cyber Defense was established in 2015 to aid in the prevention and investigation of cyber threats. The Miamisburg, Ohio-based company — now in the latter half of its fifth year — was founded by Shawn Waldman, the company’s CEO and president.

Waldman, a former police officer, started in cybersecurity in 2009 when the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) introduced the Criminal Justice Information Services (CJIS) compliance directive, which required all law enforcement agencies in the United States to comply with cybersecurity standards.

“I was tasked with developing the standards for the agency that I was working for,” Waldman recalls. He later founded Secure Cyber Defense to provide premier cybersecurity solutions to small and medium-size businesses. The company has since grown to provide cybersecurity to enterprise-level companies, as well.

Since the founding of Secure Cyber Defense, the company has gone from a one-person operation to employing 17 full-time employees working on different aspects of cybersecurity.

“Our primary bread and butter for the organization is managed and monitored security devices,” Waldman says, specifying that the company mainly does this for manufacturing, financial, aerospace, and state and local government sectors (with a few exceptions). “We have a security operations center in the building that is manned by certified analysts. We staff the center with a mixture of ex-military, ex-secret service, ex-law enforcement personnel, handling the day-to-day monitoring for threats. And, we’ve got three certified forensic analysts on staff that man a 24/7, 365-day response team. We have the ability to take calls from companies anywhere that are in trouble with ransomware, and we will investigate the threat and assist them with determining the who, what, when, where, why and how.”

Secure Cyber Defense is a partner of Fortinet — a cybersecurity solutions provider — utilizing Fortinet firewalls and Security Information and Event Management (SIEM). The company also offers consultation services, including third-party evaluations, gap assessments, and creating “cyber roadmaps” that run vulnerability scans and pinpoint gaps.

The team also specializes in Defense Federal Acquisition Regulation Supplement (DFARS) certification, National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) certification, and Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification (CMMC).

“Those are Department of Defense-related cybersecurity compliance directives that we are experts at,” Waldman says. “We do lots of engagements with manufacturing and aerospace in the area. We’re able to perform those assessments and apply that expertise with our ex-military folks.”

The company also recently acquired Security Orchestration, Automation and Response (SOAR) software, which automates and orchestrates time-consuming manual cybersecurity tasks without requiring human intervention.

This cuts the company’s response times to security threats in half, and it’s their commitment to rapid on-site response that sets Secure Cyber Defense apart from their competitors.

“Most of our competitors are doing all-remote engagements,” Waldman says. “We send our forensic analysts to gather images of computer hard drives, analyze logs, and use a mixture of commercial and proprietary software to perform a forensic investigation. We break down all the data to determine — the number one thing organizations typically want to know in a ransomware scenario, and what their insurance companies want to know — if any data exfiltrated. ‘Was any personally identifying or sensitive information taken?’ That’s one of the primary things that we can determine in an investigation — did any data leave?”

For more information about Secure Cyber Defense, call 937-388-4405 or visit www.secdef.com.