How to Secure Your SME with JumpCloud and CrowdStrike

Small to medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) are highly nimble, adaptable, and innovative – it’s what allows them to keep pace with (and often outstrip) larger competitors.

However, SMEs typically have fewer resources than their larger competitors, requiring high efficiency and strategic decision-making when it comes to resource allocation. Initiatives that drive clear and immediate business value often receive higher priority than non-revenue generating initiatives like security. Over time, this prioritization can create increasingly large security gaps and heightens an SME’s risk of attack. It also creates the illusion of a dichotomy between business and security, where SMEs can only invest in one or the other – not both at once.

Fortunately, this perceived dichotomy between security and business is false: it’s possible to drive both security and business at once.

This whitepaper will explore the challenges and threats SMEs face today and offer solutions that make sense for fast-paced SMEs with finite resources and limited security expertise.

Understanding the SME Security Landscape

While certain high-profile attacks are designed to target the largest, most attention-grabbing organizations, the vast majority have something to gain from businesses of all sizes. The reality is that SMEs face significant threats in today’s landscape; however, not all SMEs have the internal expertise to understand and defend against current threats.

What Motivates Cybercrime?

Direct payments
Credentials and network access
Intellectual property
Company information
Third-party access
Company damage
Access to resources

Types of Cyberattacks

Ransomware: According to CrowdStrike, 50-70% of ransomware attacks are aimed at small businesses. Ransomware attacks typically involve adversaries seizing and locking a company’s data or assets and promising to return it upon payment of a ransom.
Supply chain: When large corporations get attacked, its effects spread through the supply chain. In these cases, SMEs aren’t direct targets, but rather casualties resulting from a larger breach.
Account takeover (ATO): In ATO attacks, adversaries gain access to the network by taking over a user’s account. Account access can be gained through various means, including password-stealing software, social engineering, and using (often by purchasing) the credentials of already breached accounts.
Software exploitation: Leveraging software vulnerabilities is a common way to gain access into an organization’s systems. Often, exploited vulnerabilities are known and even have patches available – and may even be several years old.
Phishing: Phishing remains one of the top three threats SMEs face, even despite organizational awareness around it. Phishing is effective because it preys on human error and is relatively easy to deploy.
Advanced persistent threats (APTs): APTs are sophisticated attacks carried out stealthily over an extended period of time. They typically consist of infiltration, lateral movement toward targeted data or assets, and exfiltration. APTs can start from any ingress point and enter through methods as simple as a phishing attack or stolen password.

Why Are SMEs Targets?

SMEs are sometimes targets by choice, but they are often targets by chance—even if an SME does everything right, it could still become an opportunistic casualty in an attack on another business. SMEs must invest in their defenses to protect them against attack, should one occur.

The following are some of the common ways SMEs become cyberattack victims.

Playing the unwilling test subject: Just like legitimate businesses, cybercriminals strategize and test before rolling out new tactics to optimize their efforts – typically on small, nondescript businesses whose defenses they expect they can overtake.
Acting as a stepping stone: Cybercriminals may also infiltrate an SME as a stepping stone on their way to a more high-impact target. Attacks may aim to conduct reconnaissance on the target or infect the target through the SME in another form of supply chain attack.
Underinvestment in security and IT personnel: With limited budgets and significant workloads of staff, SMEs tend to have underdeveloped defense and response measures (including tooling, processes, 24/7 monitoring, and experience), making attacks easier to mount and carry out without detection or counteraction.
Tech sprawl: SME IT managers are often forced to make quick rather than strategic tooling decisions. Over time, this makes for a messy and sprawled environment where elements don’t integrate or communicate well, creating communication and visibility gaps. Adversaries look for these gaps to aid in their attack and prevent alerts to their activity.
Distributed cloud environments: Most SMEs have made their way (at least partially) to the cloud. However, this move isn’t always accompanied by sufficient security adaptations. Cloud service provider (CSP) security standards aren’t tailored to individual companies, and they are not robust enough to provide reliable security on their own. SMEs should supplement CSP-provided security with their own; failing to do so can create blind spots that hackers target.
More likely to cooperate: When large enterprises are attacked, they often (though not always) have the resources to recover, even if they can’t reclaim all of their lost data, assets, and relationships. With tighter budgets and finite resources, an SME being shut down after an attack is a real possibility. Adversaries know and exploit this: With more to lose in an attack, SMEs are more likely to cooperate (i.e., pay ransoms).
Positive news and press coverage: Unfortunately, an SME’s cause for celebration can be an adversary’s cause for drawing up an attack plan. Because cybercriminals look for exploitable data and capital, news about an SME securing funding, experiencing growth, undergoing an M&A, or other similar events could put an SME on a cybercriminal’s radar.

Mounting a Strong Defense

There are many basic cyber hygiene solutions SMEs can implement to build a more secure defense system to cyberattacks.

How to Mount a Strong Defense

Implement policies that strengthen passwords, like password rotation and complexity requirements. Implementing a password manager will make that easy.
99.9% of account compromise attacks can be blocked with multi-factor authentication (MFA). Keep users and resources safe by layering native MFA onto every identity in your directory.
Challenge and limit users’ sessions with MFA, conditional access policies, and session timeouts.
Start with strong identity security, ideally rooted in Zero Trust methodology. Zero Trust applies security at the identity layer, mandating that users should never be granted access before verifying their identity. Instead of allowing one login to grant access to all resources, Zero Trust continuously requires verification to help stop potential lateral movement.
Patch management software is the best way to reliably track and push out patches while easing IT’s burden of tracking and implementing patches – especially when 40% of SMEs take more than one week to implement patches after a known software vulnerability is released.
Conduct security awareness and best practices training to help prevent the credential theft that fuels account takeovers.
Use comprehensive detection tools to make sure teams are alerted to breaches right away.
Don’t neglect executive security training; in cybercriminals’ eyes, executives are a fast track to the sensitive data and assets they’re looking for. Make no exceptions – every executive should participate in security awareness training.

Improve Your Security Posture with IT Unification

The perceived dichotomy between security and business is false: it’s possible to drive both security and business at once. SMEs can achieve this through IT unification.

IT unification breaks down sprawl and establishes a clear, functional, and efficient base layer of the IT infrastructure that needs to be secured. This unified approach eliminates the vulnerabilities, high costs, and burdensome workloads generated by disjointed IT and security, ultimately creating an architecture where IT and security tools work together seamlessly.

It empowers IT and security teams and helps SMEs achieve a more strategic, cost-efficient stack that:

Reduces complexity, which makes the stack more flexible and manageable
Offers better controls for easier configuration and management
Improves visibility and context, allowing teams to detect and respond to alerts faster
Reduces alert fatigue, which improves productivity and threat response efforts
Allows teams to spend more time on business-driving tasks without sacrificing security

The Steps to IT Unification

1

Identify Your Core Stack: Assess your entire IT environment and determine your needs.
2

Integrate Your Core Stack: Incorporate your new stack into areas that have unmet needs.
3

Consolidate and Eliminate Tools: Let go and move on from the tools that aren’t necessary.

What a Strategy of Unification Delivers

When IT unification is at the center of your strategic plans, monetary costs and unnecessary effort go down while more time is spent deepening relationships with the people (and products) that matter most. With this strategy, each action you take carries more weight to help secure and drive your business forward.

JumpCloud + CrowdStrike: Better Together

To illustrate the power of IT unification, consider the pre-built integration between JumpCloud and CrowdStrike. JumpCloud partners with CrowdStrike, one of the cybersecurity leaders in protecting critical areas of enterprise risk – endpoints and cloud workloads, identity, and data.

The combination of the two enhances visibility, response, controls, and end-to-end protection without increased resource burden. Here’s how it works.

JumpCloud Disk Encryption

The JumpCloud platform integrates with the CrowdStrike Falcon platform to provide effective full disk encryption, allowing you to seamlessly enable BitLocker and FileVault 2 encryption across your fleet through integrated JumpCloud device policies.

With the CrowdStrike Falcon integration you can deploy to individual hosts or thousands of managed endpoints through group-based policy management. JumpCloud automatically escrows the recovery keys of encrypted drives, preventing wasted time and data loss.

Compliance Ready: Easily track which devices were updated, encrypted, and any permission changes with out-of-the-box logging and reporting.
Secure Hosts From Anywhere: Deploy the JumpCloud agent quickly to Windows devices through the Falcon console, drastically cutting deployment time regardless of location.

JumpCloud Patch Management

Ensure your organization is running on the most up-to-date technology to eliminate risk and vulnerability. Enable automatic patch management for major and minor OS updates and browsers. The JumpCloud integration with the CrowdStrike Falcon platform makes it easy to deploy the JumpCloud agent across your entire fleet.

Immediate Resolution: Improve device security globally across Windows, Mac, and Linux to eliminate vulnerabilities with minimal IT effort.
Reduce Zero-Day Impact: Define and automate specific rollout schedules and quickly add/edit/remove schedules as needed.
Compliance Ready: Gain visibility on device health and provide reporting of OS level by host.

To learn more about the JumpCloud-CrowdStrike integration, visit our overview.

Unify Your Tech Stack with JumpCloud

JumpCloud is a cloud directory platform that offers many of the key elements required for a secure, comprehensive core, including:

Identity and access management (IAM)
Device management with patch management, disk encryption, and mobile device management (MDM) capabilities
Single sign-on (SSO)
Privileged access management and conditional access policies

Because it offers several solutions typically sourced from different vendors, the JumpCloud platform is an ideal piece of the core infrastructure in a unified environment. It unifies device and identity management, tying security and access measures to holistic user and device telemetry.

This unification permeates throughout the infrastructure, offering SSO and access management to all of the resources users need to work as well as comprehensive MDM, with the ability to enable full disk encryption, remotely lock and wipe devices, and create device-contingent conditional access policies. Further, JumpCloud is compatible with Mac, Windows, and Linux management, which prevents the need for separate management tools.

This holistic unification enables a significant amount of consolidation by replacing several point solutions and their many custom integrations with native ones.

JumpCloud® helps IT teams Make Work Happen® by centralizing management of user identities and devices, enabling small and medium-sized enterprises to adopt Zero Trust security models. JumpCloud has a global user base of more than 200,000 organizations, with more than 5,000 paying customers, including Cars.com, GoFundMe, Grab, ClassPass, Uplight, Beyond Finance, and Foursquare. JumpCloud has raised over $400M from world-class investors, including Sapphire Ventures, General Atlantic, Sands Capital, Atlassian, and CrowdStrike.

CrowdStrike Holdings, Inc. (Nasdaq: CRWD), a global cybersecurity leader, has redefined modern security with the world’s most advanced cloud-native platform for protecting critical areas of enterprise risk — endpoints and cloud workloads, identity, and data. Powered by the CrowdStrike Security Cloud and world-class AI, the CrowdStrike Falcon® platform leverages real-time indicators of attack, threat intelligence, evolving adversary tradecraft, and enriched telemetry from across the enterprise to deliver hyper-accurate detections, automated protection and remediation, elite threat hunting, and prioritized observability of vulnerabilities.

Purpose-built in the cloud with a single lightweight agent architecture, the Falcon platform delivers rapid and scalable deployment, superior protection and performance, reduced complexity, and immediate time to value.

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