IT at Acerta: how the Security team fends off hackers

Personal data is always a sensitive matter – especially when it comes to money. At Acerta, we manage hundreds of portfolios. Our customers put their trust in us to keep their information safe. Insert: Security, where Kurt is a mentor. Kurt shows you how Security intervenes in a worst case scenario.

Kurt cannot stress the importance of monitoring, efficient scenarios and guidelines enough. “We put our feelers out every quarter: what’s new, what security solutions should we improve? We keep our fingers on the pulse of the IT landscape and the world of threats.”

Tip: ask your new colleagues for references straight away when you start. Every IT professional subscribes to niche newsletters or is a member of an online community to keep up with the latest security updates – this is a must if you want to keep data safe.

As you join the Security track, you will also do a lot of testing. This will help you check whether the measures taken are effective and helps you identify where our pain points lie. App by app, step by step.

“Sufficient preparation ensures there are no ‘jump scares’ in security”

On a zero-day, it’s all hands on deck. That’s the day hackers have discovered a vulnerability in a particular piece of software, but the product owners have not yet been able to patch it. The ideal time to strike.

You can take the term zero-day literally here: you have less than a day to trace and solve the problem if you don’t want to get hacked. “This kind of news is often noticed externally, after which we initiate our safety procedure.” It looks something like this:

1. What does the threat hunt say? Our partners have been aware of the issue in the background way before we have: the threat hunt for threats and patterns runs 24/7.

2. Analysis of the threat How serious is the threat to us? How do we apply the vulnerable software? Are we using the system under attack?

3. The moment of truth Are we susceptible to the vulnerability? If so, we have to communicate about it immediately – internally and with our customers.

4. Avoiding recurring incidents To avoid these kinds of “jump scares”, we immediately update our scenarios and guidelines to respond appropriately to such attacks in the future.

“We not only learn from our own cyber scares, we look at the entire Belgian landscape. Last year has taught us how ransomware can have major consequences when hackers infiltrate government agencies. We’ve drawn our lessons from that.”

Wondering what it's like to be in charge of cyber security for a large company? Let us know below or contact one of our mentors for an open discussion.