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Credential Theft Prevention & Identity Protection

Breached Identities are the biggest, most damaging and most widespread threat facing small businesses. S3 Technologies layered security approach ensures your users check all boxes before they are granted access as part of the prevention of credential theft and overall identity protection.

365 Business Identity Protection

Our security team will investigate all risky sign-ins and risky user alerts generated by Microsoft Azure AD and
validate whether an account has been compromised or not. In the case that an account has been compromised, our team will remediate the situation followed by a thorough investigation to determine the extent of the compromise. Awareness of all activity and sign-in traffic is a key element in credential theft protection.

Preventing« Brute Force » Attacks

Brute force attacks are at an all-time high as attackers try to obtain credentials by performing these attacks on any internet exposed service. Brute force attacks are often the initial attack in a successful ransomware compromise. We monitor every user in Active Directory to ensure that the bad password count never exceeds the lockout policy. This not only allows us to ensure that no account can bypass the lockout policy, but also detects ongoing brute force attacks.

Dark Web Compromised Credential Monitoring

The Dark Web consists of a part of the Web not indexed by Google and only accessible via special protocols, like Tor, which provides anonymous access to websites and other servers. The Dark Web is the birthplace for identity theft and credential theft. Many databases containing stolen usernames and passwords are exchanged on the Dark Web. This service detects the presence of one of your user’s passwords on The Dark Web and allows for our monitoring center to react immediately. We alert the user, force a password change, and block future use of the compromised password. This service can offer peace of mind while we take all measures to ensure credential theft prevention.

Two Factor Authentication (2FA) Monitoring

Two-factor authentication is one of the best lines of defense against attacks that exploit weaknesses in a single sign-on, such as a password. This service monitors the active status of two-factor authentication for users in Azure AD. As another step in the avoidance of credential theft, we recommend linking the two-factor authentication provided by Azure AD to all other externally exposed services, such as a VPN that can use the Azure AD identity.

Privileged Security Group Protection

Security groups that give members privileged (or administrative) access to the network should be protected as much as possible, since admission to this type of account would give an attacker full access to the network. Our security monitoring center validates any changes made to these groups. It is quite common for an attacker to try to create one or more user accounts with privileged access to keep access to the network, even after it is detected. This service allows you to detect and block this type of attack.

Frequently Asked Questions

How do you protect my backups?

We have developed a backup security standard to keep backups safe from attackers who will look to compromise them in a ransomware attack. We built our standard with the assumption that the network will be breached and that the attackers will obtain admin rights. Therefore, we completely segregate the backups from the network and put in place their own authentication. Our offsite backups also have ransomware protection built-in which allows for recovery if ever they were to be deleted. Our backup standard withstood penetration testing by multiple specialized security firms. We adapt our backup security standards constantly as the attackers change their tactics.

Simon Marcil

President

How long have you been in business?

21 years! S3 was founded by Marc, Vince, and myself in June 2003 after we all graduated in computer engineering together. Our vision was to become an outsourced IT department for SMBs which is still what we are today. We were, therefore, a Managed Service Provider before the term was used.

We are still the three sole owners of S3 and work hard at it every day.

Simon Marcil

President

Should I get cyber insurance? If so, how can you help?

Yes, you absolutely should. Unfortunately, even though we are very confident in our abilities to protect you against cyber attacks, nothing can be 100% secure. Insurance is an important part of your response plan.

The security standards that we deploy will make sure that you will be insurable, and we will help you answer all the questions the insurers will have, and they will have a lot. We can also help validate that the proposed coverage makes sense for your business.

Vincent Rabbat

Vice-President, operations

What’s a typical client for S3?

Our typical client is an SMB with a head office in the greater Montreal area. Many of our clients also have other offices throughout Canada and the US. A good proportion of them have hybrid office models and some work entirely from home.

Our clients take the security of their data and the productivity of their people very seriously. They want to ensure that their IT enables them to meet their business goals and does not hold them back.

Our clients are from different industries. 60% are professional service firms and the other 40% are in distribution or manufacturing.

Our clients are in the Microsoft ecosystem. They mostly use Windows, Office 365, Azure. The majority have a mix of cloud and on-premise infrastructure. The others have a purely cloud infrastructure.

Most clients have no full-time IT people. Some have an IT team that is mostly focused on their line of business applications.

Clients usually find us when they outgrow their IT provider, or they lose an internal resource and decide they do not want to manage IT people anymore.

Vincent Rabbat

Vice-President, operations

Looking for a new IT supplier?

  • You will be taken care of by a designated team.
  • You will be able to focus on running your business.
  • You will have a true partner who cares about your success.
  • You will be able to take advantage of the latest technologies for greater efficiency.

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