EU Presidency Series: Securing Irish Government in a High-Stakes Year #6

By this point in the series, your organisation should have a clearer picture of its risk landscape, a more disciplined approach to patching, a vulnerability management programme in motion, and stronger identity controls in place. Each of those is a meaningful step. But individually, they are still components. What ties them together — and what ultimately determines whether an organisation is genuinely resilient or merely less vulnerable — is security posture.

Security posture is the term used to describe an organisation’s overall defensive capability: not just the tools it has deployed, but how effectively they are configured, monitored, and maintained; how well staff understand and follow security processes; and how quickly the organisation can detect, respond to, and recover from an incident when one occurs.

Getting posture right is the difference between an organisation that survives a serious cyber incident and one that doesn’t.

From reactive to proactive: what the shift looks like

Most public sector IT teams spend the majority of their security time in reactive mode — responding to alerts, resolving incidents, chasing patches, handling helpdesk requests. This is understandable. The day-to-day demand is real. But a purely reactive security function is one that is always a step behind the threat.

Proactive security is not about predicting the future. It is about systematically reducing the conditions that allow attacks to succeed, and building the detection and response capability to catch the ones that get through anyway.

In practice, the shift involves several things happening in parallel.

Visibility: you can’t respond to what you can’t see

The foundation of proactive security is visibility — a continuous, accurate picture of what is happening across your environment. This typically means having a Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) system or equivalent capability that aggregates logs from across your infrastructure, applies detection rules, and surfaces anomalies that warrant investigation.

Many Irish public sector organisations have some logging in place but lack the centralisation and analysis capability to turn raw logs into actionable intelligence. Events that would, in retrospect, have signalled a breach in progress — unusual authentication patterns, unexpected outbound connections, privilege escalation on systems that don’t normally see it — pass unnoticed.

Investing in visibility is not glamorous. It requires configuration work, ongoing tuning, and a human process for reviewing and acting on alerts. But it is what enables an organisation to catch an incident early, when the damage is still limited, rather than weeks later when it has spread.

Detection and response: shortening the dwell time

The average dwell time — the period between an attacker gaining access and an organisation detecting the intrusion — remains measured in weeks or months across many sectors. During that time, attackers are typically establishing persistence, escalating privileges, moving laterally, and exfiltrating data. The longer the dwell time, the greater the damage.

Organisations that have invested in proactive detection capability consistently achieve shorter dwell times and significantly better incident outcomes. Key elements include:

Endpoint & Managed Detection and Response (EDR & MDR) . Modern EDR & MDR tools and services provide visibility into activity on individual devices — detecting behavioural patterns consistent with malware, lateral movement, or credential misuse — in a way that traditional antivirus cannot.

Network monitoring. Visibility into traffic flows across your network enables detection of unusual patterns: large data transfers, connections to known malicious infrastructure, lateral movement between systems that don’t normally communicate.

Threat intelligence integration. Knowing what threat actors are actively doing — the techniques they’re using, the infrastructure they’re operating from — allows detection rules to be tuned to the actual current threat rather than generic historical patterns.

Defined incident response procedures. When an alert fires, who does what? In the absence of a defined, practised incident response plan, organisations lose critical time to confusion. The plan doesn’t need to be elaborate — it needs to be clear, current, and known to the people who will execute it.

The human layer: security culture matters

Technology alone cannot deliver a strong security posture. The human layer — staff awareness, behaviours, and culture — is consistently one of the most significant factors in both the success and failure of security programmes.

Phishing simulation programmes, regular security awareness training, and clear policies around acceptable use, device management, and incident reporting all contribute to a culture where security is understood as a shared responsibility rather than the IT team’s problem.

For Irish public sector organisations, where staff may be handling sensitive policy information or operating in contexts that make them attractive targets for social engineering, investment in the human layer is at least as important as investment in technology.

Measuring and communicating posture

One of the hallmarks of a mature security function is the ability to measure its own effectiveness and communicate it clearly to senior leadership. This means having meaningful metrics — not raw counts of alerts, but indicators of actual security outcomes: mean time to detect, mean time to respond, patch compliance rates, percentage of assets covered by monitoring, number of open critical vulnerabilities and their age.

Senior leaders in public sector organisations are increasingly being held accountable for cybersecurity outcomes — by government policy, by the NIS2 Directive, and by the expectations of the public they serve. Giving them a clear, honest picture of where the organisation stands is both a governance obligation and a practical necessity for getting the resource and attention security programmes need.

Your action this fortnight

Step back from the individual controls and ask the broader question: does your organisation have a documented, current understanding of its security posture? Is there a person or team responsible for maintaining that picture and reporting on it? Is there a defined target state — not just “more secure than we are now,” but a specific set of capabilities and standards to achieve?

If the answer to any of those questions is no, that is where the next conversation needs to happen — and it needs to happen at senior leadership level, not just within the IT team.

Paradyn supports Irish public sector organisations in assessing, measuring, and systematically improving their security posture. To set up a conversation about where your organisation stands and where it needs to go, reach out to the Paradyn team today.

The post Security posture: moving from reactive firefighting to proactive resilience first appeared on Paradyn.

EU Presidency Series: Securing Irish Government in a High-Stakes Year #5

Stolen credentials are involved in the majority of data breaches. Not sophisticated zero-day exploits. Not elaborate supply chain compromises. Usernames and passwords — obtained through phishing, credential stuffing, or purchasing them from other breaches — used to walk through the front door of organisations that trusted a single factor to protect everything behind it.

Multi-factor authentication (MFA) is the most direct response to this risk. When implemented well, it means that a stolen password alone is not enough to compromise an account — an attacker also needs the second factor, which they typically don’t have. Microsoft has estimated that MFA blocks over 99% of account compromise attacks. For a control that costs relatively little to deploy, that is a remarkable return.

And yet, across Irish public sector organisations, MFA adoption remains uneven. Some systems have it; others don’t. Some staff use it; others have been granted exceptions. During a period when credential harvesting campaigns targeting Irish government are a credible and active threat, those gaps are worth taking seriously.

How credential attacks work in practice

Understanding why MFA matters requires understanding what attackers actually do.

Phishing remains the most common method of credential theft. A convincing email — referencing a real event, appearing to come from a trusted colleague or service, creating a sense of urgency — leads to a fake login page that captures whatever the user types. During the EU Presidency, the supply of credible pretexts for phishing campaigns is essentially unlimited: EU policy updates, interoperability briefings, calendar invitations, Microsoft 365 alerts.

Password spraying involves trying a small number of commonly used passwords against a large number of accounts. It avoids the lockout thresholds that catch brute force attacks and is often used against organisations with large numbers of users.

Credential stuffing uses combinations of usernames and passwords leaked in previous breaches — of which there are billions in circulation — against new targets, exploiting the fact that many people reuse passwords across personal and professional accounts.

In all three scenarios, MFA is the control that stops a compromised credential from becoming a compromised account.

Not all MFA is equal

When organisations implement MFA, they often reach first for the most familiar option: one-time codes sent by SMS. This is significantly better than no MFA at all, but it is worth understanding its limitations.

SMS-based codes are vulnerable to SIM-swapping attacks, where an attacker convinces a mobile carrier to transfer a victim’s phone number to a device they control. They are also susceptible to real-time phishing, where an attacker proxies the user’s login in real time and captures both the password and the SMS code before it expires.

Stronger MFA options — particularly full feature Identity Solutions (such as Cisco DUO) and hardware security keys (such as FIDO2-compliant devices) — are meaningfully more resistant to these attacks. For high-privilege accounts and senior staff who are attractive targets, these stronger options should be the standard.

The implementation challenges that matter

The technical deployment of MFA is generally straightforward. The harder challenges are organisational.

• Coverage gaps. MFA on Microsoft 365 is a good start, but it is only as useful as the systems it covers. VPN access, remote desktop, finance systems, HR platforms, and any other application that holds sensitive data or provides privileged access all need to be in scope. A partial MFA implementation provides partial protection.
• Service accounts and shared credentials. Many organisations have shared accounts — used by multiple people or by automated processes — that sit outside standard MFA policies. These are frequently high-value targets and need specific attention.
• Legacy authentication protocols. Older applications often use authentication protocols — basic authentication in email clients, for example — that cannot support MFA at all. These represent a bypass route around even a well-implemented MFA policy, and they need to be identified and either upgraded or blocked.
• User friction and exceptions. MFA adds a step to the login process. Without good change management and clear communication about why it matters, organisations frequently encounter resistance — and respond by creating exceptions that quietly undermine the whole programme. A culture where exceptions are easy to obtain is a culture where MFA protection is unreliable.
• Phishing-resistant MFA for privileged users. Standard MFA can still be bypassed by sophisticated real-time phishing attacks. For administrators, executives, and others with elevated access, phishing-resistant MFA — specifically FIDO2 hardware keys or passkeys — should be the standard, not the aspiration.

Your action this fortnight

Audit your current MFA coverage across all systems that hold sensitive data or provide administrative access. Identify the gaps — the applications not covered, the accounts with active exceptions, the legacy protocols still in use. Prioritise closing the gaps on externally accessible systems and privileged accounts first.

If MFA is already broadly in place, the next step is reviewing the strength of the methods in use and moving your highest-risk users to phishing-resistant options.

A single afternoon of honest audit work on MFA coverage is one of the highest-value security activities your organisation can undertake right now.

Paradyn works with Irish public sector organisations to design and implement MFA programmes that are comprehensive, practical, and sustainable. To set up a conversation about your identity security posture, reach out to the Paradyn team today.

The post One password isn’t enough: making MFA work across your organisation first appeared on Paradyn.

EU Presidency Series: Securing Irish Government in a High-Stakes Year #4

If patching is about fixing known problems, vulnerability management is about continuously finding them. The two are closely related — but they are not the same thing, and the distinction matters.

Many organisations treat vulnerability management as a synonym for patching, or as a once-a-year exercise tied to an audit or compliance review. In a threat environment as active as the one Irish government organisations are navigating right now, that approach leaves dangerous gaps. Effective vulnerability management is a continuous cycle, not a point-in-time event.

Patching versus vulnerability management

Patch management, as covered in the previous post in this series, is about deploying vendor-issued fixes for known software flaws. Vulnerability management is broader. It encompasses:

• Discovery: Continuously scanning your environment to identify vulnerabilities — including configuration weaknesses, missing patches, exposed services, and misconfigurations — before attackers find them
  Assessment: Evaluating the severity of each finding in the context of your specific environment, not just its generic CVSS score
  Prioritisation: Deciding which vulnerabilities to fix first, based on exploitability, asset criticality, and business impact
  Remediation: Fixing, mitigating, or formally accepting each risk — and tracking that to closure
  Verification: Confirming that remediations were effective and that the vulnerability no longer exists in your environment
• Patch management feeds into this cycle as the primary remediation mechanism for software vulnerabilities. But vulnerability management is the governance layer that ensures patching happens in the right order, at the right pace, and doesn’t miss the things patching alone can’t fix.

What continuous scanning reveals

Organisations that run their first thorough vulnerability scan are often surprised by what they find. Not because their IT teams have been negligent, but because complex environments accumulate risk in ways that aren’t visible without actively looking.

Common findings include:

• Forgotten or shadow IT assets. Systems that were stood up for a project and never decommissioned. Legacy servers that fell off the asset register but are still running. Test environments that were never properly secured. All of these represent real attack surface.
• Misconfigured services. A service that is correctly patched but incorrectly configured can be just as exploitable as an unpatched one. Default credentials, unnecessary open ports, and overly permissive access controls are consistently among the most common findings in public sector environments.
• Vulnerabilities in network devices and firmware. Routers, switches, and firewalls are often overlooked in vulnerability programmes that focus primarily on servers and endpoints. They are frequently under-patched and can offer attackers significant leverage if compromised.
• Third-party and open-source software risk. Modern applications commonly contain dependencies on open-source libraries. Vulnerabilities in those libraries — like the Log4Shell incident that sent shockwaves through the industry in 2021 — can be extremely difficult to track without tooling specifically designed for the purpose.

The role of penetration testing

Automated vulnerability scanning tells you what is there. Penetration testing tells you what an attacker could actually do with it.

A penetration test involves skilled security professionals attempting to exploit vulnerabilities in a controlled, authorised way — simulating what a real threat actor would do if they targeted your organisation. It is one of the most valuable investments an organisation can make in understanding its true security posture, and it consistently surfaces risks that scanning alone misses.

For Irish public sector organisations during the Presidency period, commissioning a penetration test of externally accessible systems is a particularly worthwhile step. Understanding your exposure from the outside — exactly as an attacker would see it — is clarifying in a way that internal assessments rarely are.

Prioritisation: the hardest part

The output of a mature vulnerability scanning programme is typically a large volume of findings. Without a principled approach to prioritisation, that volume can be paralysing.

Effective prioritisation takes into account:

• Exploitability in the wild. Is this vulnerability being actively exploited by real threat actors right now? ENISA, CISA, and other agencies publish threat intelligence that helps answer this question.
• Asset criticality. A critical vulnerability on a public-facing authentication system demands different urgency than the same vulnerability on an isolated development server.
• Compensating controls. Is there something else in your environment — a firewall rule, a network segment, an access control — that meaningfully reduces the exploitability of this vulnerability in your specific context?
• Remediation complexity. Some fixes are quick wins. Others require change management, testing, and planned downtime. Understanding the effort involved helps with realistic scheduling.

The goal of prioritisation is not to deprioritise risk — it is to ensure that the most dangerous risks get the fastest attention, rather than being lost in a queue of lower-severity findings.

Your action this fortnight

If your organisation does not have a scheduled, recurring vulnerability scan running against your environment, establishing one is the priority. If you do have scanning in place, review the age of your oldest unresolved findings — particularly any rated critical or high severity. If you have findings that have been open for more than 30 days without a remediation plan, that is a gap that needs to be closed.

Visibility is the foundation. You cannot manage what you cannot see.

Paradyn provides vulnerability management services tailored to the complexity and compliance requirements of Irish public sector organisations. To set up a conversation about your vulnerability posture, reach out to the Paradyn team today.

The post See your weaknesses before attackers do: vulnerability management done right first appeared on Paradyn.

The majority of successful cyberattacks do not exploit cutting-edge, zero-day vulnerabilities. They exploit known weaknesses — flaws that software vendors identified, issued fixes for, and published to the world. In many cases, the organisations that fell victim had the patch available to them for months before the breach occurred.

This is the uncomfortable truth about patch management: most of the damage it prevents is entirely avoidable. And for Irish public sector organisations operating under heightened threat during the EU Presidency period, “we’ll get to it eventually” is not a policy — it’s a liability.

Why patching falls behind

Before examining what good patch management looks like, it’s worth being honest about why it so often slips. The reasons are rarely negligence. They are almost always structural.

• Operational continuity pressure. Applying patches — particularly to critical systems — often requires downtime or restarts. In organisations where systems run continuously and downtime requires sign-off across multiple stakeholders, patches get deferred.
• Testing requirements. In complex environments, a patch to one system can break functionality in another. Proper testing before deployment takes time that busy IT teams frequently don’t have.
• Legacy infrastructure. Older systems may no longer receive vendor patches at all — they have reached end of support and are essentially undefendable through conventional means. Many organisations are not fully aware of how much of their estate falls into this category.
• Sheer volume. A mid-sized organisation might be managing hundreds of systems across servers, endpoints, network devices, and applications. The volume of patches released across all of those in any given month is substantial.

None of these are reasons to stop patching. They are reasons to have a proper system for doing it.

The risk of falling behind

When a software vulnerability is publicly disclosed, it typically takes threat actors a matter of days — sometimes hours — to begin scanning for and exploiting unpatched systems. This is known as the exploitation window, and it has been shrinking consistently over recent years.

During a period of elevated targeting of Irish government systems, that window matters acutely. Attackers who are actively looking for ways into Irish public sector networks will scan for known, unpatched vulnerabilities as a first step. An organisation that is weeks or months behind on patches is, in effect, advertising its weaknesses.

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) in the United States publishes a list of known exploited vulnerabilities — a catalogue of weaknesses that are actively being used in real-world attacks right now. Cross-referencing your patch status against that list is a sobering exercise for most organisations.

What a mature patch management programme looks like

Effective patch management is not simply “apply all patches as fast as possible.” It requires a structured approach that balances speed, risk, and operational reality.

1. Asset inventory as the foundation. You cannot patch systems you don’t know exist. A current, accurate asset inventory — covering hardware, software, and firmware — is the prerequisite for everything else. This connects directly to the risk assessment work covered in the previous post in this series.
2. Prioritisation by criticality. Not all patches carry the same urgency. Patches addressing actively exploited vulnerabilities in internet-facing systems demand immediate attention. Patches for low-severity issues in non-critical internal tools can be scheduled. A good patch management process makes this distinction explicitly and consistently.
3. Defined SLAs for remediation. Best practice defines clear timelines for patch deployment based on severity: critical patches within 24–72 hours, high severity within two weeks, medium severity within a month. Having those targets written down and tracked is what separates a patch management programme from ad hoc activity.
4. Testing environments. Where operationally feasible, patches should be tested in a non-production environment before deployment to live systems. This is especially important for core infrastructure.
5. End-of-life system management. Systems that no longer receive vendor patches need a risk management strategy of their own — whether that is network isolation, compensating controls, or an accelerated replacement programme.
6. Reporting and accountability. Someone in the organisation needs to own patch compliance as a metric and report on it regularly. Patch management that is nobody’s specific responsibility tends to drift.

Your action this fortnight

Pull a current report on patch compliance across your estate. Focus first on internet-facing systems and anything that handles sensitive data. Identify your oldest outstanding critical patches and set a deadline to resolve them. If your team doesn’t have visibility into patch status across the full estate, that gap itself needs to be addressed urgently.

The goal is not perfection — it is reducing your exploitable attack surface to the smallest it can practically be, as quickly as possible.

Paradyn helps Irish public sector organisations build and operate structured patch management programmes that are realistic, measurable, and effective. To set up a conversation about your current patch posture, reach out to the Paradyn team today.

The post Patches aren’t optional: why patch management is non-negotiable in 2026 first appeared on Paradyn.

You cannot protect what you don’t understand. It sounds obvious, but in the day-to-day reality of running IT for a public sector organisation — with limited resources, competing priorities, and legacy infrastructure that has grown organically over years — it is surprisingly easy to lose a clear picture of what you actually have, what it connects to, and what would happen if it were compromised.

A structured risk assessment gives you that picture back. And during a period of elevated cyber threat — like the one Ireland is navigating right now as EU Council Presidency holder — it is the single most important thing you can do before anything else.

What a risk assessment actually is

A risk assessment is not a tick-box compliance exercise, though it can satisfy compliance requirements. At its core, it is a systematic process for answering four questions:

1. What assets do we have? Systems, data, people, processes — anything of value that could be targeted or disrupted.
2. What threats face those assets? Who might want to attack you, how, and why? During the Presidency period, this threat picture is more complex than usual.
3. What vulnerabilities exist? Where are the gaps in your defences that a threat actor could exploit?
4. What is the potential impact? If a given asset were compromised, what would the operational, reputational, and legal consequences be?

The output is not a report that sits on a shelf. It is a prioritised list of risks — ranked by likelihood and impact — that drives every subsequent security decision your organisation makes.

Why it has to come first

Every other security control in this series — patch management, vulnerability scanning, MFA, posture improvement — requires context to be effective. Patching everything equally is impossible and inefficient. You need to know which systems are critical, which are internet-facing, and which feed into sensitive processes. That context comes from a risk assessment.

Without it, security spending is essentially guesswork. Organisations end up over-investing in areas of low risk and under-investing where it matters most. A well-executed risk assessment makes every euro of security budget go further.

The Irish public sector context

Risk assessments for government organisations need to account for some factors that are less common in the private sector.

Legacy systems are the often the norm, not the exception. Many Irish public sector organisations are running infrastructure that was never designed with modern threat actors in mind. Understanding the risk profile of older systems — and being realistic about what can be patched versus what needs to be isolated or replaced — is a critical output of any honest assessment.

Interconnected networks create shared risk. Government organisations frequently share networks, data, or services with other bodies. A risk assessment needs to map these dependencies clearly, because a compromise of one organisation can propagate quickly through a connected ecosystem.

Data classification matters enormously. Not all data carries the same risk. Personal data held under GDPR obligations, sensitive policy documents relevant to the Presidency, and critical operational data each demand a different level of protection. A risk assessment should drive a clear data classification framework.

Supply chain exposure is often underestimated. Third-party vendors, managed service providers, and software suppliers all represent potential entry points. An assessment that stops at your own perimeter is incomplete.

What good looks like

A well-executed risk assessment for a public sector organisation should:

– Be conducted or validated by an independent party, not solely by the internal team whose work it will scrutinise
– Include asset discovery — you cannot assess risk to systems you don’t know exist
– Consider both technical vulnerabilities and organisational ones (process gaps, staff awareness, governance weaknesses)
– Produce outputs in plain language that are meaningful to senior leadership, not just the IT team
– Have a defined review cycle — a risk assessment is not a one-time event, particularly during a period of elevated threat

Your action this fortnight

If your organisation does not have a current, documented risk assessment — completed within the last 12 months — that is where your energy should go first. If you have one, now is the time to dust it off, pressure-test its assumptions against the current threat environment, and check whether the risk landscape has shifted since it was written.

The goal is not a perfect document. The goal is an honest, up-to-date picture of where you stand — so that every decision you make from here is grounded in reality rather than assumption.

Paradyn works with Irish public sector organisations to conduct structured risk assessments that are practical, independent, and directly actionable. If you’d like to set up a conversation about where your organisation stands, reach out to the Paradyn team today.

The post Know your exposure: risk assessment as your first line of defence first appeared on Paradyn.

EU Presidency Series: Securing Irish Government in a High-Stakes Year #1

For six months, all roads in European policy lead to Dublin. Ireland’s EU Council Presidency brings with it enormous diplomatic prestige, significant administrative responsibility — and a cyber threat landscape that looks very different to business as usual.

If your organisation is part of Ireland’s public sector, even at one remove, now is the time to take a clear-eyed look at your security posture. Here’s why the Presidency changes the risk calculation, and what you should be thinking about.

A bigger stage means a bigger target

State-sponsored cyber actors — groups affiliated with nation-states that have an interest in European policy outcomes — routinely increase their targeting activity around high-profile geopolitical events. An EU Council Presidency is exactly that kind of event. Ireland is now a hub for sensitive policy deliberation across areas including defence, trade, energy, and digital regulation. That makes Irish government systems significantly more attractive to actors seeking intelligence, looking to disrupt proceedings, or attempting to exert influence on outcomes.

This isn’t speculation. The European Union Agency for Cybersecurity (ENISA) has consistently documented spikes in attacks targeting government and public administration during periods of elevated geopolitical significance. Ireland experienced this first-hand with the HSE ransomware attack of 2021 — a stark reminder that Irish public sector organisations are not too small, too obscure, or too peripheral to be targeted.

It’s not just the big departments

One of the most dangerous assumptions an organisation can make is that the risk belongs to someone else — the Department of Foreign Affairs, perhaps, or the Taoiseach’s office. In practice, the attack surface of a Presidency extends far beyond the headline institutions.

Threat actors frequently target peripheral or supporting organisations as a stepping stone into more sensitive networks. A local authority, a semi-state body, a shared IT services provider, or even a third-party supplier to a government department can all serve as an entry point. If your organisation connects to, shares data with, or provides services to any part of the Irish public sector, you are part of the attack surface — whether you think of yourself that way or not.

The threat landscape right now

The types of threats that increase during periods of heightened geopolitical attention include:

• Spear phishing and social engineering. Highly targeted email campaigns, often referencing real events or plausible professional contexts, designed to trick staff into surrendering credentials or installing malware. During a Presidency, there is no shortage of credible-sounding pretexts — EU policy updates, ministerial correspondence, stakeholder briefings.
• Ransomware. Opportunistic criminal groups take advantage of moments when organisations are stretched, distracted, or operating under new pressures. A busy, understaffed IT team during a major diplomatic period is an attractive target.
• Supply chain attacks. Rather than attacking a well-defended target directly, sophisticated actors compromise a trusted supplier or software vendor first. Irish government organisations should be asking hard questions about the security posture of their supply chains right now.
• Hacktivism and disruption. Not every attack is about extracting data or demanding ransom. Some actors aim simply to embarrass, disrupt, or undermine confidence in Irish institutions during a moment when Ireland is under the international spotlight.

The good news: the window to act is now

Heightened risk does not mean inevitable compromise. The organisations that weather elevated threat periods well are invariably those that used the time before the storm to get their fundamentals right. Strong security hygiene — the kind that comes from structured risk assessment, disciplined patch management, robust identity controls, and a clear picture of your own vulnerabilities — dramatically reduces the likelihood of a successful attack.

Over the coming weeks, this series will walk through each of those fundamentals in practical, actionable terms. Not theoretical frameworks, but concrete steps that Irish public sector organisations can take right now to reduce their exposure.

The EU Presidency is a moment of national pride and significant responsibility. Making sure that moment isn’t defined by a security incident is the job in front of us.

Coming up in this series

– Know your exposure — risk assessment as your first line of defence
– Patches aren’t optional — why patch management is non-negotiable
– See your weaknesses before attackers do — vulnerability management done right
– One password isn’t enough — making MFA work across your organisation
– Security posture — moving from reactive firefighting to proactive resilience
– After the Presidency — sustaining the security gains you’ve made

This article is part of an ongoing series on cybersecurity for Irish government organisations, brought to you by Paradyn. If you’d like to discuss your organisation’s current security posture, reach out to the Paradyn team and we’ll set up a conversation.

The post Ireland in the spotlight: why the EU Presidency raises your cyber risk first appeared on Paradyn.

Paradyn’s Paul Casey (Chief Operations Officer) and Rob Norton (Chief Technical Officer) at the TotalView Operations Centre launch.

Paradyn launches TotalView Operations Centre and Security Services

The launch of Paradyn’s new network and security operations centre has been brought forward by two months in response to the significant increase in malicious threats being faced by businesses during Covid-19.

Based in Little Island, Co. Cork, the Paradyn TotalView Operations Centre will give customers a complete view of their infrastructure and the cyber threat landscape. From the dedicated centre, Paradyn’s security team can provide 24/7 network monitoring, rapid remediation of cybersecurity threats, real-time analysis and detailed reporting of network events, as well as vulnerability and penetration scanning.

Paradyn partnered with global security experts, such as Cisco and Manage Engine, in developing the leading edge security facility. The centre is result of a €250,000 investment, through which Paradyn also created five new security analyst roles.

“Cybercriminals are thriving in the COVID-19 remote working world and businesses are experiencing significant increases in remote access, phishing and social engineering threats,” said Rob Norton, chief technical officer, Paradyn. “Criminals are targeting weak security on personal devices connected to company networks and we have seen several instances where they have targeted corporate and sensitive financial data, such as banking information, login credentials, as well as personal data.”

The new facility will bolster Paradyn’s managed service capability and help Irish businesses remain secure against an increasing volume of cyber-threats. With many businesses currently reliant on remote working solutions, Paradyn said its new centre will enable proactive monitoring of the potential cyber-threats associated with remote working. This includes the overview of mobile device management solutions, which ensure that staff working from home can only access the company network through an authorised and secure device.

Over the next two years, the end-to-end IT and communications service provider expects to generate an additional €2.5 million revenue from the services enabled by the Paradyn TotalView Operations Centre.

Norton continued: “The Paradyn TotalView Operations Centre gives organisations a 360 degree view of their network through our SIEM & SOC modules. With this investment, we have significantly enhanced our threat readiness so our customers can benefit from the latest security tools and be more confident that their data and systems will remain protected throughout COVID-19.

“Even prior to the current crisis, we have seen a prolonged growth in demand for managed cybersecurity services. As cyber-threats increase in both volume and sophistication, it is becoming more complex than ever to keep businesses protected. Organisations can avoid an expensive and never-ending arms race with cybercriminals by leveraging the expertise and advanced technologies of a security specialist like Paradyn. In doing so, they can focus on their core business, assured that they are well secured to face the complex challenges of the modern workplace.”

For more information, please contact us today:

Email: info@paradyn.ie

Phone: 01–299 3950

The post Paradyn launches TotalView Operations Centre first appeared on Paradyn.

We are Paradyn

1. Exigent Networks, Irish Telecom & Netforce are now Paradyn.
2. Our new name is a combination of Paradigm and Dynamic and the name reflects those we work with and also our dedication to providing exceptional customer service.

3. Our Name, colours and Logo have changed, apart from that we’re still the same people that you have always known and loved!
4. Our dedication to our clients has remained unchanged and they are still at the core of everything we do.

Why the rebrand?

Exigent Networks was founded in May 2007 by Cillian McCarthy, Paul Casey and Rob Norton who all had previous experience in the technology industry. With Exigent Networks already established as a leader in the field of Wireless Networking, just three years later in 2010 Irish Telecom was founded by the same Directors. Irish Telecom became rapidly recognised as a National provider of high quality wireless and fibre broadband. With both companies growing and developing from strength to strength in 2016 an opportunity arose to acquire Netforce. Netforce had made a name in the Irish market by providing sensible, sustainable IT services, solutions and support to SMEs. Since 2000, the company has been an early adopter of innovative solutions. The next natural step in this progress was a rebrand uniting all three successful companies into one End–to–End full ICT provider.

What will change?

While our Name, Logo and Website may be changing, our commitment to our customers continues to be our highest priority and there are a number of things that we want to assure you will remain unchanged:

• You will continue to work with the same people you have in the past. All of our team members are being retained in their current roles.
• The structure of the company as well as current management, contracts and service agreements will not be altered.
• All the services we have provided you previously will continue to be offered by Paradyn.
• For our clients our existing contracts, VAT number and systems will remain in place.

What will it mean for our customers?

It means that our highly experienced team can build, monitor and maintain every aspect of your ICT infrastructure, delivering all this as a single trusted partner. Paradyn’s consolidated portfolio of services now covers Infrastructure, Connectivity, MSP and Security. You will have access to additional expertise and resources, ensuring that you get the best possible return on your technology investment.

We provide an all-encompassing end to end service at scale which in turn allows our customers to scale too.

We are individual, We are confident, We are Paradyn.

We hope that our rebrand provides you with a clear understanding of our company and our expanded services & expertise portfolio. We are excited to work together as Paradyn and we look forward to partnering with you!

If you have any questions on our rebrand, please contact us on info@paradyn.ie and we would be happy to answer these.

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