In a world where the presence of networks, devices, and data continues to grow exponentially, how can you be sure your information is safe? Enter Nelnet CyberSecurity. Nelnet CyberSecurity is composed of strategists, advisors, technologists, and guardians. These professionals make it their mission to advise and help develop the most secure strategies for Nelnet and business segments. They work in partnership with business units and departments to support Nelnet’s mission and goals by living CyberSecurity’s core values: “Security First, Compliance Always, Audit Anytime.”
Cyber Security at Nelnet
Nelnet CyberSecurity maintains an enterprise cyber security team to defend against exploitation, manage vulnerabilities, and orchestrate logistics operations. These tasks align Nelnet and specific business segments to the appropriate cost/risk-level of security posture, compliance standards, and fulfillment of audit engagements at a moment’s notice. Through this mission, they align themselves directly with the business goals and strategies of Nelnet while providing the essential confidentiality, integrity, and availability directives.
A Growing Need
As you might expect, the department has grown substantially over the last two years to meet the growing needs of all business segments. Nelnet CyberSecurity helps ensure departments throughout the company are not only compliant, but are leading the initiative to put security first. Maturing communications and relationships between business segments and the teams that make up Nelnet CyberSecurity are key factors in cyber security success.
Working Together
Six Nelnet CyberSecurity teams work together to provide a variety of services to all Nelnet businesses.
- Leadership and Program Management: Cyber enterprise architecture and management of programs and projects
- Vulnerability Operations: Scan, assess, and remediate vulnerabilities
- Offensive Operations: Penetration testing and application security
- Defensive Operations: Threat hunting, monitoring, architectural design, and cyber defense
- Logistics Operations: Policy, compliance, education, and incident response
- Risk Management Operations: Risk management, audit, and compliance
Recent Successes
The growth of Nelnet CyberSecurity’s team capabilities have paved the way for some very powerful contributions to Nelnet. Their important work affects the quality of work life and safety of Nelnet associates and businesses.
- In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, they teamed up with other business segments and executive leadership to act fast. Together, they moved 6,500 associates to secure work-from-home solutions within 2 weeks! Additionally, Nelnet CyberSecurity implemented modern multi-factor authentication for remote work. The team decreased attack surface/exposure by shifting around 1,000 users to virtual desktops. Their Ethical Hackers team tested secure remote work solutions in real time as Nelnet scaled our work from home capacity.
- Recently, the team safeguarded a senior Nelnet executive from an email bomb. This cyber threat caused them to receive more than 3,000 emails in 15 minutes.
- Since March, they’ve defended over 100 million attempts to connect to our network from China and Russia.
- They’ve reduced the amount of time needed to investigate a threat from hours to minutes using contextual threat intelligence.
- Currently, the team is using their security-first approach to apply cyber security by design for cloud operations. These will be used be used by Nelnet Bank, Velocity, and other future developments.
You can rest a little easier knowing Nelnet CyberSecurity is working hard 24/7 to keep you and your data safe, and they’re ready to respond to threats at a moment’s notice.
For more information on Nelnet CyberSecurity services, visit the CyberSecurity Portal. Want to join the team? Check out available opportunities on our website.
