Break the reactive cycle and become proactive by securing your environment and focusing on critical preventions.
What causes security incidents to happen? Here are the current trends:
Compromises are on the rise and more investigations are taking place now than ever before. At the same time data and system footprints continue to grow and business regulations are incorporating new standards.
Bottom line: No one anticipated the amount of work required to keep up with security.
Businesses are waiting to invest in security until something bad happens and since most companies are equipped to handle a comprise, they have quickly experienced things such as customer loss and regulation fines. Meanwhile, as they are cleaning up the mess, the technology and threats happening in real time around them are changing rapidly.
Bottom line: Organizations are still in a state of focusing on the fire and not the prevention, leaving them in a vicious cycle.
So, how can you stop the cycle?
Step 1: How to Prepare
Assess your business risk level and define the most critical components of your business so that you can create a plan.
Cybersecurity Preparedness Score
During the planning phase, ask yourself these questions:
- Do I understand the business risk profile?
- What is it that I am securing?
- What are the most likely attack vectors?
- Am I investing in the right security solutions?
- Are the solutions effective?
Step 2: Create a Strategy
Security will not work in a silo. This means that you must create a strategy that helps everyone across departments in the organization to understand the purpose and how the security requirements in your plan align with the overall business objectives. Your strategy should include a clearly defined mission and goals along with the necessary investment requirements and accountability expectations to support the plan at each phase then be communicated clearly to the organization’s leadership.
During your strategy phase, think about these five things:
- Identify – Know your assets, perform s scanning and run configuration management reports to identify vulnerabilities, communicate problems and risks to appropriate teams
- Protect – Use Anti-Malware, enforce policy restrictions, configuration management, standardization, code control, governance, documentation and training, help maintain a culture of “doing the right thing”
- Monitor – Observe system and network activity for abnormal patterns, actively monitor and respond to traffic, alerts, and log notifications (threats and performance degradation)
- Maintain – Apply patches, firmware updates, fixes, perform backups, update documentation and requirements
- Validate – Conduct reoccurring health checks, assessments and formal audits, disaster recovery tests, update checklists when gaps are noted
Step 3: Remediate by Risk
While there are no shortcuts when it comes to security, you can take some steps to fast track your plan. Begin internal discussions immediately among department to talk about risks, classify those risks and determine a priority ranking system. In order to tackle the priorities immediately, without having to bring on and train new technical staff, build a Tiger team to test your company’s ability to protect its assets by attempting to defeat its physical or information security. You can do this by collectively assigning resources from each department and providing a job description to them that includes responsibility roles and incentives.
