How To Build Cyber Resilience With Intelligent Threat Operations
Building Cyber Resilience
Security activities are often focused on the incorrect approach. Rather than enabling the business to prosper, security professionals often pursue enforcement, vulnerabilities, and the ideal security controls without first knowing its most important assets.
Patient records and operational procedures in the emergency room and surgical theaters, for example, are usually the most sensitive assets in hospitals. Attackers who gain access to such high-value assets will steal data and, increasingly, hold the facility for ransom.
An aerospace or defense company, on the other hand, must safeguard intellectual property such as system designs and process methodologies. A financial services firm must also safeguard account access, a proprietary database of financial transactions (such as mergers and acquisitions), and non-public financial analysis.
Because in an increasingly digitized world, protecting everything equally is not an option, these extraordinary assets, which are critical to a company, must be at the heart of an effective strategy to protect against cyber threats.
How To Safeguard The Most Valuable Assets
Here are five ideas for safeguarding the most valuable assets:
1. Align cybersecurity priorities with the value chains of businesses
Business organizations, IT teams, and risk roles often have competing interests and ambiguous working relationships in many companies. As a result, many organizations try to apply the same cyber-risk controls to all areas. This often leads to a waste of time and money, but it can also lead to a lack of priority for assets and functions critical to business value chains.
To define and prioritize the top risks, security teams should first concentrate on the business issue and consider the whole organization. Since cybersecurity budgets compete with technology investments for limited resources, security teams must view the entire organization, working with an interdisciplinary team to consider security concerns from enabling the company.
2. Identify vital business assets that must be protected first
The detection and security of the organization's digital crown jewels is a key aspect of cyber resilience. Some data, systems, and applications are more important than others in any given business. Furthermore, some individuals are more vulnerable to risk, while others are more likely to be attacked.
Companies must concentrate their greatest defenses on their most sensitive systems and properties, especially those that meet a trifecta of criteria: they are highly critical to the company, they are exposed to greater risk, and they are likely to be attacked. Even though most businesses understand the seriousness of the problem, they continue to treat it as a technological and control issue, despite their defenses being unlikely to keep up with potential attacks. First, teams should concentrate on cyber threats that are prioritized on a "business back" basis across the enterprise.
3. Gather information to assess the motives of attackers
Although threat modeling, risk reviews, and vulnerability analysis should concentrate on the importance of an asset to the organization and possible security flaws, potential attackers' profile is also relevant. Modeling the most likely attackers and how they function will assist in detecting new vulnerabilities and the allocation of resources to reinforce weak points that are likely to be attacked.
This is a data-driven, intelligence-intensive operation, but it's important. Although businesses would tend to provide in-house security expertise, bringing in security consultants will provide a second set of eyes. Furthermore, threat intelligence specialists track a wide variety of outlets and are likely to have tools that the average company lacks.
Finally, by integrating threat intelligence, machine learning, and analytics capabilities within the IT feature, companies can engage and deflect attackers in real-time.
4. To help resilience, develop a cybersecurity capability
The ability to predict threats before they occur is an important aspect of cyber resilience. Threat modeling is an integral part of this strategy. However, to thwart threats in real-time, a business must also have a ready cybersecurity capability.
SIEM systems are capable of detecting known attacks in real-time. A reference model, such as MITRE ATT&CK, can be used to determine the efficacy of an organization's detection strategy as well as the possible impact of deploying other security technologies. Anomaly-detection models search for an activity out of the ordinary, such as a user's unusual access. Organizations with an active-defense posture use SIEMs and anomaly-defense systems to provide more robust threat detection.
5. Take Note
The constant stream of news about data breaches and ransomware attacks can serve as a wake-up call to businesses. In 2016, a hacker who had taken control of a Los Angeles hospital's systems was paid a $17,000 ransom. The total now appears to be amusing. After France was hit by two massive ransomware attacks on hospitals in February, French President Emmanuel Macron promised to spend €1 billion.
Final Thoughts: Adapt and Evolve
Organizations must adjust and evolve their response to cyber threats rather than remaining passive. They should expect their firewalls to be broken and their accounts to be hacked.
This evolvement is to predict attacks before they occur, monitor alarms to contain attacks, and secure sensitive assets in a tiered manner.
Courses and Certification
Information Security and Cyber Law Course and Certificate
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