U.S. businesses have been devastated by cyberattacks over the past few years, but even in today’s environment, the cost of security far outweighs the benefit in some organizations’ minds. Whether an organization will experience a cybersecurity attack attempt is no longer an if but a when. And when you consider the average cost of cyberattacks has grown to an estimated $3.6 million per incident, investing in a preemptive security strategy suddenly doesn’t seem as costly.
To thwart cybercriminal efforts and prevent a potential attack, it’s critical to be proactive and preemptive. Below is a five-step cybersecurity plan security professionals can implement to protect their organization before anything happens.
Get Visibility
To accurately protect the business, IT teams need complete visibility across an organization. From an understanding of the network to who has access to data to any possible brand implications, three key visibility categories you need access to:
- Technical visibility: an understanding of what connected devices you have on your network, where they are vulnerable, and the threats to them.
- Operational visibility: how and why people are accessing data as well as what cybersecurity training you’re providing.
- Organizational visibility: enables you to assess the extent to which an attack could damage your company’s brand, reputation, or intellectual property.
Visibility also involves a strong emphasis on security analytics and supporting tools which allow an organization to centralize data from across the network, endpoint, and end user to identify anomalous behavior. As anomalies are identified, they can be fed to cyber threat hunters who respond and stop the attacker before something bad happens. However, traditional storage can often become a bottleneck in this process and without collecting enough usable data or processing it too slowly, companies are blind to bad things happening in their environment. That’s why it’s important to leverage storage platforms which allow for fast, easy ingestion and correlation of data. The faster you’re able to ingest and correlate data, the faster you can detect and thwart an adversary.
Get Control with Strong Hygiene and a Reduced Surface Area
The smaller the attack surface, the easier it is to safeguard your network. To do this, it’s about eliminating duplication – think, having fewer versions of operating systems.
The next step is to eliminate any possible holes in your company’s attack surface; to do this, you need to know what you have on your network and perform the necessary security hygiene. Think of it as putting a fence around the perimeter of your lawn. For example, make sure routers and firewalls are properly configured, keep your IT systems patched, upgrade to the latest versions, keep whitelists and blacklists updated, enforce strong password rules and multi-factor authentication.
A key ingredient of good hygiene is a well-defined patch management program in place which promotes the implementation of patches and updates as soon as they’ve been released so there’s no time for cybercriminals to act on vulnerabilities. This keeps your network crack-free and protected.
Increase the Cost of the Attack
Cybercriminals seeking to attack your network look for easy avenues of access. To thwart attackers, you need to make it incrementally harder for an attacker to get into your environment than into that of the person next door. There are a few ways you can do so:
- Implement multi-factor authentication and admin credential vaulting for all systems.
- Putting in place the right tools, such as centralized logging and events.
- Partner with your solution vendors to understand the features offered and to implement them properly.
- Maintain good system hygiene by regularly auditing your data and removing duplicate or unnecessary data.
- Hire an appropriately staffed cyber threat hunting and response team.
Adapt, Recover, and Respond
Following a cyberattack, and having successfully gotten back up and running, it’s vital to review what happened and why, and use that to inform how to keep it from happening again. This postmortem evaluation goes back to the need for visibility. Attacks don’t just happen due to technology failures but may have been assisted by human or operational error. If that’s the case, it’s important to educate users more comprehensively on ways to avoid opportunities for cybercriminals to access the company’s systems.
By evaluating lessons learned and incorporating them into future plans and policies, you can continuously improve your readiness and response.
In today’s climate, cybersecurity awareness is more important than ever. There’s a rumor going around the cost of securing a business far outweighs the benefit, one which has made its way into organizations’ minds. This is a dangerous mindset. Protecting an organization requires complete buy-in from all stakeholders and investment in an end-to-end security strategy. Not only does this mean securing the organization before an attack but having practices in place which will help it quickly and effectively recover, regardless of the scale of the attack. Ultimately, the cost of a cyberattack will always be more than what organizations put in to avoid it.