Companies must address their growing exposure to cyberattacks and data breaches, yet many small and midsize businesses still take a haphazard approach to cybersecurity, which reduces their readiness to detect and respond to threats. Every element of an IT environment introduces its own set of risks with varying threat levels, so taking a blanket approach to mitigate all those risks at once is simply impractical.
A comprehensive cyber risk assessment can identify and rate the spectrum of potential underlying security risks. Cyber risk assessments help organizations identify their unique security risks and vulnerabilities, while providing insights into critical areas that require immediate attention. In this way, businesses can decide how to prioritize their security efforts and allocate scarce resources. Here are six key ways to boost your cybersecurity posture.
Define and track core security metrics
Cybersecurity starts by adopting metrics that standardize security processes and solutions around networks, applications, data, systems, endpoints, and users. These metrics should provide visibility into all IT systems and assets. Some useful measurements include time to patch vulnerabilities, incident rates, severity levels, the effectiveness of security controls, and average response times. By compiling and analyzing such metrics, security teams can make more informed decisions.
Monitor networks and software for vulnerabilities
Effective cybersecurity also requires an ability to continually monitor and remediate vulnerabilities in IT environments. The full range of vulnerabilities can be exposed through applications, websites, cloud infrastructure, smart IoT devices, or any other connection points on the network.
Despite widespread awareness about the need to regularly make patches and issue software updates, many businesses still face countless application vulnerabilities that can result in data breaches. By implementing comprehensive monitoring capabilities, security leaders can quickly pinpoint the top problems for remediation and improve their overall security posture.
Create systems to prioritize risks
Security leaders need to know which risks have the most potential to cause harm, and prioritize how they should be addressed. Risk prioritization also reveals lower priority risks that can be accepted without greatly weakening the overall security posture. This kind of risk acceptance applies for cases that are extremely unlikely to occur, or for threats that will result in limited impacts even if the attackers do succeed in exploiting a vulnerability.
Gain visibility into the perimeter
Understanding and gaining visibility of an organization’s attack surface involves understanding the attack perimeter and building protections against incoming cyberattacks, either through remote user devices, third-party open-source code, IoT devices, or cloud applications. All these factors can open up the attack surface by introducing new entry points for bad actors.
By applying techniques for external attack surface management, security teams can map out all their internet-facing devices and assets. Such a network map uncovers vulnerabilities such as software and hardware misconfigurations, or weaknesses with user credentials and network access, as well as new assets being added to the environment.
Conduct ongoing regular security assessments
In the current dynamic IT environment, it is critical to make regular risk assessments that provide an ongoing view into the changing security posture and ways to strengthen protections. The assessment should give a snapshot of the network status at any given time, including all hardware, software, endpoint devices, and user permissions. In this way, security teams can also make historical comparisons over time to assess the effectiveness of different security tools and solutions. The days of an annual penetration test being good enough are behind us.
Armed with a cyber risk assessment and IT inventory, security managers can evaluate which assets are adequately protected, and which remain vulnerable. In this way, they can implement stronger controls, policies, and workflows to harden the overall security posture.
Put an incident response plan in place
An incident response plan provides a well-defined, structured approach to address any cyberattacks that may succeed. By establishing clear procedures for detecting, containing, eradicating, and recovering from incidents, businesses can minimize the impacts from security breaches.
Each plan should designate the roles and responsibilities for detection and analysis, how to contain an incident, and how to recover affected systems to their previous secure state. The CISA Cyber Incident and Vulnerability Response Playbooks provide useful operating procedures for incident response plans. Developing a clear step-by-step plan can reduce response times and greatly limit the damages in real-time.
A robust security posture depends on the capability to identify vulnerabilities and rapidly mitigate them. Guarding against an attack requires a combination of preventative measures and long-range planning to assess potential risks and address vulnerabilities ahead of time. In this current multi-cloud IT world with evermore endpoints and customer-facing web apps, businesses that prioritize attack surface visibility and monitoring can strengthen their cyber posture while reducing their risk from exploitable weaknesses.
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