Developing Cyber security management by learning from others
From hard lessons to prepare for what is around the corner
Threat detection has gotten harder since attackers always develop new ways to access sensitive data. How can cybersecurity management be developed to reduce risk? Developing Cybersecurity Management by learning from others – from hard lessons to prepare for what is around the corner.
The term “cybersecurity management” describes a broader strategy for defending a company’s IT assets from online threats. This type of security management protects all elements of an organisation’s IT infrastructure, including the network, mobile devices, cloud infrastructure, Internet of Things (IoT) devices, apps, and APIs.
Best Practices in Cybersecurity Management
The following is a list of five tried-and-true recommended practices for managing cybersecurity.
Understand Your IT Assets and Environment
A thorough understanding of your company’s IT infrastructures and resources, including all data and other digital assets, BYOD devices, systems, networks, third-party services, technologies, endpoints, and other pertinent items, is necessary for effective cybersecurity management.
Understanding every component of your IT environment is essential, especially since any aspect of your network can be leveraged to compromise your system. Additionally, you must regularly evaluate your assets and watch over your IT infrastructure.
Deploy a Risk Management Strategy
Managing risk without a well-thought-out and effective cybersecurity risk management strategy and plan might be counterproductive. Organisations must therefore create sound strategies and plans and maintain them up to date. Before planning, you must determine your level of risk tolerance and create a risk profile. Include employee and key stakeholders’ roles, incident response and escalation strategies, and other relevant information in your risk management plans.
Create best practices that staff members can use, and incorporate employee training into your plan. This is because the weakest cybersecurity linkages are frequently people. Through avoidable mistakes like clicking on an unfamiliar link or accessing the company account on an insecure network, they can significantly increase cybersecurity threats. Include measures in your strategy itself to make cybersecurity everyone’s responsibility.
Make Cybersecurity Risk Management an Element of Company Culture
To effectively manage cyber hazards, stakeholders must be aware of, comprehend, and accept their obligations. If they are not adequately implemented across the organization, cybersecurity risk management policies and processes are meaningless, no matter how well-designed. Therefore, explain your concepts, strategies, and processes to all parties involved. Include cybersecurity risk management in the company’s principles and culture.
Use Continuous, Adaptive, and Actionable Risk Assessments
Risk identification and assessment are two of the most crucial components of risk management. Risks associated with cyberspace are always changing. A change in company procedures or the introduction of new technologies could occur. As a result, the organization’s risk position alters. The procedures must be continuously assessed for deficiencies and improvement to ensure effective security. Only if the risk evaluations are ongoing and flexible is this feasible.
Organizations defend their IT systems and digital assets through cybersecurity risk mitigation techniques. Risk assessments provide the business with information about where vulnerabilities exist, what threats are on the horizon, etc. Risk assessments must offer takeaways for risk reduction to be successful.
Enhance Visibility in Your Network
To avoid and mitigate cybersecurity incidents, your network must have complete visibility into its components. Your environment may be at risk from threats, including insider threats, vulnerabilities in third-party components, and human mistakes. Having reliable, real-time visibility of your organization’s risk profile is crucial.
Cyber Attack Examples
Here are a few recent instances of cyberattacks that affected the entire world.
SolarWinds Supply Chain Attack
This enormous, extremely creative supply chain attack was discovered in December 2020 and was given the name SolarWinds in honour of its Austin-based victim, an IT management company. It was carried out by APT 29, a gang that regularly commits cybercrime and is linked to the Russian government.
The hack compromised an upgrade for the Orion software platform from SolarWinds. Threat actors infected Orion’s updates with malware during the hack, which became known as the Sunburst or Solorigate ransomware. Customers of SolarWinds were then given access to the updates.
Because it successfully compromised the US military and numerous US-based federal agencies, including those in charge of nuclear weapons, critical infrastructure services, and the majority of Fortune 500 companies, the SolarWinds attack is regarded as one of the most severe cyber espionage attacks on the US.
Mitigation Strategy for Supply Chain Cyber Attacks
Thoroughly evaluate vendors: Businesses should thoroughly examine a supplier’s security procedures before forming a partnership or utilizing any third-party products or software. This entails looking into any security lapses the vendor may have encountered and requesting the company to describe its security procedures.
Use a zero-trust model: Companies should request that their IT department use a zero-trust model whenever possible. This restricts the kinds of activities carried out within a network because it presumes that no application or user should be trusted by default.
Utilize security tools: Firewalls and antivirus software won’t always prevent supply chain attacks. They might be able to let you know if an attack is happening. For instance, firewalls may be able to identify and stop significant volumes of data from leaving a network, which would indicate a breach. Still, antivirus software can identify malware, such as ransomware.
Create an incident response strategy: Businesses should be ready with a response strategy in case of compromise. Implementing a communication strategy for informing clients and partners about a breach should also be a part of this plan, along with identifying mission-critical business components and the clearly defined roles for incident response.
Amazon DDoS Attack
Amazon Web Services (AWS) was the victim of a significant distributed denial of service (DDoS) assault in February 2020. A 2.3 Tbps (terabits per second) DDoS assault with a request rate per second (rps) of 694,201 and a packet forwarding rate of 293.1 Mpps was experienced by the company and mitigated. It’s regarded as one of the biggest DDoS attacks ever.
Mitigation Strategy for DDoS Attacks
Multi-layered DDoS defence: In the past, most DDoS attacks were volumetric Layer 3 or Layer 4 attacks that targeted the network or transport layers. The numerous types of DDoS assaults that are used today each target a distinct layer (such as the network layer, transport layer, session layer, or application layer) or group of layers.
Early identification is essential and unavoidable when preventing DDoS attacks, as is ongoing traffic and packet analysis. There are several ways to accomplish this, but one of the most crucial methods involves continuously observing website traffic, requests, and data packets to identify patterns, nature, etc. and blocking malicious/unwanted traffic, requests, and payload.
Strengthen the network architecture: Network architecture that is robust and resilient is essential for combating volumetric/network-level DDoS attacks. Your network design needs to be strengthened to withstand traffic peaks or thunderous surges without experiencing downtime, crashes, or service interruptions.
Conclusion
The threat environment is constantly expanding, vulnerabilities are increasing, technology is advancing, business procedures are changing, and so are the hazards to the organization. It is impossible to completely defend against these dangers given the time and financial constraints. Therefore, all firms must have a constantly developing cybersecurity risk management programme that utilizes best practices.
