Strengthening Enterprise Cybersecurity to Combat Rising Cyber Attacks

Businesses must take a more protective approach to their cybersecurity, with cybercriminals becoming increasingly innovative and sophisticated and state-sponsored cybercrimes rising in number.

IT security teams must implement stronger protection measures to secure their organizations as threat actors become more sophisticated. They must establish security-first culture that prioritize blocking threats wherever they may arise and also hire the right people to meet the cybersecurity needs of their enterprise.

IT teams must be ready for different attack types in order to counter these threats. Tabletop exercises, incident response plans, and training are a few of the ways that leaders and employees can become involved in fostering a culture that puts security first and places a high priority on data security.

Here are a few trends in cybercrime and some steps businesses can take to strengthen their cybersecurity:

Also Read: IT Security Challenges Faced in the Modern Workplace

Detecting and Mitigating Cybersecurity Threats

Attacks involving phishing and social engineering are on the rise. Malware-containing phishing attacks have increased this year more than ever before. Although credential stuffing only accounts for a small portion of cyber-attacks, it is also becoming more common. Additionally, there is an increase in ransomware attacks.

Phishing Attempts

Phishing is still the most popular way to attack businesses, with some of the most effective scams impersonating company executives and demanding immediate action or appearing to be communications from legitimate financial organizations. The industry today is closely monitoring the possibility of AI-powered attacks that could help threat actors predict passwords based on deepfake biometrics like facial recognition or stolen data.

Employee cybersecurity awareness training and anti-phishing solutions are some of the crucial ways to build a strong first line of defense.

Ransomware

Ransomware continues to be a major threat across all industries and has increased exponentially in the last few years. Threat actors can cause damage during various stages of an attack besides the ransom phase. Threat actors often send alarming messages to company leaders and force them to take prompt action by threatening to leak confidential information to the public.

In the worst-case scenario, organizations could lose everything. To safeguard themselves against vulnerabilities in the infrastructure, IT professionals must stay on top of updating and patching systems.

Companies can be proactive by implementing training programs, regular patching policies, auditing account access, and limiting privileged access and administrative accounts. Running penetration tests and regular cybersecurity checks, implementing multi-factor authentication, and enforcing strict password security guidelines are all crucial from the password standpoint.

Making the Right Hiring Decisions

More than ever, it’s critical to make sure that companies are hiring security professionals with the right skill sets for their security team. By collaborating with universities and engineering schools to develop talent, many larger corporations are ensuring that the next generation of IT professionals is well-trained and ready to address evolving cybersecurity issues. Smaller businesses can encourage new hires to advance in their careers by offering robust in-house training programs.

Developing a Security-First Mindset

Education at all levels and across all teams is the key to fostering a security-first mindset within a company. The value of integrating these programs as a key component of an integrated security stack must be explained to the company leadership by security leaders. Since employees are the first line of defense against cybercriminals, they must participate in security training. In order to permanently implement a security-first mindset, a security culture that starts at the highest levels of corporate leadership and moves down to all other levels is essential.

Also Read: Three Strategies to Ensure Business Continuity After a Ransomware Attack

Building a Robust Security Policy

A robust information security policy can reduce risk and exposure, both financially and in terms of reputation. Strong policies are also ones that are regularly audited and evaluated to ensure they are working as intended. Successful policies establish enforceable, workable, and verifiable processes across the entire organization.

Leaders must consider what they want the security policy to do, who it is intended for, and what goals they hope to achieve before drafting it. They must ensure they consider factors like authority, network security guidelines, access control, data classification, backup, and protection processes. They also need to consider how they move and secure data. Along with clearly defining roles and responsibilities, the policy should also cover encryption practices, data backup processes, and the frequency of security awareness training.