Top 5 Steps Businesses Can Take to Improve Their Cyber Strategy

Many businesses have turned to remote work operations as the COVID-19 outbreak shows no signs of abating. Remote working’s rapid growth has resulted in enormous cybersecurity vulnerabilities and an increase in security incidents.

Protecting a company from advanced cyber threats necessitates creative thinking and techniques. Cybercriminals have not stopped looking for methods to exploit the crisis and uncover flaws in the digital systems as businesses all adjust to their “new normal” of more digitalization in the wake of the coronavirus outbreak.

The COVID-19 pandemic, combined with the rising usage of digital technology, has given hackers new opportunities. The recent SolarWinds breach was the largest and most sophisticated attack in history, and ransomware attacks are on the rise. Cyber security leaders should collaborate closely with their data science and broader digital technology teams to understand how cyber threats have grown in scale and complexity, to identify the threat actors that pose the greatest threat to their company or industry.

Also Read: Cybersecurity Begins With Employee Wellness

In a post-pandemic world, here are five actions cybersecurity leaders can take to reduce the danger of compromise in today’s more complicated cybercrime landscape.

Threat actors should be re-prioritized

Prior to the pandemic, cyber-attacks were typically more targeted and specific to businesses, such as supply chains. While past attacks focused on disrupting a particular operation, such as shipping, attacks like the one against SolarWinds highlight the importance of focusing on threat actors that can endanger numerous industries with a single attack vector. Cyber leaders should update their lists of known adversaries and keep track of key events, both internal and external, on a regular basis so that they can reprioritize threats and aggressively defend against them.

Support for a multi-cloud approach to be implemented

Many businesses that were previously recognized for having on-premise-based infrastructures are now shifting to multi-cloud strategies after more than a year of remote work for hundreds of thousands of employees. Multi-cloud strategies are advantageous because they ensure that each task receives the best available cloud service. When implementing multi-cloud strategies, cyber leaders should build risk controls ahead of time so that they don’t slow down adoption while also protecting the company’s assets and data.

Biometrics are being used to rethink identity protection

In terms of cybersecurity, biometrics is a game-changer. A threat actor will find it much more difficult to break into a system based on behavioral attributes such as how quickly users type, how they move their mouse, or what applications they have open than one based on static passwords. As cyber-attacks grow in scale and sophistication, businesses should use biometric technologies to protect their employees’ personal identities in ways that passwords often can’t.

Adopting zero-trust architecture is a good idea

As organizations embrace remote and hybrid work, traditional security perimeters such as firewalls should be reconsidered. Companies trust the identification of the user rather than the identity of the location in a zero-trust architecture, resulting in a more secure and accurate type of protection. To better understand the prospect of adopting zero-trust architecture into their cyber operations, cyber professionals should collaborate with operations or data scientists at their companies.

Also Read: The Entire Organization is Responsible for Cybersecurity

Security operations can benefit from machine learning

Adequate cyber protection requires constant monitoring and reporting of cyber threats. Industry experts advise organizations to work together with their data science team to monitor their infrastructure 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Organizations should also ensure that their cyber team is aware of all internal and external risks and that any infrastructure requirements are updated on a regular basis. Prioritize technology investments, such as artificial intelligence and machine learning that can assist the company in promptly identifying and responding to threats.