This year’s cybersecurity awareness month’s theme is “See Yourself in Cyber” to demonstrate the importance of ‘people’ in enforcing proactive cybersecurity measures to secure the enterprise from sophisticated cyber threats and risks.
Cybercrime has become a trillion-dollar industry that is flourishing at an exponential rate, largely because of easy access to Cybercrime-as-a-Service. Malicious actors are leveraging advanced attack techniques and tools with Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML), and automation integrated to infiltrate business networks, accelerate lateral movements and increase the attack severity. As the cybercrime market has evolved tremendously, businesses need to have proactive cybersecurity strategies rather than waiting for an attack to disrupt the business flow.
SecOps teams need to have a strategic plan to secure their entire IT infrastructure against various cyber and data threats to avoid any legal implications or other potential business disruptions. CISOs should consider the following proactive strategies that enable the organization to stay one step ahead of the cybercriminals:
See yourself in cyber: educate resources
The most significant way to implement proactive cybersecurity measures throughout the enterprise is to spread cybersecurity awareness throughout the entire enterprise. CISOs should consider concentrating on their employees and developing them as strong defense lines to strengthen their IT infrastructure against various threats and risks. Empowering and educating employees on their role in securing business networks by identifying suspicious activities and notifying them to the right channel is crucial. Enterprises that do not educate their employees; make it challenging for them to secure their systems against various threats that cybercriminals leverage to steal sensitive information. CISOs should make the most of cybersecurity awareness month 2022 to educate their resources to identify suspicious Phishing, Identity theft, Malware, Password hacking, and Ransomware activities. Once the entire workforce is aware of their biggest cybersecurity threats and vulnerabilities and is empowered with robust tools to protect against these attacks will help to strengthen the security posture. SecOps teams can update all the software and applications, patch all the attack surface areas, and implement robust firewalls as proactive cybersecurity measures to secure their data and IT infrastructure.
Also Read: Comprehensive Cybersecurity Approach Against Sophisticated Cyber Threats
Monitor and identify threats vigilantly
Enterprises can leverage cyber intelligence tools in their cybersecurity tech stack to efficiently monitor IT infrastructure in real time. Once the teams identify all the potential threats, CISOs need to set effective workflows and tools to mitigate them. Enterprises that embrace proactive cybersecurity measures will help them to actively hunt and mitigate threats before they start moving laterally in the business network. SecOps teams can integrate robust automated cyber intelligence tools that will help to focus on securing business operations from all the potential disruption or being a victim of an attack. It is crucial to embrace automated, comprehensive threat-hunting tools available in the market to identify, analyze, investigate and respond to threats immediately. These proactive cybersecurity measures enable the organization to get a holistic view of the entire IT infrastructure to track all activities with malicious intent.
Partner with scalable and reliable cybersecurity vendors
Many businesses find it challenging to attract, hire and retain in-house cybersecurity talent to ensure better security against sophisticated cyber threats and vulnerabilities. However, enterprises can partner with a trusted cybersecurity vendor to get more visibility in their entire business network, cloud ecosystem, and digital infrastructures. These vendors have industry veterans onboard that offer their expert proactive cybersecurity measures to secure the IT infrastructure.
Proactive cybersecurity measures to secure data
Securing data can be a challenging task because the enterprise has to abide by complex rules. Moreover, it is an intricate task to enforce permission-based access controls based on the job role to access required data. It becomes more difficult for the SecOps teams that can want to define contextual-based controls with specific time periods that the authorized user or group can access data.
“Ransomware has evolved to become harder to defend against. A factor at play here could be the increased scrutiny of data breach incidents. More governments are tightening data protection laws to protect consumers, with hefty fines being imposed on businesses that were found to have lapses in their security protocol. With growing awareness about the importance of data privacy among consumers, data theft incidents can also have profound implications on an organization’s reputation, which may mean that more businesses are willing to pay the ransom than risk the fallout,” adds Jonathan.
Also Read: Three Game-Changing Strategies for Addressing the Cybersecurity Talent Shortage
A recent report published by IBM titled “Cost of a data breach 2022” suggests that ransomware attacks have become more sophisticated and costlier, with an average cost of USD 4.54 million. The report highlights that the ransomware breach share increased by 41% in 2021 and, on average, took 49 days longer to identify and mitigate. Enterprises should segment and monitor their data irrespective of the repository it is stored in. The SecOps teams should always have transparent and stringent data governance policies to determine who has access to what data, how they utilize it in their daily operations, and the ways they share it in real-time. CISOs can set proactive cybersecurity measures to identify and notify potential data misuse and exfiltration security incidents that could lead to a possible data breach.
It can be challenging for the SecOps teams to democratize data in a professional context because the data owners know the data access policies thoroughly. However, the SecOps teams are responsible for enforcing the data governance policies throughout the organizations. It is crucial to implement policies and tools that enable business operations and security teams to collaborate efficiently to secure their data. A proactive cybersecurity posture to secure sensitive data will help organizations to avoid any legal implications and other hefty fines.
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