Remote work and work-from-home setup gained a lot of popularity in the past few years. This change is great in the sense that it allows employees to work in the comforts of their own homes. However, this setup also allows data breaches on company networks resulting in stolen data and other issues. Thus, a need for a cyber attack resiliency plan arises.
Opportunities are opening up to hackers and other cybercriminals to the point that it is no longer a question of if but when your corporate network will experience a security breach.
The Need for Security Resiliency During the Time of Cultural Shift
Technology made a lot of wonderful things possible. It gave more people access to educational information, business opportunities, and now people can work at home. However, it also made it easier for cybercriminals to attack both personal and corporate networks.
Cybercrimes can impact brand reputation, customer confidence, regulatory compliance, and operations which is the hefty price to pay for neglecting to protect your network.
They say that prevention is better than cure, which is true– but having a prevention-only strategy is no longer enough to keep your systems safe.
Security consciousness must be paired with cyber-resiliency. Being resilient means are capable of surviving attacks, maintaining operations, and adopting new technologies to fight off evolving threats.
How to Develop Cyber-Attack Resiliency in a Company Setting
Here are the things you need to do to develop resiliency in the face of evolving cyber-attack threats:
Enforce a clear strategy against cybercrimes.
Cyber attack resiliency is not about being able to fight off all attacks. It is about having a plan in place so that you can quickly recover after you are compromised. Generally, resiliency means being able to function after a breach.
However, cyber attack resiliency can mean many different things based on your business objectives, priorities, and risk tolerances for your systems and business areas. You need to establish a resiliency plan that will allow your company to adapt, evolve, and change its security posture.
The first step to creating a strategy is understanding your infrastructure. For instance, you need to know what information assets you have and where the company stores them. Knowing this information will allow you to protect them.
You can conduct a technology inventory to help you identify critical application dependencies and vulnerabilities. You can use this information to create recovery plans and rebuild targets in case of a data breach.
Once you have a strategy ready, you need to put it to the test to help you identify areas for improvement. You need to develop a structure for both communications and command which will allow your business to function despite a breach.
Trying to secure everything proves to be a challenging feat, especially for an enterprise. You can strategically focus on critical digital assets and the interactions between them so you can proactively protect your data and control access.
Define responsibilities.
You need to establish clear governance to ensure a good incident response. Define who is responsible for which actions in case you experience a cyber-attack. You need someone who can enforce the procedures and best practices to respond to the breach.
Clear responsibilities ensure that your resiliency plan is followed through after the breach. It also enables you to escalate and respond rapidly which is a necessity during a cyber-attack because time is of the essence to keep your business running.
Your senior management should be aware of the strategy and how to enforce them and all the necessary third parties, partners, legal teams, law enforcement, etc. should be informed about the situation.
Raise cybercrime awareness to develop cyber attack resiliency.
Resiliency cannot be achieved in a day. You need to create the process, structure, controls, and you have to prepare the people.
An organization is an organization because of its people. And the people in charge of the assets and data should develop a culture of resilience.
Everyone involved in using the network from the business staff, IT personnel to executives should all be aware of how cybercrimes can take place and what a cyber-attack might look like. You can raise awareness of cyber attack resiliency through training and seminars.
Network security can help you detect malware before it penetrates your system further, and endpoint security is your last line of defense– but your first line of defense is the people’s awareness about cybercrimes, hackers, and data breaches.
Make sure that no one is complacent.
Cybercriminals are more opportunistic, organized, and sophisticated with their methods nowadays. Threats can evolve just as quickly as your security measures.
Although both endpoint and network security tools are improving, cybercriminals and hackers are becoming more creative as well. For instance, the security perimeter has become much fluid and harder to manage– with people working at home, protecting the corporate network is more than just protecting the trusted internal network zone.
Make sure that no one is complacent and trusting just because your organization has invested in security controls to keep the network safe. Each member of the company should still continuously learn about the latest attack methods and assist in evaluating the relevance of your current controls and strategies in regards to the cyber attack resiliency plan.
Members of the company should not trust anything from outside the network. They must assume that everything around the corporate network is hostile. This also means that your security measures should require constant verification which only permits access based only on certain policies within the right context.
Bottomline
Cyber attack resiliency begins with a solid strategy with a reliable structure and a clear definition of accountability and responsibility. These cyber-attack resiliency plans require proper execution and swift decision-making based on risk management.
No network security plan can guarantee that your network will be 100% attack-proof. However, a cyber-resilient culture can help your company to manage the risk and damage, and quickly get back up on your feet.