Many organizations are overly focused on the arguably impossible task of keeping the bad guys out of their systems. Recent high-profile attacks have proved that not even the biggest budget can guarantee a completely secure environment.
Enterprises and government agencies are spending a lot of money to secure critical infrastructure. However, due to the secrecy surrounding information security and the fact that IT spending is becoming increasingly difficult to track, we only hear the bad news, like the recent attack on a biometric security platform.
According to a Gartner prediction, more than $124 billion will be spent on information security products and services in 2019 - driving this demand is detection, response and privacy. Another report by Cybersecurity Ventures predicts that global spending on cybersecurity products and services will exceed $1 trillion for the years between 2017 and 2021.
Despite the current and future plans to increase investments in cybersecurity, organizations are still suffering costly breaches. Sometimes the attacks aren't even sophisticated: relatively simple attacks resulting from mismatched configurations, poor patching and human error have led to great losses.
Prep your team with security testing
Regular organization-wide security tests are a common requirement by most compliance standards. To protect critical information as well as the privacy of their citizens, savvy governments have increased legislation and promise more to come. Huge fines await offenders from both the public and private sectors for mishandling data.
The global skills shortage for security professionals doesn't make things any easier for the modern organization as taking apart the network, systems and applications to evaluate your infrastructure is no easy task. The technical staff trained in the arts comes at a premium and outsourcing are not cheap either.
A common attempt to circumvent this expense by organizations is to invest in tactical approaches -- an issue is fixed once, and only if, it arises. For instance, patches and fixes are applied only when an employee has been phished or when a malware is identified. Because of this response-driven behavior, organizations are accumulating security tools without any regard for coordination or common interface between them. At the very least, this results in distraction from detection, people and process.
The options
Traditionally, to detect a threat, an organization compares system event logs against known threats. The Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) system is the preferred route for disseminating the logs that are to be searched for known threats for larger businesses.
For the average business, security testing is more effectively carried out using Breach and Attack Simulation (BAS) systems. Tools using this technology are designed to test different network segments across multiple attack vectors with an aim for a complete view of your overall security, giving real time data of vulnerabilities found.
Use intelligence to allocate security resources
BAS offers data in real time on the strengths and the weakness of your business’ security. With valuable information on the weak points within your security plan, your team's experience and proficiency throughout the security lifecycle and incident response is greatly increased.
Using BAS, organizations can answer elusive security questions such as: How secure is the network? Are our alerts precise? Will our staff respond to alerts? Are we in a position to effectively respond to and contain an attack? This helps you make more sound investments in security products.
To develop resilience in cybersecurity, organizations must be aware of their ability to detect attacks, deploy a sound incident response strategy and automate mundane processes. The notion, "if we haven't been attacked we must be doing it right," is wrong. At the highest attainable level of security, businesses are already knowledgeable on how to act and are prepared if an attack occurs. This means having measures in place to determine the organization's security posture at all times.