With cybercrime costs anticipated to grow 15% every year and reach $10.5 trillion annually by 2025 according to Cybersecurity Ventures, it has never been more important for organizations to protect themselves with a multi-layered approach.
No longer is it adequate to focus solely on detection and remediation solutions. Today, firms must be holistically prepared with a comprehensive cyber strategy covering policy, prevention, detection, response and recovery efforts.
In my experience, the final piece is often overlooked. With several layers of security in place, organizations can trick themselves into believing that they are completely protected from cyber-attacks. Yet, with threat actors continuing to advance their methods and exploit new vulnerabilities, no entity can ever be considered 100% safe from cyber threats.
For this reason, firms must prepare themselves for the worst possible eventuality and mitigate the potentially massive financial damages that can be incurred if they suffer from an attack with an effective recovery plan. Indeed, industry figures show the average total cost of recovery from a ransomware attack in 2021 was $1.4m – a figure that could derail many small, medium and even larger firms.
Securing Cyber Insurance Isn’t Easy
Acquiring cyber insurance is a logical approach to recovery. Not only can it be used to cover the financial losses that result from cyber events and incidents directly, but some policies may also help with expenses associated with remediation, such as legal consultancy.
Today, cyber insurance is not a nice to have, but a must have. It’s fast become a standard requirement to demonstrate a business’s preparedness in defending against and mitigating potential attacks. Yet, unfortunately, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to secure.
Purchasing a cyber policy isn’t as simple as looking for travel cover and having a confirmation email in your inbox 10 minutes and $20 later. Indeed, there are several rules and regulations that come with purchasing cyber risk cover that can make it feel like a fruitless and somewhat expensive task.
As the volume of attacks mount, insurance providers are increasing premiums and making more demands on businesses to show they have the tools, processes and people in place to reduce the chance of having to make claims.
This should be seen as more than just insurance providers attempting to dodge payouts. Instead, businesses should consider those requests a good starting point in assessing their defenses and resilience status. It’s in insurance providers’ interests to keep their customers safe, and insurance claims should be the absolute last resort.
Privileged Access Management Can Help
So, how can businesses keep pace with the changing requirements, demonstrate their cyber resilience and prioritize measures that underline their readiness to increase their chances of getting coverage?
Privileged access is a critical piece of the puzzle, representing a security risk for all organizations.
All systems, services, devices and applications are typically managed by powerful administrator accounts that are not only capable of making significant changes to functionality, such as defining the abilities of other users but are also able to access valuable corporate intellectual property and sensitive personal information.
Within this context, it’s no surprise that such accounts are the most prized targets for threat actors. They could do serious damage in the wrong hands, placing all IT and cybersecurity systems at risk.
As a result, organizations must demonstrate their ability to protect privileged access credentials properly. This is no longer optional. Indeed, many critical regulations, including GDPR and PCI DSS, demand this as a best practice to reduce risk, and cyber insurers are now following suit.
Using Technologies to Achieve Best Practice
So, how can organizations achieve best practices in relation to privileged access management in the most straightforward manner?
Privileged access management (PAM) solutions can manage and protect powerful accounts without impeding productivity. Specifically, PAM can be used to separate users from valuable administrator credentials that are typically required to manage shared servers, devices and systems.
Moving beyond typical identity access management (IAM) solutions focused on proving user identities, PAM applies policies that determine which systems each user may access and at what privilege level. Further still, some solutions can ensure that privileged applications are always run in a protected environment, where sessions are monitored and recorded and key processes automated.
Addressing this piece of the cyber insurance puzzle and having access controls in place will not only be a significant step down the path to achieving cyber insurance readiness but also ensure businesses are protecting their data to help defend against those security implications that demand the need for cyber insurance in the first place.