As advanced targeted attacks become the new reality, the focus of organizations is evolving from cyber security to the more robust concept of cyber resilience.
Cyber resilience adds multiple dimensions to how an organization stays protected in the ever changing threat landscape. While security is still a key factor, cyber resilience also includes strategy, business continuity and crisis management.
Modern cyber threats are persistent and sophisticated campaigns with the goal of establishing a foothold in an organization and extracting sensitive information or disrupting operations.
Organizations should consider the following our Top 5 recommendations to increase their cyber resiliency:
- Connect your business leaders to a near real-time picture of your organization’s cyber resilience based on personalized frameworks that enable threat anticipation, discovery and impact estimations of security incidents so that leaders can act quickly and make informed decisions when cyber attacks are on the rise;
- Have experienced security teams with multi-disciplinary skills, populated with internal or external analysts who can understand, hunt and handle cyber threats in your organization’s infrastructure, making the organization more resilient when faced with agile and persistent adversaries;
- The existing security technology already used by your organization, when optimally configured, can support Advanced Persistent Threats detection and hunting or prompt identification of immediate effects;
- Align business continuity, crisis management and cyber security according to your organizational culture to drastically reduce the total impact of security incidents;
- Limit the attack surface of IoT elements and software applications through secure code review of your in-house developed software or the flaw analysis of code binaries received through the supply chain, and the malicious actors will face more difficulties in landing their destructive payloads against your organization’s assets.
When looking at the successful attacks timeline maintained by Hackmaggedon, more than 1 in 10 successful breaches come as result of a targeted attack. Developing an agile cyber resilience approach enables an organization to anticipate, withstand, recover and adapt to persistent adversaries. The approach must include a unified assessment of the overall security governance framework, data protection mechanisms, efficient incident management, business continuity plans and crisis management processes. With internal and external support, challenges can to be dealt with in a deterministic manner by using an innovative way of thinking about a problem, like adding more fog to help drivers connect better.
Sergiu Zaharia, Lead of Cyber Security Center of Excellence, BearingPoint Romania
BearingPoint security experts are ready to discuss your challenges and ideas related to the cyber space battlefield.
