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Defence against Cyber Attacks should be a Board-Room priority
Leaders Must Evolve Strategies to Protect an Expanding Digital Footprint Against Emerging Threats
Attacks have both increased in number and frequency during the past six months. The implications for business would be greatest if attackers or intruders are able to breach and get beyond the perimeter security controls that have been created. These violations may have a negative impact on finances either directly or indirectly by harming shareholder confidence, brand reputation, and customer trust.
The IT staff is frequently thought to be solely responsible for information security, but senior management has to see information security as beneficial to the business and its clients.
The number of cyber threats cannot be ignored, known and unknown to customers, expanding too quickly for many firms to keep up with the exponential growth of new emerging technologies used to drive marketing and customer-oriented efforts.
The following six areas and information security programs can help firms strengthen their cybersecurity posture:
Cyber Security Response Capability: proactively plan to defend critical systems and data assets to stay ahead of changing threats, and to fully recover from attacks when they do happen.
Data Security and Data Protection Programs: Databases are a frequent target for hackers considering they store the most sensitive and critical data. As a result, businesses need to prioritize database security by putting in place data security protection programs.
Identity and Access Management (IAM) Initiatives: To prevent breaches, leaders must enhance governance, reinforce privileged access management procedures, and build more robust and agile authentication and authorization.
Threat Intelligence Programs: Organizations wishing to strengthen their cyber defensive security measures need to use threat intelligence as a force multiplier.
Vulnerability Assessment Projects: The goal of an assessment is to locate weaknesses that can be exploited to compromise systems.
Implementing appropriate Detection programs: Enterprises are protected by detection systems by looking through network traffic analysis, behavioral anomaly hunting, stateful protocol analysis, delivering a signal and observing the response.
Organizations should put more effort into expanding employee awareness, strengthening internal security, and increasing the maturity levels of their organization’s cyber security index. The Information Security function needs to be given more emphasis in order to provide proper protection, and last but not least, appropriate governance needs to be formed by designating champions at the executive and department levels. The highest organizational level must take responsibility for the information security policy, which is essential to the development and success of the company.
These days, any contract that an organization and a third party with whom services or goods are being sourced sign will include the words “Data Security” and “Data Protection.”
Entities are mandated to perform a self-evaluation and develop security-related procedures with those who have access to the data and third-party risk assessments. Despite the fact that organizations have increased their investments in information security, many professionals believe that the budgets are insufficient to address the current, rising cyber risks, a lack of qualified resources to support the proper priorities and needs of information security, and executive awareness and support. Many firms who have next-generation antivirus, IDS, IPS, etc. installed and running yet have incorrect configurations and procedures.
“Attackers are weaponizing AI just as fast as organizations augment their defenses with it, meaning that it’s not enough for cybersecurity technologies to evolve – strategy and leadership approaches must change, too.” – Gartner 2022
Organizations must respond swiftly to avoid being exposed to a costly and brand-damaging security event that could undermine the trust of stakeholders and customers as the speed and complexity of cyber-attacks continue to rise. A crucial part of establishing an organization-wide information security program for continual improvement is security awareness and training.
Organizations must allocate resources to proactively battle both known and unknown risks related to technology as well as to protect against emerging threats and zero-day threats. The gap between an organization’s information security program and the cyber threats it encounters must be closed if organizations don’t develop an information security program to comprehend both the opportunities and the risks as well as to act on the findings.
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