Table of Contents
Important Components to include in any size business’s cybersecurity plan
Table of Contents
Whether you obsess about cybersecurity every day or are brand new to the process, there are a few things to keep in mind to ensure the success of your company’s cybersecurity plan. Whether you’re the solitary proprietor of a brand new business or trying to improve the security posture of a large, well-established corporation, we’ll disclose five components you should include in your approach.
-
- Recognize the distinction between compliance and security. You have an ethical, if not legal, obligation to be a responsible custodian of personal information or data that your firm obtains as part of your relationship with consumers or vendors. It’s not enough to simply claim “we won’t reveal your personal information” or to be able to produce required audit reports when questioned; that’s not security. Knowing what data you gather, where it’s stored, who has access to it, and why is the first step in developing a security strategy. This allows you to determine what constitutes “regular” data usage for your company, making it much easier to spot when someone is attempting to steal it.
- Make data security a shared responsibility for everyone. According to Forrester Research, privileged credentials are involved in 80% of security breaches. That means a cybercriminal gained access to an insider’s credentials and potentially sensitive personal data, either unintentionally or maliciously. Another cornerstone of a cybersecurity strategy should be training employees on how to prevent their credentials from being exposed. This can be as easy as asking employees to log out of sensitive databases when they’re done with them or assisting them in detecting a phishing assault. The National Cyber Security Alliance, for example, has a wealth of materials to help you get started. It’s also crucial to think about data access control. Organizations can utilize role-based user privilege access control rules to align individual power levels with the real requirements of their job function with the correct technology.
- Know who your adversary is. The Imperva Research Team determined the four sorts of attackers from whom you need to safeguard your assets after studying 100 data breaches. The unwitting or malicious “inside” attacker, who usually has access to assets or credentials and is less suspect, is the first category. Others are “outside” attackers who either “smash and grab” important information and flee, or, more concerning, “hang around” unnoticed for an extended length of time seeking more opportunities to cause havoc. To steal credentials and compromise databases, some people utilize keyloggers, sniffers, and other tools. A security strategy should consider both “inside” and “outside” attackers, as well as procedures for detecting and correcting aberrant data exfiltration.
- Keep track of the responsibilities that your cloud vendors and ISPs play. For a variety of reasons, large and small businesses share sensitive data with cloud-native architectures. The AWS Shared Obligation Model clearly explains that cloud companies provide secure architectures for their customers to store data, but it is the customer’s responsibility to implement their security policies to the data. The vast majority of businesses appear to be unaware of this detail. According to Gartner, customers would be responsible for at least 95 percent of cloud security failures until 2022. Working with all of your cloud-native vendors to ensure that their environments are configured to allow full visibility into your data so you can apply your security policy should be part of your security plan. ISPs are used by many retailers and service providers to host their websites. They rely on their ISPs to keep their websites up and running no matter how busy they are. You could be facing an existential threat if your website is ever subjected to a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack, which is an incident whose main objective is to render your website and servers unavailable to genuine visitors. In many cases, an ISP would simply shut down a website under a DDoS assault until it ceases, in order to ensure that the performance of the other websites they host is not harmed. DDoS attacks must be considered as part of your security strategy, and you must have a mechanism in place to disperse illegal web traffic without shutting down your website and ensuring actual traffic.
- Have a plan in place in case your security is breached. A breach occurs despite best efforts, and your data security policy must account for what happens next. A disaster recovery strategy should be in place to secure your network, prevent further damage, identify the source of the breach, and notify stakeholders and law authorities. The plan should transform the incident into a positive by ensuring that the information gained during the breach is internalized and used to prevent future breaches.
We strongly advise collaborating with cybersecurity specialists to accurately assess your specific threat landscape and assist you in developing a long-term data protection strategy.