You can always add new strategies to your IT security defense, but what if you could see into cybercriminals’ playbook?
Readers of our blog will know that, apart from providing top-shelf IT security assessments, we’re also a strong proponent of risk management. In a world increasingly infiltrated with ransomware and malicious actors taking advantage of the chaos around COVID-19 and the subsequent global recovery, risk management is more vital than ever to ensure your organization’s safety.
What makes a good risk management strategy? Working together with a security vendor of your choice, you’ll need to identify your company’s information assets, organize them by their intrinsic value, and discover and remediate your system’s vulnerabilities. Taking these steps will make you a more difficult target and, therefore, a more unlikely one, although experts warn there’s no way to fully eliminate the risk.
But even diligence around risk management isn’t foolproof. Organizing by intrinsic value is often a biased process, and while you may be able to judge which assets are most valuable to your company, judging which assets are most valuable to hackers is far more difficult—and those values change by the day.
You need a strategy that monitors and evolves with the present, that takes stock of current players in the cybercriminal game and adjusts accordingly. Enter an expanded approach to your IT security: threat management.
Protecting What Hackers Value
Where risk management is taking precautions, threat management is responding to intel. Constructing an effective defensive security strategy relies on knowing who the biggest threat is to your systems and, most importantly, what they’re really after, which may be different than what you initially assume.
Organizations with all degrees of IT security measures can still miss the assets that are most appealing to hackers because they’re focused on what they value themselves. Even the big guys aren’t immune to this strategic omission: the 2019 Capital One breach saw hackers obtain AWS (Amazon Web Service) keys, which provide access to encrypted customer data, while a recent Twitter hack broke into the website’s management console to promote a cryptocurrency scam. Neither of these organizations were prepared to protect what the hackers were after.
But cyber threat intelligence, or CTI, struggles to flourish even within its own sector. A significant decline in industry-wide hires makes it increasingly difficult for organizations to divert their resources to gathering and interpreting intel.
Yet experts advise that operating amid the pandemic makes CTI more valuable than ever. Remote work environments significantly expand the attack surface for cybercriminals, and knowing the who, where, and how of COVID-era threats will put your organization well ahead of the curve.
How to monitor current threats? For starters, you can keep yourself apprised of new developments in the world of IT security. And you’ll want to find a vendor with their finger on the pulse, who frequently adapts their processes to contend with the front line of cybercrime.
Evenly Matched
You need not take our word for it, but BAI Security strives in everything we do to match criminal innovation with cutting-edge solutions.
The quality of your IT security assessment can be the difference between true security and a costly breach, but we’re here to help you find what you’re looking for—industry-leading specialists, an unparalleled focus on IT security and compliance, and so much more.
For more information, contact us today.
