There are multiple facets of cyber threats and so are multiple things to do to secure the cyber domain of the company. Let us look at a systematic approach to improve cyber security at your company. Some specific points to be kept in mind to address the cyber security for your company:
1. Protect your crown jewels, not just the perimeter
Assess and identify your crown jewels (most sensitive organization data) so that you can prioritize security investments and requirements. Do note that prioritization should also include risks and not see the standalone business continuity.
The value of information asset should not be under looked. For eg: During a cyber-attack, even a routine looking administrative system can matter a great deal. If an email server or authentication server gets hacked the company is left impaired.
2. Proactively assessing the cyber risk
Cyber threat intelligence is an essential component for organizations information systems. Monitoring data access trails and diving deep into data is important to detect threats and mitigate them. Monitoring applications that access data is important and putting necessary checks and balances will improve the security. Data access controls and security analytics are an effective way to manage large volumes of data.
3. Focusing on creating a multilayered defense
Cyber criminals are using extremely sophisticated methodologies. Security awareness should become a part of company culture. Increasing vigilance and doing this in a more interactive way where employees know about threats is important. For eg: A phishing email about company’s annual sales to sales team is likely to be clicked and create a possible entry for malware attack.
Encryption can be a part of multi-layered defense system where access controls clearly defines permission and restrict exposure.
4. Fortification of organization
This is straight forward, find the weak spots and create firewalls to fortify them. Spend more time and money on cyber security to get regularly updated. Security should build into the design of the system. Some measures can be restricting personal’s mobile access to company data, maintaining regular security patches implementing multifactor authentication. DLP systems play a great role here. Sensitive data should be identified and protected before it can cause harm if leaked.
Cyber criminals have become very smart and they use personal/ sensitive data from social media to make the attacks look like a regular email from colleague (social engineering). Therefore, information and awareness is imperative to safety.
5. Always be ready. Consider the system breached.
Simply having a security protocol in place under attack situation will not guarantee smooth functioning of company. It will require a better understanding of how departments will work under attack. How all the stakeholders will engage, partners and clients. Cyber simulations can be used to interactively see how and what happens when a particular type of attack happens.
Logix Infosecurity systems has latest DLP software. If placed, it can effectively help in mitigating cyber-attacks in your organization. The best way to protect one organization is not to have an attack and hence latest systems must be used to prevent malware attack.