6 Active Cyber ​​Security Practices to Prevent Expensive Cyber ​​Attacks

In the modern age, there is nowhere near enough of a responsive approach to cyber security.

Businesses already spend an average of £ 855,000 per cyber-attack. And even after successful cleaning, the business will not restore its profitability and brand image before the breach.

So it is important to take an active position in cyber security.

What is Proactive Cybersecurity?

Proactive cyber security does exactly what it says on the tin.

It focuses on protecting your company’s IT infrastructure against cyber-attackers-stopping them from progressing before they are destroyed.

In this way, any costs directly related to resolution can be avoided.

Here are some ways your business can take active cyber security:

1. Invest in breach and attack simulation

Any self-respecting enterprise should have an existing cyber security stack.

The question is, how effective is your cyber security solution? Can they reliably avoid cyber-attackers using modern tactics?

These are questions that a Violation and Attack Simulation or BAS can answer.

In layman’s terms, BAS works by examining the current security controls of a company, but not limited to:

• Intrusion Detection System or IDS
• Antivirus software
• Hardware authentication device
• Network firewall
• Email server filter

Once these security controls have been identified, the next step is to configure automated tests that evaluate them for vulnerabilities. And when the results come out, the automatically generated reports will be sent to the organization’s cyber security team.

As a bonus, this report will include remedy options. In this way, the company gets a chance to fix potential attack vectors before actual hackers can exploit them.

What makes simulation of breaches and attacks effective is that most of the process will be automated.

To protect companies from recent attacks, BAS solutions also receive threat data from multiple sources, such as:

• First party information from the organization’s previous cyber security report
• Data obtained from the internal research team of the solution
• Open source threat intelligence databases such as MITER ATT & CK

Be sure to ask the BAS vendor for a list of their threat information sources. The wider this list, the more confident you will be in their services.

2. Build a cyber security-conscious culture

Whether you like it or not, human error is the root cause of 95 percent of all cyber security breaches.

In other words, your workforce may be the most important line of your defense against threatening actors অথবা or, they may be your downfall.

Anything from weak passwords, bad data storage habits and poor email security awareness can lead to a costly cyber-attack. That’s why it’s important to maintain and spread cyber security awareness throughout your organization.

There are several things that can help your company create cyber security awareness. As your first step, you need to make cybersecurity awareness training mandatory for employees who directly handle and manage sensitive data.

Your company should also implement a password reset policy where employees need to update their passwords regularly. For remote employees, make sure you’re using a secure VPN to keep their connections encrypted.

3. Use a Zero Trust policy

The idea behind a Zero Trust policy is simple: Assume that no network access request is secure.

This means that one or more authentication steps must be performed each time a device tries to connect to your network.

To make this possible, you may need a combination of multifactor authentication tools, endpoint protection and identity protection tools. This will help ensure that no malicious actors ever gain access to your company’s sensitive data.

Just keep in mind that a zero trust policy can disrupt the day-to-day workflow of employees.

As a security protocol, Zero Trust must be effective in reducing the likelihood of data breaches. However, the impact of such a policy on the productivity of your organization needs to be considered.

4. Establish user and event behavioral analysis

User and Event Behavioral Analytics, or UEBA, is another automated strategy that can prevent cyber-attacks before they do harm.

As the name implies, UEBA works by actively monitoring the activity of users, devices, and software processes within your IT network.

UEBA solutions rely on the power of machine learning to analyze millions of interactions and create behavioral profiles. If something common happens within your network, the system sends out alerts of potential breaches.

5. Use red teaming

Red teaming is a cybersecurity adversarial testing practice that evaluates your company’s cyber defenses and reveals vulnerabilities.

During the operation, ethical hackers, aka “red team”, use real-world tactics that real hackers use to gain access to your network. This will enable you to support your cyber security measures to protect you from modern attacks

A red teaming strategy starts with a goal. For example, your company may hire a red team to uncover possible ways that hackers can use to access certain assets.

The Red Team will then work and find potential exploits – from simple phishing to cross-site scripting vulnerabilities.

The penetration test is another validation practice with similar functions. It aims to create a list of identified network vulnerabilities that hackers can exploit.

What sets the penetration test apart is that it tries to identify every single exploit that is found in your IT infrastructure. Red teaming, on the other hand, focuses on a single goal and goal assets.

6. Continuous security validity

Like Red Teaming, the goal of uninterrupted security validity, or CSV, is to test an organization’s existing cyber security system.

The main difference is that CSV is fully automated.

It includes an array of tools, including BAS, to map the attack surface, identify potential attack vectors, and make remedial recommendations.

Like BAS, CSV draws threat models from a variety of sources, including the open-source threat knowledge base. It then simulates using threat intelligence to figure out how a real-world hacker would try to break into an organization’s network.

Due to the shorter test cycle, CSV is much more efficient and reliable than red teaming and penetration testing.

Since it is fully automated, you can expect regular reports to flow This will protect your organization against recent threats, including zero-day attacks.

Conclusion

Whether you are a small business or a large corporation with thousands of employees, cyber security is something you should not take lightly.

The bets are most definitely high. And even if your company’s financial profile can reduce the impact of cyber-attacks, such incidents can do irreparable damage to your brand image.

If you haven’t already done so, plan how your company can take a proactive approach to cyber security as soon as possible. Good luck!