5 Keys to Improve Your Cybersecurity

However, that is not the way it works. Technology continues to
evolve. Cyber attackers adapt and develop new malicious tools and
techniques, and cybersecurity vendors design creative new ways to
detect and block those threats. Rinse and repeat.

Cybersecurity isn’t easy, and there is no magic solution, but
there are a handful of things you can
do^[1] that will greatly reduce
your exposure to risk and significantly improve your security
posture.

The right platform, intelligence, and expertise can help you
avoid the vast majority of threats, and help you detect and respond
more quickly to the attacks that get through.

Challenges of Cybersecurity

Effective cybersecurity is challenging for a variety of reasons,
but the changing perimeter and the confusing variety of solutions
don’t help.

Long ago, during a time that is all but a distant memory by tech
standards, cybersecurity was built around a concept of inside vs.
outside, and us vs. them. The servers, applications, users, and
data inside the network were inherently trusted, and everything
outside of the network was assumed to be a potential threat.

The advent of free public Wi-Fi, portable laptops, mobile
devices, and cloud computing have eroded the idea that there is any
sort of perimeter, and most attacks leverage valid credentials and
appear to be legitimate users, so the old model of defending the
perimeter is no longer valid.

Meanwhile, as new platforms and technologies are developed,
cybersecurity vendors inevitably create targeted point solutions
for each one.

The result is a confusing mix of tools and services that protect
specific facets of the environment, but don’t play well with each
other and don’t provide a holistic view of the whole infrastructure
so you can understand your
security posture^[2]
as a whole.

The constantly expanding and evolving threat landscape doesn’t
make it any easier, either. Attacks are increasingly complex and
harder to identify or detect—like fileless or “Living off the Land”
(LotL) attacks.

The complexity of the IT infrastructure—particularly in a hybrid
or multi-cloud environment—leads to misconfiguration and other
human error that exposes the network to unnecessary risk. Attackers
are also adopting machine learning and artificial intelligence to
automate the process of developing customized attacks and evading
detection.

Improve Your Cybersecurity

All of that sounds daunting—like cybersecurity is an exercise in
futility—but there are things you can do. Keep in mind that your
goal is not to be impervious to attack—there is no such thing as
perfect cybersecurity.

The goal is to increase the level of difficulty for an attacker
to succeed in compromising your network and to improve your chances
of quickly detecting and stopping attacks that occur.

Here are 5 tips to help you do that:

• Assess your business objectives and unique attack surface
  — Choose a threat detection method that can address your
  workloads. For instance, cloud servers spin up and spin down
  constantly. Your detection must follow the provision and
  deprovision actions of your cloud platform(s) and collect metadata
  to follow events as they traverse this dynamic environment. Most
  SIEMs cannot do this.
• Eliminate vulnerabilities before they need threat detection
  — Use vulnerability assessments to identify and remove
  weaknesses before they become exploited. Assess your full
  application stack, including your code, third party code, and code
  configurations.
• Align data from multiple sources to enhance your use cases
  and desired outcomes — Collect and inspect all three kinds of
  data for suspicious activity: web, log, and network. Each data type
  has unique strengths in identifying certain kinds of threats and
  together present a whole picture for greater accuracy and
  actionable context.
• Use analytics to detect today’s sophisticated attacks —
  ensure your threat detection methods look at both real-time events
  and patterns in historical events across time. Apply machine
  learning to find what you do not even know to look for. If you use
  SIEM, enlist machine learning to see what correlation missed and
  better tune your SIEM rules.
• Align security objectives to your business demands —
  There is more than one way to improve your security posture and
  detect threats. While SIEMs are a traditional approach, they are
  most useful for organizations that have a well-staffed security
  program. A SIEM alone is not the best solution for security
  monitoring against today’s web applications and cloud
  environments.

5 Recommendations to Strengthen Your Security Program

Jack Danahy, Senior Vice President, Security for Alert Logic,
recently presented a webinar titled “Five
Recommendations to Strengthen Your Security Program.”

If you want to learn more about the challenges organizations,
face today with cybersecurity, and what you can do to improve your
security posture, check out the recording of the webinar.

^[3]