[eBook] A Guide to Stress-Free Cybersecurity for Lean IT Security Teams

Today’s cybersecurity landscape is enough to make any security
team concerned. The rapid evolution and increased danger of attack
tactics have put even the largest corporations and governments at
heightened risk. If the most elite security teams can’t prevent
these attacks from happening, what can lean security teams look
forward to?

Surprisingly, leaner teams have a much greater chance than they
think. It might seem counterintuitive, but recent history has shown
that large numbers and huge budgets aren’t the difference-makers
they once were. Indeed, having the right strategy in place is a
clear indicator of an organization’s success today.

A new guide by XDR provider Cynet (download it here^[1]) looks to dispel the
myth that bigger is always better and shows a smarter way forward
for lean IT security teams.

The new guide focuses on helping lean IT security teams plan
strategies that can protect their organizations while reducing the
level of stress they face. Due to the rise of cyber tools that can
help level the playing field and a new generation of security
professionals, smaller organizations can now defend their
organizations equally. However, it’s not just about tools, but
about how they’re deployed.

The guide signals six key components of stress-free
cybersecurity:

• Prevention
• Detection
• Correlation
• Investigation
• Remediation
• Oversight

Putting the pieces together

The question is how organizations can put together these six
components into a strategy that doesn’t just help them survive but
stay ahead of potential threats and attackers. The guide argues
that it begins with a combination of good planning and having the
right tools in place.

Instead of having to update security definitions manually and
constantly being behind the eight-ball in terms of prevention,
recent technologies such as next-generation antivirus (NGAV)
software can give organizations greater visibility and help
automate detection and initial response. This reduces the time it
takes to get up to speed, and lets organizations be proactive.

Next, adding a layer of detection tools such as endpoint
detection and response (EDR) and network detection and response
(NDR) offers a more comprehensive view of organizations’
environments. They also provide around-the-clock monitoring for
every attack surface. More importantly, they help organizations cut
down on the volume of alerts.

However, even with fewer alerts, it’s still important to
separate the noise from the real alarms. Older technologies don’t
offer these capabilities and left massive blind spots because they
weren’t collecting data from every potential source (files, users,
networks, and hosts). Instead, they left security teams to put
together the pieces as best they could.

Adding correlation abilities with platforms such as extended
detection and response (XDR) can help connect these dots and
provide a much better picture of the threat landscape. Instead of
having to put the pieces together manually, XDR tools can gather
all the data from relevant sources and analyze it in a unified way,
producing more actionable intelligence for better results.

With the ability to correlate data in hand, lean security teams
can better investigate issues.

However, even here, new tools are making the process easier and
less stressful. For instance, new XDR tools offer automated
investigation and response, which allows them to look not just at
an incident, but at the sequence of events, alerts, and anomalous
behavior that led to it.

This offers a much better path to the final step, remediation.
Here again, automation offers much faster response times, better
outcomes, and easier resolutions. More importantly, by adding
things like fully integrated managed detection and response (MDR),
organizations can focus on the critical tasks knowing that they
have a team of experts supporting them.

You can learn more about how lean security teams can build
stress-less security strategies here^[2].