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Can we nip the cyberthreats in their buds?

by CIO AXIS

An attack-led downtime, no matter how short it is, could have not only cost implications but also result in serious consequences with loss of trust.

Prevention is better than cure, goes an old saying. Nothing could be more apt, especially when it comes to the area of IT security.

Indeed, no IT team would like to see its enterprise’s network going down in the face of an attack. Yet, it is not uncommon to see attackers bringing down enterprise networks to crippling halts or holding organizations to ransoms.

A successful attack could lead to significant downtimes and associated costs. Even more seriously, in incidents involving thefts of customer data and other vital information, the organization becomes liable to inquiries and is required to answer uncomfortable questions. This amounts to trust and credibility-related issues for the organization with potentially far-reaching consequences.

If a breach is able to expose a compliance-related vulnerability or a gap in the system, then the organization could even be subject to questions and probes by, say, an industry regulatory body. It is not hard to imagine how such a development could impact an organization, in terms of direct as well as goodwill-linked costs.

Clearly, measures need to be taken to ensure that a threat vector is comprehensively addressed in a proactive manner well before it matures into an actual attack.

Develop comprehensive threat intelligence
The number of threat vectors and their genres have increased manifold in the recent years. An ad hoc study of the environment is no longer enough. A strategic, systematic approach is the need of the hour to ensure that all threat categories are duly captured and thoroughly analysed. Any new mutations must be quickly noted and tracked, all in an automated fashion.

Case studies of how threats got converted into attacks in the past, whether internally or outside, and how they were countered could serve as key reference documents.

Make your defence agile
A reality check of your existing resources and skillsets is an important first step toward creating an impregnable bulwark. The threat actors have become highly sophisticated in this age of digital and are using AI-guided weapons of attack. To counter these new-age attackers, organization too need to invest in latest tools and technologies.

However, that alone is not enough. A tool can only be as effective as the person who’s handling it. The teams in charge of the organization’s defence must be able to harness the capabilities of those tools fully well. In the absence of that, systems remain as vulnerable as before.

Processes too play an equally important role. AI-enabled workflow ensures that the right sets of information are seamlessly available to the individual members of the incident response (IR) team. Also, processes should be defined such that specific guided actions are made available to members corresponding to the incident that has taken place.

Well-coordinated responses, involving people, processes, and technologies would greatly enhance the counterattack capabilities of the IR team, and enable it to shoot down a threat vector even before it enters the enterprise’s defence circuit.

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