In this article, we will learn how to address and effectively respond to major enterprise cybersecurity threats and provide tips to mitigate IT security risks. Today, cyber security incidents lead to significant damage, alarming organizations of all types and sizes in different geographic locations. That’s why it’s vitally important to increase cyber security awareness as well as find new methods for risk management.
In 2017 the following primary sectors, increasingly turning to the cloud, file-sharing services, and big data technology, top the list of the most high-target industry verticals vulnerable to cyber-attacks:
- The public sector (governmental services, transportation, and state infrastructure)
- Healthcare
- Insurance
- Banks and financial services
- Retail
- Telecommunications
- Manufacturing
- Education
- Law firms
- Military
The biggest cybersecurity disasters compromised records and impacted major banks in the world; numerous state-sponsored attacks targeted critical national infrastructure or defense capabilities.
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Try SpinOne!Social engineering attacks, including phishing, spam, and viruses introduced via clickable links within e-mail affected 80% of the banking institutions in 2016. VoIP phishing and impersonation also victimized millions of corporate employees across the world, contributing to an even greater cyber threat.
The contemporary world has witnessed the rise of the Internet and global communication, and collaboration technologies, including mobile data use and the culture of bring your own device [BYOD]. It is vital for any enterprise landscape to ensure viable, open, and reliable corporate communications – fostering innovation and economic prosperity, with respect to safeguarding against disruption and serious cyber risk perception.
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How to Enhance Cyber Security Awareness and Cyber Intelligence
Enterprise cyber security awareness and cyber risk management programs encircle a full range of actions required to protect corporate IT infrastructure and sensitive data. For enterprise digital health, it is imperative to prevent illegitimate access attempts and to deter inside and outside attackers from causing serious damage. Cyber threat management, being an advanced discipline, craves analytical attention and a commander’s strategic skills of information security executives to confront and overcome the multi-dimensional cyber threats.
Cloud security success and choosing the right investments is all about having a clear understanding of threat types and their resulting damages. We recommend to categorize types of cyber threats by:
- Source (external/internal point of origin and employees’ activities or hacker’s assaults)
- Agent (human or technological)
- Motivation (accidental, intentional)
- Intention (malicious or non-malicious)
- Impacts
Consecutively, there are several kinds of cyber threat impacts:
- Destruction and corruption of information
- Theft
- Data Loss
- Disclosure
- Denial of use
- Elevation of privilege
- Illegal usage
- Data leaks
The above classification of cyber threat types will enable you to functionally assess and evaluate their impacts, and elaborate good strategies to avoid, prevent, or mitigate the cyber threat impacts.
Get the list of cybersecurity terms for your employees to learn and remember.
Be On Your Guard with the Most Treacherous Insider Roles
A paramount priority when addressing the threat is to distinguish the fundamental insider risks. Let’s consider several types of dangerous insider roles and types of behavior (inadvertent, deliberate, or inaction), which may weaken the enterprise’s cyber protection endeavors.
- Trusted insiders, demonstrated accidental or inadvertent behavior, who may damage the systems or facilitate outside attacks.
- Discontented employees, seeking revenge for the company, may launch vindictive attacks or break the safety of IT and on-premise or cloud file-sharing systems.
- Financially-driven employees, willing to manipulate the corporate data assets or the systems for personal advantage and capitalization on high administrative access levels.
- Insiders with privileged access expose companies to the most dangerous cyber threats, and damage the most valuable and sensitive corporate data.
Always keep your eyes open to control-rights of the senior IT managers or systems administrators with the authority to configure servers, firewalls, cloud storage, and file-sharing (or another network privilege). Regularly revisit the rights of business users, including executive officials, finance, HR, Legal, and IT departments, and make sure you are able to change and revoke them.
It’s worth noting that the most high-risk groups of insiders may also include contractors, service providers, and business partners with insufficient controls placed on their data entry rights. The IT landscape’s complexity requires the deployment of Privileged Identity Management technologies, given the increasing sophistication of modern attacks via malware and ungated entries.
The Global State of Information Security Survey 2017 suggests that companies should look into deploying threat detection tools and processes (including monitoring and analyzing security intelligence information), conducting vulnerability and threat assessments, penetration tests and security information, and event management (SIEM) tools. Aimed at reducing corporate vulnerability to insider threats, info security professionals should regularly monitor the most important infrastructure locations. These are where enterprise-sensitive information is normally stored, including rapidly-growing cloud service environments, databases, and file servers.
The key enterprise cyber security risk management process
- Maintain increased cybersecurity awareness of major types of threats.
- Detect and mitigate the impact of critical anomalies and incidents affecting IT systems and valuable data.
- Develop cybersecurity strategy and implementation plans with a responding view, and to recover from incidents.
- Place tight controls around the use of all admin rights, including the ability to grant administrative privileges.
How to Defend: Empowerment Through Cyber-Threat Intelligence
Executive boards and departments face a greater frequency of cyber-attacks and an increased number of vulnerability types across enterprise operations. Truly effective cyber risk management requires the combined efforts of the following departments:
- Enterprise Board and senior executives
- Human Resources
- Legal and Compliance
- Finance
- IT and Cybersecurity teams
Enterprise-grade and medium organizations are looking to increase budgets and efforts to protect the essential data assets from insider threats and reduce the level of cyber risk exposure. To pursue cybersecurity culture change, we recommend you to institute a cost-effective, company-wide security awareness training for your employees. What are the benefits of cyber security awareness trainings?
- You will create cyber awareness among your staff, as well as users, partners, customers. Consequently, when different sophisticated hacking techniques, types of assaults, and malware are learned, your innocent employees become your cyber security partners.
- You will be able to smoothly incorporate cyber threat information into your enterprise data protection policies, with your employees being aware of cyber threat prevention methods.
- You will enable your staff to effectively perform essential security functions.
- And last but not least: Your organization is only as strong as your weakest link!
Tips for Employees’ Cyber Security Awareness Improvement
Get smarter and deploy the following cybersecurity techniques to address insider threats, using a people-centric security approach. Cyber security awareness training for employees provides them with a general understanding of insider threat terminology, different types of insider threats, and technical and behavioral indicators.
We recommend including the following suggested modules, representing the key elements of the enterprise cybersecurity in the protection enhancement program:
- Cybersecurity landscape overview with real-world threat scenarios, types of attacks, and examples of major recent disasters;
- Ransomware protection essentials with ease of infection examples;
- Password protection techniques (with a special focus on privacy of login info);
- Mobile, add-ons and lost device cyber security;
- Network security and data protection;
- Protection against e-mail spoofing, and phishing awareness;
- Rules and policies for protecting Personally Identifiable Information (PII);
- Credit card security and fraud prevention techniques;
- Best practices to safeguard against social-engineering attacks (digital attacks, in-person attacks, and telephone attacks);
- Rules for reporting unusual/extraordinary incidents;
- Secure network and browsing essentials;
- Cloud cybersecurity and best practices for secure file-sharing;
- Secure online behavior basics;
- Monthly corporate cybersecurity newsletter, containing tips, mitigation techniques, tactics, and tools from your company’s security leaders and practitioners.
How to Set Priorities For Cyber Risk Management
Deploy Gartner Best Practices for Building an Outstanding Cybersecurity Team. Make sure you engage the following professionals with due roles and cyber risk management functions within your Superb Cyber Security Team! Encourage your key cyber professionals to develop first-rate security awareness training materials for employees and executive staff.
| Key Job Positions in Cyber Security | Risk Management Roles |
| CIOs, CSO, CISOs |
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| Business continuity and IT disaster recovery managers |
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| Governance, risk, and compliance professionals |
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| Network security and executives |
|
AFTERWORD
This article addresses some important issues of enterprise security. However, even CEOs and cybersecurity experts love shortcuts, simple tricks, and straightforward formulas. Here are two truly magical tips to empower corporate security:
Backup is Fundamental for your Cyber Security Hygiene
The current and future cyber security challenges comprise of growing data volumes and data transitions between on-prem systems to cloud, and big data environments that come into play (with concerns about a lack of control over third-party access), highlight the importance of backup and recovery solutions. I’m not exaggerating: A secure cloud backup solution can save hours, days, months and years of your team’s work.
That said, empower your employees with an effective and simple Data Loss Protection solution, allowing Automated backup and restore, deletion control, smooth migration, version control, activity reports, etc., and you will never lose sleep over you cybersecurity issues – because Spinbackup takes care of your valuable data.
Deploy Genuine and Elegant Ransomware Protection
As the ransomware threats continue to grow as we observed with the recent WannaCry, NotPetya and other recent cyber disasters, Spinbackup offers the most innovative and unique cloud security Backup & and Ransomware protection for cloud environments. One example is our phenomenal Ransomware Protection and G Suite security feature. This feature is designed to guarantee an immediate response to Ransomware attacks targeting a Google Drive. In the event of the Ransomware assault, the G Suite administrator will receive a notification about the incident either via e-mail or by Slack. The G Suite Admin can then immediately log in to their Spinbackup account and be able to see the list of encrypted files, and either restore all of them with one click, if the “Auto-recovery” mode is on (Spinbackup automatically blocks Google Drive for PC application and recovers all encrypted files), or manually in case the mode is off.
Protect your business from cyber assaults and never assume that cyber risk management occurs on its own!
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