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Build Cyber Resilience Strategies for your Organization

Olivia Carter — Thu, 21 Dec 2023 11:13:48 +0000

In today’s highly interconnected world, organizations are constantly facing cyber threats.

Statistics from Marsh show that globally, 75% of businesses have experienced a cyber attack at one time or another. In quarter 3 of 2022, the rate of cyber-attacks grew by 28 percent– a strong pointer to the growing threat.

Cyber threats compromise organizational data, disrupt operations, and undermine the trust their clients have in the business. To mitigate these challenges, businesses must build a cyber resilience strategy. This means taking a more strategic approach in the way they navigate the dynamic threat landscape so they can recover from cyber-attacks quickly, if or when they occur.

In this article, we explore the concept and cyber resilience strategy your organization can adopt to strengthen its response to and recovery from cyber attacks.

But First, Let’s Define Cyber Resilience

Cyber resilience refers to the ability of an organization to foresee, respond, withstand, and recover from cyber threats while ensuring the integrity, confidentiality, and availability of its most vital information assets. It underscores the ability of a business to recover, adapt, and continue running in the event of cyber-attacks or incidents. With about 16,000 cyber-attacks (Source: Statista) being detected across the world between 2021 and 2022, having a solid strategy will help your organization recover quickly from a cyber attack and avert irreparable damages. The concept of cyber resilience transcends the conventional cybersecurity measures that focus primarily on cyber attack defense and prevention.

What’s a Cyber Resilience Plan?

A cyber resilience plan refers to a detailed strategy that highlights the critical measures your organization takes to identify, respond, and recover from cyber-attacks or threats. A cyber resilience strategy evaluates the cybersecurity context and aligns your business objectives, tolerance, risks, and regulatory requirements.

Compared to a resilience framework, a cyber resilience plan has a wider scope. It takes a strategic approach to building organizational resilience against cyber threats. By having a resilience strategy, your organization will be better prepared to deal proactively with cyber threats. This enables it to mitigate potential damage and ensure uninterrupted business operations.

10 Cyber Resilience Strategies for Your Organizations

The plans that organizations develop should highlight the various strategies they will implement to address the cyber threats. These cyber resilience strategy allow businesses to create the multiple layers of defense systems they need to detect and respond to cyber threats, address vulnerabilities, and recover swiftly from attacks. Below are 10 important strategies to help you build resilience in your business:

1. Craft a Cyber Resilience Framework

The first cyber resilience strategy on an organizational level is developing a solid cybersecurity framework. A framework identifies specific processes and actions an organization takes to maintain resilience. A good framework should indicate preventive measures, cyber threat detection capabilities, and the response protocols to be followed in the event of a threat.

It addresses a wide range of issues including business risk assessments, continuity plans, incident response plans, as well as continuous monitoring and evaluation of cyber threats. Some of the specific measures businesses include in their frameworks include antivirus, firewalls, and systems for detecting intrusion. Others are penetration tests and vulnerability assessments to identify and fix system weaknesses.

2. Implement Controls in Data Access and Management

When it comes to preventing unauthorized access to organizational data, establishing and implementing strict controls is critical. Limit access privileges and give access only to staff who are authorized to handle specific data. User permissions should be reviewed and updated regularly to ensure that access rights are based on individual responsibilities and roles. You should also implement strong password policies across the organization and use multi-factor authentication to improve data security.

3. Prioritize Cybersecurity Education/Training

Another cyber resilience strategy for an organization is educating employees. When it comes to cybersecurity, the actions that people take pose the highest cybersecurity threat. Educating your staff about the best data protection practices like identification of phishing attempts, use of strong passwords, and safe browsing is vital to curbing cyber threats. Schedule training sessions regularly to keep your employees updated on emerging cyber threats and equip them with the skills they need to strengthen resilience in your organization.

4. Execute Patch Management Procedures

Cybercriminals can use security loopholes in outdated software to gain unauthorized access to your systems. To prevent this, ensure the applications, software, and operating systems in your organization are updated with the latest security updates and patches. Reduce system vulnerabilities by implementing a patch management process to run timely updates across your organization’s IT infrastructure.

5. Gather Cyber Threat Intelligence

Another cyber resilience strategy building in your business is to keep abreast of emerging threats by gathering information and intelligence on cybersecurity. An excellent way to gather these insights and intelligence is to collaborate with government departments, industry peers, and cybersecurity communities. The collective knowledge shared in these interactions can help you improve your organization’s cyber resilience plan and framework.

6. Use Secure Backup Solutions

Regular backup of essential systems and data in cloud platforms or offsite locations is another strategy for building organizational resilience to cyber-attacks. Opt for secure backup solutions and test them periodically. The backups should also be reliable to minimize downtimes. Consider accessibility as well. Your backup solution should be easy to access to allow for quick data recovery and business continuity following a cyber incident.

7. Run Cyber Attack Simulations

Another way to build organizational cyber resilience to cyber-attacks is to simulate cyber-attack incidents. This involves taking employees through the different steps they need to take in the event of a cyber attack. Simulations should cover the entire response process, including identifying threats, investigating their cause, and reducing their impact on the business.

8. Monitor Cyber Threats Regularly

Regular monitoring of cyber threats helps in early detection and proactive response to thwart attack attempts. You can identify potential threats by deploying advanced threat monitoring detection tools. Identify anomalies or suspicious behavior in your system by keeping tabs on your network’s traffic, user activities, and systems logs regularly. Consider investing in a security information and event management system (SIEM) for your organization. A SIEM system gives you a comprehensive view of your network so you can detect and respond to cyber incidents promptly.

9. Have an Incident Response Plan

Cyber resilience recognizes the reality of cyber threats and ensures that organizations are prepared to respond in the event attacks occur. An important aspect of this preparation is the development of incident response plans that clearly show steps that should be taken when a threat materializes.

Set up a team to respond to incidents and assign each member specific roles and responsibilities. Establish clear communication channels for the response team for easy coordination. Your incident response plan should be tested and updated frequently to ensure that it remains effective and well-aligned to the evolving nature of cyber threats.

10. Assess Systems for Vulnerabilities

Cybercriminals exploit system vulnerabilities to launch attacks. An important part of strengthening your organization’s resilience is understanding the weaknesses in your systems and addressing them early. Assessing your system regularly is the best way to identify and fix system vulnerabilities. To do this, hire a cybersecurity professional to inspect your system and provide a comprehensive report. Alternatively, invest in vulnerability scanning tools to help with the assessment.

Conclusion

In today’s digital environment, cyber resilience strategy cannot be overlooked. With cyber-attacks becoming more prevalent and sophisticated, organizations must adopt a more strategic approach to avoid disruptions, data breaches, and revenue losses. Building threat resilience can reduce the impact of cyber-attacks on your business significantly. Implement the 10 strategies discussed above to safeguard your organization’s competitive advantage and ensure operations continue smoothly in case an attack occurs.

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10 Common Cyber Resilience Challenges and How to Overcome Them?

Noah Davidson — Wed, 15 Nov 2023 15:31:00 +0000

A breakdown of global cybercrime damage costs predicted that in 2024 it will be USD 9.5 trillion a year. This number is daunting and sums up to billions of dollars per month in cybercrime damage. With technological tools and advancements becoming handy, hackers are also upgrading themselves for it. This proves one thing implementing a cyber resilience policy is not enough, you will also need to incorporate strict measures against it.

Most organizations don’t leave their data security to negligence but don’t do enough to secure a fool-proof solution too. What they don’t understand is that businesses get impacted and they lose revenue, customer data, and operational resources. Cybersecurity concerns or breaches not only impact an enterprise’s goodwill but also leave them out of business.

So without any delay, let us see the cyber resilience challenges organizations face and their solutions.

10 Cyber Resilience Challenges and Their Measures

When organizations are aware of the possible threats and are always on the lookout for solutions, they never face any cyber security threats or breaches.

1. Two-Factor Authentication

Most data breaches happen due to weak passwords and they alone don’t offer adequate protection. Having strong passwords is mandatory to ensure data privacy and avoid credential-compromise cyber attacks.

For passwords, you can implement a preventative and commonly used strategy of having strong passwords. This can be added,

The passwords must include at least 8 characters
They should be alphanumeric
Avoid putting personal data like date of birth
It should be unique and not previously used
Lastly, the password should not sum up to a legitimate word

Additionally, it is also important to figure out other forms of authentication like multi-factor authentication via apps.

All users including senior members in the company can be asked to adhere to it. Multi-factor authentication should be enabled for every system account with substantial focus on accounts having sensitive data like finance, HR, and legal teams.

2. Remote Access Protocols

The concept of remote access has grown far and wide due to the pandemic. These remote access solutions allow full control of a remote computer or laptop including local network access and storage. Such massive access provides opportunities worth of gold to attackers.

So it is pivotal to keep remote desktop solutions inaccessible via the internet. What you can do to make them accessible is only via VPN or enable a virtual desktop solution. A few examples of virtual desktop solutions are VirtualBox, Virtual Desktop Infrastructure, Nutanix, V2 Cloud, AirWatch, and more. Remote desktop protocols should not be accessible without a two-factor authentication.

3. Corporate Networks

Corporate networks or virtual private networks have become a place of exploitation for attackers. They look for intrusion vector focus as a potential weakness or exploitable perimeter. A simple solution for the same is to keep vulnerability scanning tools, blending reactionary and active patch management at arm’s length.

Antivirus solutions fail to locate an adversary that connects to the VPN with stolen admin credentials and is issued greater privileges, operating as a normal user would. Consider constant reviews of VPN logs for any potential or suspicious activity. So users must log into the VPN with limited access privileges.

4. Encrypt All the Data and Create Backups

When organizations save their data in normal-text format, it is easy for hackers to access it. So you should make sure that all your sensitive data is encrypted. Data encryption controls the data access to parties who possess the encryption key. Another benefit is that even if someone gets unauthorized access, they won’t be able to read your sensitive data. A few data software also let you know when someone is altering or meddling with your data.

Cybersecurity breaches often result in data loss, so it is fundamental to have backups of important information from time to time. If you don’t create a backup and there happens to be any cyber security breach, it will lead to operational chaos and revenue loss in your organization. So make sure you have a secure and reliable backup option.

5. Endpoint Detection and Response

An EDR collects and monitors any threat-related information from workstations and any other endpoints like laptops, servers, and workstations, giving systemwide transparency for evidencing suspicious behavior.

Antivirus is a bit different from EDRs as antivirus depends on signature-based detection to find any malware. It is incorporated to look for any suspicious behavior like network scanning or lateral network movement. Attackers generally enter networks through unmonitored systems so EDR agents should be deployed as wide as possible in the environment.

6. Access and Track Your Vendors

There is a huge possibility that you are highly dependent on third-party vendors. So you will require vendor risk management to mitigate third-party risk instead of solely relying on incident response.

You should primarily focus on

Cybersecurity risk: thoroughly monitor your vendors right after you start a business with them. Create improved strategies before onboarding them.
Strategic risk: make sure your vendors or service providers will not interfere in meeting organizational objectives.
Operational risk: continuously check your vendors and make sure they won’t create any operational disruptions.
Legal and compliance risk: ensure that the vendor you are seeking will not impact your compliance with legal, regulatory, or local laws.

Always look for vendors who will secure your networks instead of creating risks for you as a cyber resilience move.

7. Employ a Killswitch in Place

Killswitch is a kind of cyber resilience, a reactive cybersecurity protection strategy where your information technology department closes all systems as soon as they identify any suspicious activity until it is resolved. Every organization should have a killswitch in place as a protection from large-scale attacks.

Conduct cybersecurity framework audits frequently and analyze all server logs to make sure everything is protected. Another thing you can do is get network forensic analysis tools that check information flow through your network.

8. Install Firewalls

Cyber attackers are becoming smarter with every passing day and they are coming up with new strategies to access your data. You can protect yourself from this by implementing firewalls. It is a network security device that analyzes and filters incoming and outgoing network traffic based on an enterprise’s previously established security policies.

This will help you protect against sudden attacks or any damages that cannot be reversed. It will also look for any suspicious activity that will hamper the data integrity. While choosing a firewall look for one that provides full security control and transparency of your networks and applications. Additionally, it should have complete protection and prevention capabilities along with security infrastructure.

9. Email Hygiene

It is one of the most important aspects of cyber resilience. Your employees should feel comfortable in notifying or communicating phishing emails. Inculcate a multi-layered defense by adding filters to inbound and outbound messages with attachment sandboxing and URL rewrites.

Along with email hygiene, pursue cyber hygiene practices to work smoothly in remote settings. Cloud-based email solutions can enable organizations to simply and cost-friendly implement core security controls such as MFA and reduce the chances of an attacker getting access to internal private networks through compromised on-premises servers.

10. Create Awareness in Your Employees

Phishing emails are hard to detect as they always seem genuine. Employee training on cyber security is essential as it assures them to raise a query and report suspicious activity. without proper knowledge or training, employees may entertain phishing emails and give access to hackers to sensitive data.

So organizations must hold training for employees at least once a year where you can educate them about primary forms of cybersecurity attacks and the solutions to prevent them. Also, communicate the importance of checking email addresses before replying and links before opening them.

Overcoming Cyber Resilience Challenges

Implementation of these solutions will definitely help you overcome any potential threat to cyber resilience. When organizations have a strong cyber resilience strategy, they have a secure environment, intact data, and no loss of revenue. With growing smartness of hackers to access data in different ways, organizations need fool-proof solutions to tackle the challenges.

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Rising Concerns and the Israel-Palestine War Impact on Economy

Emily Lawson — Tue, 10 Oct 2023 12:53:29 +0000

With the Israel-Palestine war, industries all around the world are suffering from losses and threats. Nations are facing cybersecurity issues, investors are panicking about stocks, and tech companies are struggling with the spread of misinformation.

One instance of it is social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter. X updated its policies to combat hate speech and videos posted and shared on the platform. The video had content of violence faced by Israel and Palestine which killed hundreds of civilians in both nations in the last few days.

This isn’t just limited to violence but also extends to false and misinformation with the Israel-Palestine war’s impact on the economy being significant.

Tech Companies Stumble As Falsehoods Spread

The speed at which false information and news went online after the recent attack on Israel is concerning. Tech platforms like Meta and X are struggling to fight this spread of misinformation. The lack of content moderation policies, layoffs, and cost reduction have restricted the platforms’ ability to solve the issue effectively.

This false scenario was made by fake accounts impersonating journalists and war-themed video games surfacing around the Israel-Palestine conflict. Social media users are bombed with fake combat photos and old videos from Syria to look like they were taken in Gaza.

Andy Carvin, from the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, told AFP, “Social media platforms are struggling to keep up with the constant churn of misinformation and incitements to violence.”

Cyber Threats Increase With the War

Two days back, the Jerusalem Post, Israel’s news agency, was hacked into. Its official X handle said that the website crashed ‘due to a series of cyberattacks.’ The Israel-Palestine war is likely to spread in cyberspace as experts have warned of multiple instances of intelligence hacking and grid disruption that would affect allied nations on both sides. Cyber warfare consultants said that Dark web assaults may also be carried out for commercial gains while the world may see increasing malware attacks.

Siddharth Vishwanath, an emerging business leader at PwC told Livemint, “Israel has one of the most advanced security systems in the world. The Hamas attack on Israel perhaps means there may also have been a tech hack to suppress intelligence gathering and alerts. It is escalating in the physical world, and it is likely to escalate into a full-blown cyber warfare.”

Volatility in the Stock and Oil Markets

US and European stocks fell on Monday after investors reacted to the war between Palestine and Israel. The US stocks made a comeback by afternoon in the trading session. The Dow Jones rose 197 points or 0.6%, the S&P 500 added 0.6% and the Nasdaq Composite rose 0.4%.

David Donabedian, chief investment officer at CIBC Private Wealth US told CNN, “Right now there are a lot of ‘maybes’ and ‘ifs’ — and a real lack of clarity. Markets will continue to look at everything it usually looks at including climbing bond yields and the Federal Reserve’s future monetary policy decisions.”

The European stocks that fell in the morning stabilized a bit in the afternoon with France’s CAC 40 index falling 0.6%, while Germany’s DAX index dipped 0.7%. London’s FTSE 100 inched up 0.03%, propped up by gains in the shares of oil companies.

The price of oil also faced major changes as US oil prices settled at $86.38 a barrel, while Brent crude futures climbed to $88.15 a barrel.

Final Words

The question right now is whether the impact of the war on all aforementioned issues will conclude or go on to impact other industries and regions. The situation is still volatile and so are the stock and oil markets.

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