What is Cyber resilience?

Cyber resilience is the ability of an organization to withstand and recover from cyber attacks and other cybersecurity threats. It involves implementing measures to prevent cyber attacks, as well as having the necessary systems and processes in place to minimize the impact of a successful attack and to quickly recover from it.

There are several components of cyber resilience, including:

• Risk assessment: Identifying and assessing potential vulnerabilities and threats to an organization's systems and data.

• Prevention: Implementing measures to prevent cyber attacks, such as using strong passwords and enabling two-factor authentication.

• Detection: Implementing systems and processes to detect potential cyber attacks in progress.

• Response: Having a plan in place to respond to a cyber attack, including procedures for containing the attack and minimizing its impact.

• Recovery: Having systems and processes in place to recover from a cyber attack, including data backup and recovery systems.

• By building cyber resilience, organizations can protect themselves from cyber attacks and minimize the impact of successful attacks, enabling them to continue operating in the face of these threats.

Zero trust Cyber resilience

Zero trust is a cybersecurity approach that assumes that all actors, whether inside or outside an organization, are potentially untrustworthy and must be continuously authenticated and authorized before being granted access to resources. It is based on the idea that an organization should not trust any user or device, regardless of their location or whether they are inside or outside the organization's network.

The zero trust approach can be used to enhance cyber resilience by requiring all users and devices to be authenticated and authorized before they are granted access to resources. This can help to prevent unauthorized access to sensitive information and systems, and can also help to minimize the impact of a successful cyber attack.

To implement a zero trust approach, organizations typically use a combination of technologies, including multi-factor authentication, network segmentation, and access controls. These technologies help to ensure that only authorized users and devices are granted access to resources, and can help to prevent unauthorized access or the spread of malware within an organization.

By adopting a zero trust approach, organizations can significantly enhance their cyber resilience and reduce their risk of suffering a cyber attack.

zero trust cyber resilience technologies

There are several technologies that can be used to implement a zero trust approach and enhance cyber resilience. Some examples include:

1. Multi-factor authentication: This requires users to provide multiple forms of authentication, such as a password and a security token, before they are granted access to resources.

2. Network segmentation: This involves dividing an organization's network into smaller, isolated segments, which can help to prevent the spread of malware or unauthorized access within the network.

3. Access controls: This involves implementing controls to ensure that only authorized users and devices are granted access to specific resources.

4. Identity and access management (IAM) systems: These systems help to manage and secure user access to resources by controlling who is allowed to access specific resources and under what conditions.

5. Security information and event management (SIEM) systems collect and analyze security-related data from multiple sources, such as firewall logs and intrusion detection systems, to help organizations detect and respond to potential threats.

By using these technologies, organizations can implement a zero-trust approach and enhance their cyber resilience by preventing unauthorized access to sensitive information and systems and minimizing the impact of successful cyber attacks.

Three Reasons Why You Need an Incident Response Solution

Imagine the following scenario: you arrive early to work in the morning, plop down at your desk with coffee in hand, and log in to your computer. You’re excited to start working on a big project, but first you are greeted with this message:

Quickly, you dash over to a colleagues’ desk. They too, have the same message on their desk. You try dialing your IT department, but they don’t start until normal business hours.

What do you do? Where do you even start?

It’s easy to think that the above scenario would never happen to you. In reality, a 2020 survey of 600 businesses in the United States revealed that a staggering 78% had been infected with ransomware that year. The average cost of recovering from a ransomware attack has spiked to $1.85 million in 2021!

Ransomware isn’t the only threat to your business continuity. In February 2021, the state of Texas suffered massive power outages due to a severe winter storm. At least 151 people died as a result. Property damage has been estimated at more than $195 billion.

What do these scenarios have in common? They demonstrate the need to prepare for the worst; this is the essence of Incident Response.

What is Incident Response anyway?

Every organization needs to have an Incident Response Plan (IRP). The team that executes the IRP is the Computer Incident Response Team (CIRT). The most important feature of both the IRP and CIRT is that they are clearly defined before the incident takes place! Disaster recovery is hardest when preparation is lacking.

The Incident Response Plan details who does what if an incident does happen. This can include using alternate systems, notifying stakeholders, or restoring from backups.

Perhaps the most important part of the Incident Response Plan is the postmortem. Now that you’ve recovered, what will you do in order to ensure that attackers won’t attack again using the exact same methods? The Incident Response Team will identify what door the attackers used to get in and make sure it stays shut.

Why do I need Incident Response?

I’m so glad you asked. Here’s three reasons why you need Incident Response for your organization:

1.     The probability of an incident has never been higher.

Ransomware is pervasive. At this point, we need to ask ourselves not “will I get breached?” but “when will I get breached?”

A proper defense has multiple layers. Having a fence around your house is nice, but you’ll still have homeowners’ insurance. Incident Response is a way to mitigate the risks of ransomware that we can’t avoid.

2.     The cost of an incident has never been higher.

How much would it cost to replace your entire infrastructure? The nasty aspect of ransomware is that, in some cases, the only way to ensure that the attackers have been completely removed from your environment is to start from scratch. This means replacing every workstation and server in your organization.

Sometimes, there simply isn’t a price to pay; there may not even be new hardware available to purchase with a global silicon chip shortage.

3.     You can’t afford not to.

Every business owes itself to do a risk analysis of a ransomware attack. What would be the cost of not doing business for an hour? A day? A week? You will find that incident response is a necessary piece of the plan for protecting your assets and business continuity.

CyberSecOp is a leader in the Incident Response field. CyberSecOp consultants are cyber incident response subject matter experts who have collaborated on numerous security projects and operational improvement initiatives. We will support your security operational activities by helping to develop an incident response plan and work with your IT team to mitigate any potential risk. Our teams will create investigative processes and playbooks. In addition, we will be responsible for continuously identifying gaps and managing the improvements in the security response process, technologies, and monitoring. Working closely with internal architecture, engineering, and project management teams will ensure cyber-defense requirements are identified and communicated early in the project life cycle.

Security incident response services with CyberSecOp

• Support cyber incident response actions to ensure proper assessment, containment, mitigation, and documentation

• Support cyber investigations for large- and small-scale security incident breaches

• Review and analyze cyber threats and provide SME support

• Interact and assist other investigative teams within on time sensitive, critical investigations

• Participate as part of a close team of technical specialists on coordinated responses and subsequent remediation of security incidents

• Manage the security monitoring enrollment process to ensure adequate coverage and effectiveness of all new and existing cloud- and on-premise-based applications, services and platforms

• Maintain detailed tracking plan of all internal/external enrollment outcomes/recommendations and provide support through to implementation

• Act as a liaison between cyber-defense, engineering, security architecture, network & system operations, and functional project teams to ensure effective project implementation that meets incident response requirements

• Define baseline security monitoring requirements for all new projects, services, and applications joining your organization's network

• Facilitate the development and tuning of SIEM rules to support enrollments and ensure high fidelity alerting

 Don’t delay in ensuring that your business can survive any threat. Join CyberSecOp on your journey towards a safe and protected future.

Author: Josh Cabrera