Securing your online assets is a crucial part of modern business. With so many potential threats to your digital presence, it can be difficult to know where to start. So, let’s go over the many nuances of cybersecurity and see how you can secure your business from the basic harms that it might encounter.

Cybersecurity Management Tips

To manage your assets and keep them secure, it’s best to keep the cybersecurity lifecycle in mind.

Identifying Assets

Identification of cybersecurity assets involves systems, people, and resources that might hinder or help your data protection processes. This involves breaking things down into policies that cover these areas, what vulnerabilities they might face, and how they interact with various actions that might compromise your security.

At this stage, all of these factors must be assessed, and a comprehensive inventory needs to be developed. Then you can set up a monitoring process and secure the various IT cracks you might have.

Protection

There are numerous ways to mitigate risk in cybersecurity. Some of these methods are preventative, while others merely decrease the impact of a breach in case it happens.

• Keep track of software updates: Updating your website apps, CMS application, and other digital management tools can be crucial. Forgetting to update them can create lapses in security and increase potential hacks.
• Secure your IoT connections: devices will often be connected via the Internet of Things, which can lead to leaks. It’s best to know and keep track of as many of these connections as possible.
• Educate employees: Communicate the need for employees and stakeholders to properly manage their security and follow best practices.
• Conduct regular audits: Check your assets and whether they are listed accurately at regular intervals. The length of intervals should be commensurate with the rate of new assets added. It may also be great to do “blue team red team” exercises to test possible faults in the system.
• Monitor 3rd party users: Keep stringent checks on external users or those with temporary privileges. You can create custom protocols for such users, and many apps have the ability to distinguish between regular users and temporary ones.
• Employ multiple security protocols: Aside from passwords, use biometrics or 2-factor authentication, if possible.

Incident Detection

Incident detection is crucial, which is why you should implement cybersecurity automation. Implementing a tool for real-time monitoring can be a great way to do this. It can allow for flagging unusual behaviour and data breaches. In the case of an incident, you should have a robust but easy documentation system that catalogues any issues that arise.

This documentation should go to the IR team and help them future-proof processes to ensure better standards. For many companies, incidents can happen simultaneously if they have many outward-facing processes. In these cases, it can be best to have a scoring system that makes clear the severity of the breach and how important it is. This will help the teams prioritise activities and not get bogged down by ones that matter less.

Even more than technological errors, human errors can be at fault, so it’s important to go beyond potential software and hardware issues. Cybersecurity strategies should include open communication about issues so all hands can be on deck when urgently needed.

Cybersecurity Response

Before the response, cybersecurity experts should have an outline of escalation criteria for different cyber threats. This should map the potential information security impacts to relevant industry standards and regulations. It should also outline who and what will be affected by different crucial incidents and security breaches. Next, the incident response plan should outline remediation procedures to maintain compliance with industry standards and regulations.

From these measures and potential threats, security teams should outline security response roles and responsibilities across all departments. This should also outline communication plans that instantly inform stakeholders in the event of an incident, with an outline for informing security breach victims. You should also outline communication plans for giving authorities or regulatory bodies crucial information about security breaches.

Develop measurement strategies for testing the effectiveness of remediation responses and optimising tools for future responses. It is important for security professionals to identify the affected business functions and how to address their continuity and potential recovery. This should involve an audit of damages that may be applicable to future litigation. This can be turned into a Business Impact Analysis (BIA).

Data Recovery

Finally, you need to keep a cybersecurity disaster recovery plan in case of emergencies. This will allow any business to maintain business continuity and restore normal operations when things get out of hand.  For this, you need a “Plan Owner”. Your cybersecurity disaster recovery plan is best kept in the hands of the person who will lead the recovery process. They need to be accessible at all times.

As in previous steps, your audit will come in handy in identifying the critical assets. Since critical assets may face varying risks, identifying and documenting them will allow you plan and address them. The disaster recovery strategy needs adequate measures for backing up critical assets, protecting them against risks, responding to an incident, and communicating with key stakeholders.

You need to contain the threat by disconnecting affected assets and isolating potential risks. Under extreme risk scenarios outlined in the disaster recovery plan, you may need to resort to shutting the whole system down. Check your network traffic logs, user access records, screenshots, and IP addresses to find digital leaks. You also need to monitor affected devices and serial numbers, hardcopy photographs, written statements, and printed records in case of a more physical breach.

Recovery can involve uninstalling or deleting hazardous data, running antivirus and antimalware scanners to confirm safety, rebooting or reinstalling your systems, patching outdated processes, and restoring data from backups. You should then test the system for better reactions to future incidents.

Digital Security Management Tools

Forensics is one of the more important parts of protecting your data. Tools come in 2 main varieties: real-time analysis (for keeping track of your processes as they progress), and post-mortem analysis tools that are more suited to when breaches occur.

Some good cybersecurity forensics tools include:

• Wireshark: Free and open-source. This tool is great for looking up your data through numerous filters, scanning data packets, and troubleshooting various issues. The big downside, according to users, is that it’s more appropriate for tech-savvy users, and the learning curve can be a bit steep. Considering the price tag (or lack thereof), it might be worth putting in the hours to learn it.
• Volatility: Another open-source and free memory forensics framework. This one is appropriate for analysing volatility in RAM but has a host of other features. It’s often used in training people in digital forensics. The community for Volatility has been active in creating plug-ins and improvements that you can easily add to it.
• NMAP: A network scanning tool that helps identify open ports, services, and vulnerabilities. This one is great for creating maps of potential vulnerabilities. It’s interface is lauded and is considered user-friendly.
• Oxygen Forensic Suite: A great data extraction, analysis, and reporting tool. It works across platforms and devices, allowing for comprehensive post-mortem analysis.
• Encase: A commercial forensic tool that is used fairly often in cybersecurity. It’s main feature is the depth of data acquisition and analysis capabilities it provides.

Cybersecurity threat modelling resources include:

• OWASP Threat Dragon
• Microsoft Threat Modelling Tool
• SeaSponge

These tools are best used as a means of outlining potential and emerging threats.

Crucial Cybersecurity Metrics

For proper cybersecurity analytics, there are a number of core metrics you should focus on:

• Level of preparedness: While this may seem abstract, there are sub-goals that can help you measure this. You can track the number of security incidents detected and resolved within a specific period. Number of incidents prevented and what measures stopped them. Keep track of the number of false positives so you can adjust accordingly. The frequency of simulated phishing attacks can also be a good measure , along with their success rate.
• Device security: How many devices are up-to-date and how many high-risk vulnerabilities have been identified matters. Count how many systems have passed vulnerability scans and how frequently data is backed up. The amount of assets with sensitive information is another measure.
• Intrusion attempts: Number of attempts, response time, level of severity, impact, and number of counter-measures can be useful data to have.
• Mean Time to Detect (MTTD): There are a few ways to assess your response measures. Time taken for the team to become aware of risks, detection and response processes, and how processes are tested and validated all matter here.  How the team addresses false positives and false negatives is important.
• Mean Time to Resolve (MTTR): This measures how long the team takes to resolve security risks and incidents, what processes are used, and which processes restore systems.
• Mean Time to Contain (MTTC): This measures how long the team takes to contain an issue, how well processes work, and whether measures are reduced along with how well.
• Company versus peer performance: Comparing your security measures to those of your peers in similar industries and company sizes.

These are just a few of the crucial cybersecurity metrics that mitigate risks and assess security issues. More elaborate systems may require detailed security data tracking and procedures, but this is a good place to start. Make sure you keep your business safe by implementing a more cohesive plan that keeps threats at bay.

If you’re looking for cybersecurity marketing services, you can check out some of the ones we provide. We can leverage everything from content to paid ads to competitor analyses. We can serve as the cybersecurity marketing agency you need to build an effective digital presence.