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By Alberto Jessurun / February 14, 2024 / Blog

Cybersecurity Best Practices to Keep Your Business Safer

With threats evolving all the time, cybersecurity shouldn’t be an afterthought. Here’s how to take charge:

Key takeaways:
  • Investing in robust cybersecurity solutions is necessary to deflect increasingly sophisticated threats.
  • Effective access controls let you regulate who has access to what, and their privileges.
  • Timely software updates and patch management cover security holes and block hackers. 
  • Ongoing cybersecurity awareness training strengthens your first line of defense—employees.
  • Even when you things right, mishaps can happen. Don’t skimp on incident response planning.
Robust cybersecurity measures have become more critical as businesses embrace remote work, cloud computing, artificial intelligence (AI), and other digital transformation initiatives. These trends make IT systems and networks, and their data, more vulnerable to attacks that can inflict severe operational, financial, legal, and reputational harm. 

Per ISACA’s 2023 Cybersecurity Report, about 38% of businesses experienced more cyberattacks within the last year, while 31% experienced the same number, and only 11% had fewer attacks. The predominant cyberattack methods were social engineering, advanced persistent threat (APT), sensitive data exposure, unpatched systems, ransomware, and security misconfiguration.

Surprisingly, only 42% of the survey’s respondents reported having an effective strategy to defend against breaches. The good news is that businesses are becoming more proactive about security; Gartner projects that global security and risk management spending will increase by 14.3%, from $188.1 billion to $215 billion, in 2024.

As businesses prepare for uncertain times, they must invest in accessible and adaptable security solutions. This comprehensive guide covers best practices that bolster digital defenses. From proactive risk management to incident response planning, you’ll find actionable tips to optimize cybersecurity.

Risk assessment and management

To manage risk, you must first understand it, so you need to conduct an assessment. A comprehensive risk assessment helps find and stop security leakages before they turn problematic. It can be split into risk identification, analysis, evaluation, and documentation. Here’s what to do at each stage:

1. Risk identification: Take inventory of all your IT assets, then create a network architecture diagram to gain visibility of communication paths, the interconnectivity between them, and entry points into the network. 

Next, identify the threats to each asset and their consequences. Leverage information from reliable sources like Mitre ATT&CK, the Cyber Threat Alliance, or the Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency. These organizations provide quality, up-to-date cyber threat information in various industries and technologies.

2. Risk analysis: Determine the probability of the identified risks occurring and the potential impact they may have on your organization.

3. Risk evaluation: Use a risk matrix to classify each risk scenario, then prioritize scenarios that are above your organization’s risk tolerance for treatment.

4. Documentation: Document all identified threats and regularly review them for a current account of your organization’s cybersecurity risks.

Always conduct a risk assessment when new activities or systems are introduced and new threats arise. That way, no vulnerability ever goes undetected.

Implementing strong access controls

Properly regulating who can access your organization’s IT assets and which actions they can perform is crucial to fight nefarious actors. 

Access controls facilitate lists of authorized users and assign privileges to each. When someone tries to log into your system or network, the identity is first verified, then grants access based on the privileges attached to the user ID. This minimizes the risk of unauthorized access, keeping your business safer.

Here are the best practices for implementing access controls:
  • Establish strong password policies and multi-factor and biometric authentication to validate user identity.
  • Use the principle of least privilege to restrict access to the minimum resources needed to perform an authorized activity.
  • Assign privileges based on responsibilities.
  • Regularly review and update access privileges to ensure alignment with business needs and to eliminate vulnerabilities.

Regular software updates and patch management

Hackers are always looking for ways to exploit software vulnerabilities. They take advantage of security flaws by planting malware on your system. Malware attacks can start with no action other than playing infected media, opening a compromised message, or viewing a rogue website. An infected device can spread malware to others in the network in a matter of minutes.

What happens next? The malware gives hackers control over your system, steals data, or encrypts files so that they’re unusable.

Timely software updates and patch management cover security holes and block hackers. Follow these steps:
  • Identify which assets in your inventory are missing patches.
  • Use threat-intelligence feeds to find critical system vulnerabilities, then patch them ahead of less essential ones.
  • Test patches before installing them to fix vulnerabilities without causing additional problems.
  • Deploy patches when few or no employees are working, or roll them out iteratively to avoid disruptions and catch issues before they spread to the entire network.

Employee training and awareness programs

With 95% of cybersecurity issues traceable to human error, creating a security-aware culture within your organization is paramount. Security incidents may not be too far behind when employees don’t understand prevailing threats and how to protect the organization.

Invest in cybersecurity training and awareness programs to fight attacks targeting weak links. Teaching employees proper password hygiene and safe customer data handling is an excellent place to start. 

As phishing attacks get more sophisticated with generative AI, conducting regular phishing simulations is crucial to train employees about the latest tricks. These ensure not unwittingly downloading infected files or clicking on malicious links. Similar training is necessary to protect against other forms of social engineering attacks.

Developing and testing incident response plans

Security incidents can still occur even with safeguards to protect your digital assets’ availability, integrity, and confidentiality. It’s essential to have an incident response plan to minimize operational disruptions and quickly recover from breaches.

Your recovery plan should lay out escalation requirements, key definitions, contacts, personnel responsibilities, and steps to follow during a breach. Run regular simulations to ensure the plan works and all team members understand their roles and responsibilities. The simulations should include various threat scenarios: system misconfigurations, insider data theft, DDoS, and ransomware attacks. Identify lessons learned from each simulation and keep testing and updating the plan.

Take a strong stance for digital security

Accessible and adaptable security solutions start with comprehensive risk assessments. Strong access controls, regular updates, and ongoing employee training are needed to bridge security gaps. Even with these safeguards, it’s always smart to have an incident response plan; disaster can strike at any time.

Remember, continuously learning about emerging threats and taking proactive steps secures digital operations to optimize chances of success against the bad guys.

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