We live in a world where cyber-attacks are on the rise, and as a result, businesses must make it a top priority to secure their sensitive data, which is one of their most valuable assets.
Because cybercrime has the potential to result in crippling financial and operational consequences, the ability to prevent and recover from large-scale attacks is nowadays a must. And, as cyber-attacks become increasingly sophisticated, you will need to have a solid security strategy in place.
If you wonder how to establish a solid security strategy to validate security in your organization, read below.
Prioritize Test Objectives
By prioritizing, you can identify risks you need to be more worried about to ensure security in your organization. This is why you must have information on what are the potential threats to your company. This information should help you predict potential attacks and targets, as well as attackers’ ways of achieving their goals. This will enable proactive threat identification, business risk and security program alignment, and efficient security program alignment against the most likely threats.
If you want an accurate assessment of the success of your security measures, you should concentrate on actual attacks rather than simulated ones. A real-world attack can provide you with an accurate picture of your company’s strengths and vulnerabilities. In contrast, simulated attacks can give a false sense of security. In addition, execute a thorough threat coverage across multiple vectors for both adversary tactics and technical attacks.
Protect Information And Assets From Unauthorized Access
One of the leading risks that your organization faces is unauthorized access to your data and information. This includes hacking, phishing, and malicious code. To be able to protect yourself, you need to have frameworks in places, such as compliance with legislation and regular audits.
Let’s consider, for instance, the FISMA compliance report. The Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA) is legislation specifically designed to protect government information and assets from unauthorized access, use, disclosure, modification, disruption, or destruction. As an organization, you must first determine the security category of your information system to comply with this legislation.
If you’re looking to achieve compliance, you’ll need to conduct a FISMA audit. As soon as your organization is audited, a report will provide you with independent third-party verification concerning the fairness and suitability of controls regarding information security and practices.
Measure Security Controls Effectiveness
Assessing the performance of your security controls against the most pertinent attacks is one technique to validate security in your organization. Consider ways to quantify the current state of cyber security, as well as the usefulness of threat intelligence and the likelihood of future attacks. Qualitative evidence should also be gathered and analyzed to establish the overall effectiveness of the program.
This calls for carrying out realistic attacks securely along the entire attack kill chain in your area. The actual attack will provide a clear image of how the implemented technologies operate on their own and in relation to individuals, groups of individuals, processes, and policies. Try to carry out both individual behaviors or attacks as well as multi-staged, multi-layered attacks.
Improve Performance
Depending on the flaws detected by the security controls measurement, you should work on optimizing the performance. To minimize the effect of changes in the IT environment on security performance, it is best to continue testing.
The threat intelligence is made more actionable and assists in correlating validation with particular threats by utilizing third-party threat intelligence. You can also perform validation throughout the entire IT infrastructure.
Identify The Value Of Security Investments
When you manage to optimize the control, consider how adding or removing control affects the organization’s performance. Use testing to demonstrate value growth over time. Organizations should also identify whether there are similarities and attempt to reduce expenses without compromising risk.
Controls-specific assurance visibility is required for this security validation, demonstrating each control’s attack posture and ability to pinpoint specific triggers. Furthermore, it necessitates detailed evidence of flow and event, as well as the ability to assess threat families.
Final Thoughts
In today’s competitive business environment, all organizations must do their best to validate security. As cyber-attacks grow more common, you need a systemic approach to validate security in your organization. The tips above can help determine the weaknesses and gaps, and help you figure out the necessary changes to boost the controls’ effectiveness, guaranteeing business continuity.
