Sunday, February 18, 2024

3 Effective Ways To Keep Up With The Cyber Landscape In 2024

 


The world of Cybersecurity as we know it today is always changing, and will forever be changing.  It will by no means be a static one, like perhaps it was in the late 20th century.  Given how everything is all connected together now, the evolution of AI, the stealthier mindset of the Cyberattacker, etc. will all be changing this for a very long time to come.

So the question now comes down to as to how a business, or even a CISO of a much larger organization come to grips with this, and how they can keep up. It will by no means be an easy task, and trying even to do it will be a full-time job.  So to get started with, here are three key areas which will become important this year on the Cyber landscape:

1)     Threat Hunting:

The bottom line here is that the days of simply doing these kinds of tests whenever you felt the need to do it no longer suffice.  Many people have their own definition of what Threat Hunting is, but IMHO, this is a deep and comprehensive test that tries to find any threat actors or malicious payloads that have been deployed into your IT and Network Infrastructure.  It has been recommended that this kind of test be done at least once a quarter, but even now this is not proving to be enough.  It has come to the point that it needs to be done almost every day.  But the good news here is that the Cyber vendors who make these kinds of tools are fully aware of this, and are producing new services that will allow you to do this, such as a Cloud based deployment, so it remains highly affordable to you.  My recommendation is to start looking at this as soon as you can.

2)     UEBA:

This is an acronym that stands for “User and Entity Behavior Analytics”.  Long story short, this is where you deploy the needed tools to keep track of how well your employees are keeping up on their Cyber Hygiene.  But the key difference here is that you will not just be getting a holistic picture, but rather, a full report on each and every employee of yours.  Given the advancements that have been made today, you can even get an entire picture painted for you of just risky the behavior of your employee is.  Of course, you will need to tell them how you will be watching them ahead of time.  But once again, given how things are changing, you cannot take anything for granted.  This is especially true of hiring contractors.  Also, by deploying UEBA, you will get far better indications of when an Insider Threat could be happening.  Another key advantage if using UEBA is that it can create updated baseline profiles for you, on a real time basis.  For more information about UEBA, click on the link below:

https://www.darkreading.com/cyber-risk/how-to-get-the-most-out-of-ueba

3)     The rise of data:

There is no doubt that today, there is a sheer explosion of data that is happening today.  Not only can it be a nightmare to store all of it, but worse yet, it can be almost disastrous to try to keep up with the data privacy laws and their rules/regulations.  But, data can carry a lot more meaning these days.  For example, Big Data sets often contain hidden trends that convey a lot of meaning.  For example, it can give you greater insights into your competition and customers.  But above all, it can even give you very subtle clues as to who is gaining access to your system, what times that it is happening, etc.  But don’t attempt to do this all by yourself.  Rather, use both AI and ML to do this for you.  They can do it in just a matter of sheer minutes, and give extremely granular insights into each and every bit of data that your business has.

My Thoughts On This:

For you the business owner, this is of course a lot to digest in.  But I always keep a motto:  Take things one day at a time.  The one nice thing about the Cyber community is that we all band together in a time of need.  So if you need help with any of these above-mentioned items, please reach out to me or I can refer you to somebody else.

Also, stay tuned for future blogs on this very topic, but focusing in on other areas of concern that you need to be aware about.

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