May Newsletter

May 2023 Newsletter

Tim Cook Said Recently “In The World of Cybersecurity The Last Thing You Want Is To Have a Target Painted On Your Back”

The Near Inevitability of Cybersecurity Breaches Calls for Greater Focus on Identification, Response and Recovery through Incident Recovery Preparedness

• According to The Cost of a Data Breach Report 86% of the participants said they had been breached more than once.
• 79% of Critical Infrastructure Organizations said they had not deployed a Zero Trust Architecture.
• 19% of breaches occurred due to business partner compromise.
• 45% of the breaches were cloud based.
• Average cost of a breached record $164.00
• Estimated time to identify a breach 200+ days.
• Source: IBM and Ponemon Group Breach Report

How to Reduce the Inevitability of a Cybersecurity Breach

• Document written IT Control cybersecurity policies, procedures, and plans.
• Perform a Cybersecurity Risk Assessment based on a framework like NIST CSF.
• Perform a Vulnerability Assessment or Penetration Test to identify vulnerabilities and exploits, patch all systems based on findings and re-test.
• Provide employee security training and awareness programs with reminders and testing.
• Adopt a Zero Trust Model to Prevent Unauthorized Access to Data.
• Protect sensitive data in cloud environments using policy and encryption.
• Invest in security orchestration, automation and response (SOAR) and EDR, MDR, and XDR to help improve detection and response times.
• Protect and monitor endpoints and remote employees.

Create and Test incident response plans and teams to increase training and awareness before a breach occurs.

• Increase IT spend it’s cheaper than a breach
• Invest in your IT people through advanced training and certifications.
• Deploy application aware firewalls.
• Penetration Test custom applications and databases during the development phase.
• Encrypt Data at rest and in transport.
• Deploy 2 factor authentication.
• Filter outgoing and inbound traffic.
• Perform Audits of Business Associate Agreements for Cybersecurity adherence.
• Turn off USB Ports.
• Turn off Data Jack Ports.
• Secure and Upgrade Data Centers and Wiring Closet Physical Security
• Perform Red Team exercises to enhance the effectiveness of IR teams by uncovering attack paths and techniques they might miss and identifying gaps in their detection and response capabilities.
• Test your Cloud Implementation.  Amazon and Microsoft only protect their infrastructure and advise clients to perform testing that they allow.

Vigilance is Key:

Companies realize a lower probability of a breach when they use a cybersecurity risk framework to evaluate their cybersecurity posture.  The reduced attack surface has fewer vulnerabilities resulting in less attack vectors making it more difficult and time consuming for a hacker to perform reconnaissance looking for a Exploit.