Tuesday, August 30, 2022

Enhanced Data Protection with a Robust Cyber Resilience Strategy

By: Sentia   Categories:Security, Cyber Security, Data Security

Enhanced Data Protection with a Robust Cyber Resilience Strategy

The cyber threats landscape in the past few years has redefined how organizations secure and protect critical systems, assets, proprietary assets, and business and customer data. As a result, cyber resilience is not only an exclusive role of the IT and security professionals. Rather it is a company’s shared responsibility to identify and mitigate cybersecurity risks to achieve operational sustainability and strategic viability. In the current volatile IT and digital environment, cyber resilience should comprise measures of how enterprises anticipate, identify, understand, and recover from the impacts of a cyberattack.

What is Cyber Resilience and Why is it Important?

The pertinent questions facing many business owners are; how would a cyber-breach affect vital customer services? What would a ransomware attack mean for the distribution and call centers? How would data unavailability from a wiperware malware affect the business’s legal and regulatory requirements? This is where cyber resilience comes in. Cyber resilience demands that organizations assess all vital operational business processes and how to protect them from cyberattacks’ impacts. Since the reality is not if you become a victim but when hackers target your business, companies must focus on reducing the likelihood of adverse consequences and managing them to ensure business continuity.

Security professionals are also evolving their mindsets that detecting a successful attack or breach is not enough. Still, it is equally vital to manage it effectively to prevent or reduce its damaging capability. For example, hackers can inject malicious code that remains dormant within the breached environment to activate and re-infect the IT infrastructure surreptitiously when it causes more damage. Recently, attackers have focused on three primary attacks:

  1. Wiperware attacks: Wiperware is a malware attack that deletes, overwrites, and removes data in a compromised environment. Unlike other attacks like ransomware that are financially motivated, wiperware attacks are destructive and can cause the victim to shut down essential business operations. Wiperware has been used extensively to target Ukrainian organizations, Middle East energy companies, German organizations, and South Korean financial and media organizations. Attackers can also use wiperware to erase their data theft tracks.There is a possibility that wiperware attacks will increase and extend worldwide, and organizations should be ready to mitigate the damaging effects of wiperware attacks.
     
  2. Ransomware attacks: Ransomware attacks are among the most common attacks since hackers use them for huge financial gains. During the attack, cybercriminals compromise a company’s internal systems. Then, they use encryption malware to deny access to critical data, system files, and other resources until the victim pays a specified ransom amount. In addition, attackers can employ double extortion techniques, such as threatening to leak compromised data to force victims into making the ransom payments. Ransomware attacks impact at least 70% of Canadian businesses every year.
     
  3. Supply chain attacks: Attackers use supply chain attacks to execute larger, broader, and more damaging cyber-attacks. Hackers can target organizations that produce essential logistic links and software in the supply chain as a gateway to the networks and systems of a larger organization that will deploy the compromised products. Supply chain attacks can cause widespread destruction, damage, and prolonged service outage. 54% of Canadian organizations expect increased incidents of software supply chain attacks.

Strengthening Your Organization’s Cyber Resiliency

Wiperware, ransomware, and supply chain attacks seriously threaten your cyber resiliency. Cyber resiliency aims to help an organization prevail through a cyberattack and ensure the availability and continuity of essential business operations. The primary objectives of cyber resiliency are to enable quick recovery, ensure business continuity, and protect crucial business and customer data.

To improve cyber resiliency, you should first gain full visibility of your company’s cybersecurity posture. Cybersecurity visibility starts with discovering the deployed IT infrastructures, associated risks, and vulnerabilities and quantifying the cyber risks to determine the prioritized mitigation measures. As such, it helps you prioritize the protection of more valuable assets to reduce impacts on business operations.

Additionally, developing a comprehensive incident response plan is vital in strengthening cyber resilience. Holistic preparation requires a business to obtain expert advice from proven cybersecurity providers to develop a comprehensive disaster recovery and business continuity plan. When developing a business response plan, you should assess business and third-party risks, validate the business continuity plan and bridge existing gaps, evaluate and improve existing response processes and policies, and build employee resilience through awareness and training programs.

Furthermore, building a cybersecurity improvement roadmap enables adaptability to change cyber threats and continuous improvement. Strong cyber resilience depends on a constantly updated cybersecurity enhancement program, ensuring robust risk and threat mitigation controls. Therefore, you can strengthen your cyber resilience by leveraging security professionals to assess cybersecurity requirements, test and configure unified incident response communications, and ensure that all newly deployed IT environments are configured accurately to deter breaches and attacks.

Lastly, building incident detection and response capabilities are vital to realizing a strong cyber resilience. Protecting critical assets from the resulting impacts of a data breach or malware attack depends on active detection and quick response. A managed security provider can help you to determine your organization’s incident detection and response capabilities to drive improvement and strengthen cyber resilience. Moreover, managed cybersecurity providers have cutting-edge solutions and readily available personnel to monitor your internal networks and systems, enabling rapid detection of malicious incidents across all user workstations and servers. More importantly, strengthened cyber resilience depends on access to quick incident response teams to ensure successful containment and eradication of a cyber incident to restore essential operations.

Increase Cyber Resiliency With Sentia

Sentia’s Business Continuity Services can help your organization increase its cyber resiliency. With our extensive knowledge of the latest technologies, such as storage lifecycle management, data replication, backup, and recovery, you can rest assured your data is safe. Sentia’s disaster recovery services, including disaster recovery planning, business continuity consulting, and infrastructure solutions, ensure your business is up and running. Sentia will work with you to design the optimal set of services to keep your IT infrastructure safe and operational through our managed services, including breach readiness as a service. Just contact us to get a conversation started.

Sentia
Sentia

Sentia

We are a high-value, trusted, Canadian IT solutions provider dedicated to delivering secure and reliable IT solutions across a wide variety of industries. We are committed to helping our customers meet and optimize their business goals.

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