People
Sometimes people are left only with the role of a weak link in information security. News keeps reminding us about incidents where people have fallen prey to cyber criminals, causing data and security breaches. Sometimes criminals get their way without their victims even understanding and noticing that they were exploited. Educating users on security awareness is highly relevant. This is the first step towards ensuring they have the basic knowledge about information security, potential threats, and causes for the organization. Another aspect is to get users interested in security and to be motivated to work to keep their equipment and devices safe, and properly adopt the security processes of the organization.
Processes
Implementing proper security policies, security awareness programs, and access control procedures are essential. Security processes help organizations prevent and detect cyber threats proactively. Organizations must develop their incident management plans in order to be ready to respond to a cybersecurity incident effectively. Security processes need constant updates due to the changing threat and vulnerability environment. Proper preparation significantly reduces the risks of cyber incidents and boosts detection and response if an attack occurs. Organizations recognize the need to secure their networks and have deployed solutions like firewalls and intrusion detection systems (IDS) for that purpose. Although these countermeasures make it more challenging for cybercriminals to attack networks, they are only a technological starting point.
Technology
Technology should facilitate updates and patches for software and hardware and provide the tools that support organizations’ security processes. Devices lacking recent security patches enable a significant part of the cyber attacks we face today. With older systems, updates might no longer be available, and support may have expired. Despite regular and timely updating of connected devices and respective software, vulnerabilities and threats still exist. For example:
- Releasing security patches can take a long time, meanwhile cybercriminals may exploit the unpatched flaws and weaknesses
- Installing updates interrupts users’ workflow. If updates cause problems with software that employees use daily, they might postpone them
- Patches are released to fix known problems, but there is a risk that sometimes they can also break something vital in systems
Practically, it is impossible to get rid of cyber vulnerabilities and compromised devices. Today’s cybercriminals remain a step ahead, but our solution is to close the gap by taking the opportunity away from them. We provide companies and officials with up-to-date threat information that is tailored to the demands of the recipient. By identifying the recipient by their network assets, we can find the compromised machines and potential vulnerabilities in their networks. This way, they will be aware of the known threats around them and can act on those issues quickly.
Overlooking the significance of the ICT lifecycle management leaves organizations insufficiently protected, and it may have a destructive impact on their business. Vulnerabilities can cause financial, legal, and reputational damage to companies in the long run. Luckily, there are effective solutions to detect them and mitigate their impact.
Technology helps to create a large amount of data on vulnerabilities and threats. In fact, it is so much data that technology is also needed to process it automatically. At Arctic Security, we provide you with solutions to automate the finding and processing of that data and information, relevant to your organization and customers, with no delay and extra effort. The price of having access to this information was previously quite high due to the manual efforts that were involved. With the introduction of automation, we can bring the price point to a level that is more accessible to budget-constrained companies to begin investing in security.
Our next blog post discusses our automated solutions for producing victim notifications on a global scale.