Keeping your business cyber resilient from attacks

Since Covid-19, the cyber incident ratio has more than doubled, suggesting that it will not level off. Cyber assaults have targeted large businesses, government agencies of the world’s major nations, educational institutions, non-governmental organisations such as charities and NGOs, and small to medium-sized enterprises in just one year.

All of these occurrences illustrate that no one is immune to cyberattacks, and even one mistake might be devastating to your firm. You do not live in an ideal world or have a superheroic ability to keep you from being a danger to the actors’ preferred target. As a result, you must prepare yourself and your organisations for any eventuality by being cyber resilient. This is through understanding what is resilience and validating your security controls by utilising penetration testing services.

What is cyber resilience?

Cyber resilience is the ability of an organisation to continue functioning in the presence of cyberattacks. The cyber resilience framework encompasses three key components:

1. Cyber detection and response: This refers to an organisation’s ability to identify, assess, and respond to cyber threats in a timely and effective manner.
2. Business continuity and disaster recovery: This refers to an organisation’s ability to minimise disruptions and recover from cyberattacks.
3. Risk management refers to an organisation’s ability to identify, assess, and manage cyber risks.

It aids organisations in standing their ground during cyber events, whether they are minor or severe, and helps the firm to survive with minimal downtime.

Importance of cyber resilience

Today, virtually every company utilises the digital platform, which provides them limitless possibilities and flexibility of work while also opening a new realm of cyber threats. A little vulnerability in IT infrastructure or human psychology might severely jeopardise the entire business.

In this scenario, your brand becomes a headline for yourself and your firm’s financial, reputation, and legal exposure. It is critical to building a resilient organisation with effective cyber resilience techniques to avoid these situations. Cyber security controls are required for any business, but they are useless unless a robust cyber resilience posture accompanies them.

A resilient cyber organisation can rapidly detect cyberattacks, minimise their impact, and quickly recover from them. Such an organisation has a clear understanding of its assets and how they are interconnected, and it also understands its threats and has implemented controls to mitigate those threats.

Cyber resilience has several advantages before, during, and after a cyber event. These benefits are:

1. Enhanced and continuous security – Organisations with cyber resilience programs in place are more likely to have improved and updated IT governance and data breach trend knowledge, which aids them in continuously improving their security system.
2. Saving compliance and financial losses – The continuous resilience cyber approach aids in complying with regulatory bodies, lowering the expense of financial loss and fines in the case of a successful cyber incident or data privacy breach.
3. Improved defensive capabilities – Cyber resilience is the ability of a company to withstand attacks against it. Web application and API penetration testing exercises enable organisations to develop proactive and real-world effective security controls for restricting unauthorised access and intrusion.
4. Strong reputation – Cyber incidents disrupt business operations and result in losing consumer confidence and brand reputation.

How can you test cyber resilience?

To be resilient in cyber espionage or a natural disaster, you must test your entire IT environment to ensure that your cyber protection plan is strong enough to withstand, react to, and recover from an accident.

Before a real-life scenario occurs, testing your skills might reveal flaws and weak spots. You may also evaluate the effectiveness of your security systems and your real-time response capabilities, and you may also assess your cyber resilience.

Verify security countermeasures

To assess your security status, you must ensure that all parts of your digital world are secure. SEIM solutions, firewalls, antivirus and malware programs are just a few of the security checks that may be used to identify, deter, and react to dangers by identifying, restricting, and eliminating potential risks before they can be exploited.

Test your live environment

Once you’ve implemented all preventative, detective, and reactive security measures, it’s critical to test and audit your environment from an attacker’s viewpoint. The most effective approach to assessing your real-world situation is comprehensive white-hat penetration tests.

Attack surface monitoring

To discover flaws in real-time, keep an eye on your environment. It helps a lot in analysing and reducing the attack surface when it is hard to minimise the attack surface; it also aids in detecting and restricting the attack vector from entering the IT infrastructure when minimising the attack surface is difficult.

Cyber security is an ongoing improvement process, not a final state. By being cyber resilient, you can have your organisation’s best cyber security posture.

Cyber resilience is an ongoing improvement process, not a final state. By being cyber resilient, you can have your organisation’s best cyber security posture. Think about how cyber breaches could affect your business and take preventative measures to build cyber resilience to safeguard against them.