Research by Cybersecurity Ventures predicts ransomware alone will cost businesses around the world more than $11.5 billion in 2019. What’s worse, this same study also predicts businesses will experience a cyberattack every 14 seconds by 2019, up from once every 40 seconds in 2016. So what can you do to mitigate the increasing threat of cyberattacks? Here are five IT security best practices that can help.
1. Fine-tune your security strategy to address your business’ needs. The first thing you need to do is assess your internal security workforce. A dedicated Security and Risk Management (SRM) team can evaluate the security implications of centralized availability in your organization; this team can also review the confidentiality and resiliency of digital business plans and explore methods to reduce risks, which will help foster a smooth digital transformation. Providing your SRM team with a comprehensive SIEM solution can help them regulate security operations within your organization.
2. Curb the cost of losing information using a data loss prevention (DLP) system. A robust DLP system not only helps identify where data goes and who uses it, but it also determines how a virus or some other threat entered your network. Gartner predicts that more than $124 billion will be spent worldwide on information security products in 2019, highlighting the importance of data privacy for any business. Enforcing a small, focused DLP system and implementing it in stages over time will help you effectively safeguard valuable information and assets from data loss.
3. Ensure compliance with stringent regulations to improve your risk posture. Start focusing on reducing digital business risks involved with PII, PCI, and company data by complying with regulations like the GDPR and the Notifiable Data Breaches scheme. At the current rate, approximately 80 percent of multinational companies will not be GDPR-compliant by early 2019. Maintaining compliance with government regulations can complicate security operations, but it helps ensure your data remains uncompromised. You can adopt security as a service, on-premises security solutions, or a hybrid delivery model to meet compliance requirements.
4. Develop an intelligence-driven strategy to prevent advanced attacks. Digital trust tools hunt and combat cyberthreats—these tools utilize machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) to detect abnormalities in input data, so they offer . Better yet, the longer you use these technologies in your environment, the more they learn and the more accurate their results will be. However, hackers can use these same techniques to orchestrate sophisticated attacks. Implementing tools that can both track your digital fingerprint and offer life cycle incident management will aid in analyzing anomalous user behaviour. Additionally, deception tools are gaining in popularity and can be used to detect, analyze, and defend against attackers.
5. Implement gateway security and multi-factor authentication. Cyberthreats like malware, phishing, credential theft, supply chain threats, and CEO fraud can wreak havoc on your business. Companies catering to government organizations should prepare for a rise in well-funded, nation-wide targeted cyberattacks (e.g. attacks on electronic voting systems). Building a detection and response system that provides email security, web security, firewalls, and multi-factor authentication helps mitigate the risk of these threats.
Implementing some or all of these best practices will help you see the full picture of your IT infrastructure’s health. Get prepared to fight whatever cyberattacks may come your way in 2019.
If you would like a “second opinion” on how you and your organization are setup to deal with ongoing cyberattacks please contact us and we would be happy to discuss your situation, and make recommendations on how you can improve.
** Optrics Inc. is an Authorized ManageEngine partner
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