COMPLEX CYBER HIGIENE

Business information exists in a complex ecosystem, teeming with a multitude of technologies, regulatory requirements, standards, business processes, vendors, security threats, system vulnerabilities, and market pressures. This information moves through elaborate workflows across networks, multiple applications, databases, servers, and across political boundaries. In today's world, much of this information has to meet the three information security tenets: availability, integrity and confidentiality.

Manage information assets

Managing information assets starts with conducting an inventory, which should document hardware, applications, databases, and other information assets. Managing information assets requires a structured lifecycle of inventory, classification, access control, and secure.

Assess threats and vulnerabilities

Threats are sources of danger to information assets. Vulnerabilities exist in people, processes, and technologies. It is important to list all the pertinent threats, categorize them, and rank them based on their importance. Making a list of applicable vulnerabilities and ranking them based on their impact to the organization.

Manage risks

Risk management focuses on avoiding, mitigating or transferring risks. It starts with a list of risks which are categorized according to the likelihood of their occurrence and their impact to the organization. The likelihood and the impact together determine how these risks are prioritized. A high-impact risk with a high likelihood of occurrence is a high-priority risk to the organization.

Use multi-factor authentication

Additional verification for account access will mitigate most successful phishing attacks.

Encrypt devices

All your critical devices should be encrypted - this means computers, mobile devices, hard drives, and storage. Encrypting the devices means that your data is incomprehensible without a key. Basically, if someone gets access to your laptop or mobile, they can easily access files and data without encryption.

Use next generation firewall

A next generation firewall is part of the third generation of firewall technology, meaning it combines traditional firewall with more sophisticated functionalities for detecting and preventing intrusion. They generally include anti-malware and anti-virus that are continually upgraded as new threats are discovered.

Web content filtering

Use web content filtering. The filter works by identifying the origin or content of a web page based on rules you have defined. This can help you to avoid visiting malicious pages. Content filtering will significantly improve security by blocking access to malicious or risky websites utilize policy-based controls and prevents malware download.

Protect customer data

Protecting customer data requires a multi-layered approach to secure information, maintain compliance, and build trust. Focus on data minimization (collecting only what you needed), enforcing strict access controls, and using end-to-end encryption for data at rest and in transit.

Incident management and disaster recovery

Security breaches, unintentional loss of information assets, accidental deletion of critical data, or power outage in a data center are examples of incidents. A good incident response plan clearly identifies what needs to be done, for the most common incidents. Incidents that are catastrophic in nature call for a disaster recovery (DR) plan.

Conduct trainings

An often-ignored step, training employees on security is the key to enforce an enterprise security program. All manner of technology safeguards and security measures do not mean anything if employees are careless about their laptops, connect to insecure networks outside of the workplace, or are unaware of what constitutes suspicious behavior.

Manage third parties

The complex ecosystem of information frequently includes third parties such as vendors, suppliers, and intermediaries. Insecure networks or practices in third-party organizations that are connected with a business can create exploitable security loopholes. A good starting point is to list all third parties that an organization is doing business with and prioritize this list based on the extent of information overlap or sharing, and the criticality of the information. The organization can then proceed to find out what security measures are in place at the third party and mandate any necessary controls.

Cybersecurity review

A cybersecurity review should give you a clear idea of your organization's problem areas and what issues you needed to deal with regarding your organization's security posture.