65% of data breaches go undetected in organizations across the globe.
If that number doesn’t make you pause to consider your methods and processes, your organization has probably experienced a part of that 65%.
Cybersecurity threats are more frequent, sophisticated, and disruptive than ever. To protect organizations from internal and external damage, it’s essential for cybersecurity teams to remain fluent in technologies and tradecraft that can help them meet this challenge.
Breaches are devastatingly costly, and not just financially. While the average data breach costs organizations $4.24M, the collateral damage includes areas of disclosure, destruction, or disruption that many simply do not recover from.
Many organizations struggle when the basics are often overlooked in favor of meeting a goal that is an oversimplification of their current situation. In this line of work, “knowing is half the battle”
Executive Summary
Over-reliance on human elements in the cybersecurity domain is common…and dangerous. Combined with the number of tools needed to secure an organization, the gaps compound between the tools, limited visibility, and a shortage of formally trained cybersecurity professionals, organizations remain at an all-time heightened risk profile.
If your organization is ready to “level-up” your cybersecurity program and toolset, there are four things to prioritize:
- An immersive view of your entire security posture
- Team enablement
- Threat hunting
- Multiple Source Overlay (MSO)
Without these, your organization’s vulnerabilities are exposed.
Here’s how to enable your team without adding to headcount.
The Problem
Fear is the mind-killer, and hasty, panic-based decisions only lead to company-wide confusion and increased exposure. But it pays to stay informed, so your team is fully equipped to handle and dismantle increasingly sophisticated cybersecurity threats as they appear on your radar.
The closer the alignment between your team, their tradecraft, and the technologies that support them, the more easily you’ll be able to create an unfair advantage in their dealing with and anticipating threats as they appear.
Today’s cybersecurity leaders should make strides to reduce hurdles and barriers while seeking ways to align existing toolsets. By making informed changes to reduce the load on programs and processes to streamline your cybersecurity toolset, and by keeping up with the current threats facing your organization, you will see a dramatically positive difference in the state of your cybersecurity.
Step Up Your Game – Why Organizations Need to Level Up Their Cybersecurity Toolsets:
- Reliance on Human Analysis Leaves Room for Error: Juggling multiple cyber toolsets that don’t integrate or properly speak to each other leaves extensive room for error and bias. This over-reliance on manual detection opens a window of opportunity for critical errors going undetected and leaves space for attack.
- Gaps in Existing Systems Expose Vulnerabilities: In today’s cyber landscape, too many tools are needed to protect an organization’s perimeter, network, applications, data, and critical assets. Unfortunately, each tool owns only a small piece of the full landscape, and data is rarely complete or current. These gaps create a perfect opportunity for attackers to take advantage of your gaps and sneak inside, undetected.
- Limited Visibility and Noise Instead of Actionable Data: If you’re like many organizations, your existing cybersecurity tools offer a multitude of information, but lack clarity. The inability to make sense of the noise and the lack of actionable data makes it impossible to identify which threats are the highest priority.
- Shortage of Trained Cybersecurity Professionals: The current cyber battlefield is facing a critical shortage of available and qualified cybersecurity professionals. Contrasted with a spike in the demand for formally trained experts, organizations are left with a sea of tools, and undertrained and overwhelmed staff that isn’t equipped to fully understand or operate them.
How to Level Up Your Cybersecurity Metaverse:
There’s a lot of smoke and mirrors when it comes to cybersecurity tools. Fear is sown, distrust is capitalized on, and promises are made.
You’ve heard it all before. Everyone promises the same stuff.
But when the deals are signed and the programs are implemented, an unfortunate majority of tools are just that: promises. In reality, teams are overloaded with incomplete pictures, useless dashboards, and more noise.
How can discerning CISOs and cybersecurity leaders sift through the junk? How do you build an airtight team from the grassroots that can handle the bombs that get thrown at you? How do you find the programs truly worth their salt?
What to Look for in a Best-in-Class Cybersecurity Toolset:
A Holistic, Immersive View of Your Entire Security Platform:
Visibility of all devices and assets on the network: Each device and asset on your network should be tracked and monitored by your team. With a growing remote workforce, this is even more important than ever. A lack of visibility of the assets on your network can easily and quickly lead to pockets of Shadow IT and exposures that can go unnoticed for months.- Visibility of gaps between toolsets: If you’re like most organizations, your cybersecurity toolset consists of many products, vendors, and tools, each with its own piece of the puzzle. Because these tools often don’t relate or “talk” to each other, it’s incredibly difficult to see where there is overlap and where there are gaps. Getting visibility of these gaps between your systems is essential.
- Visibility of existing vulnerabilities: Your organization is vulnerable (and we can prove it). The only question is: where? Unfortunately, the majority of cybersecurity teams don’t have a complete picture of their programs and are unaware of their vulnerabilities. Understanding where your open vulnerabilities are is the first step in protecting your organization.
- Visibility of existing and potential threats: You can’t fight what you can’t see. Cybersecurity programs are useless without clear, real-time visibility of lurking threats. Since the bulk of data breaches go undetected, organizations must go the extra mile to ensure their visibility of threats is unhindered.
Team Enablement
Integrate and consolidate data from siloed point-solutions, so security operations teams are enabled to quickly visualize, analyze and remediate external threats that are otherwise invisible.- Bypass the problems associated with the current shortage of trained cybersecurity talent. Maximize the efficiency of your current team by reducing the tools that won’t scale with your team, and investing in tools that have multiple use cases in one.
- Enable and equip your existing talent, no matter the range of skill levels, by implementing tools that are easy to comprehend and utilize for less formally trained professionals, and are simultaneously scalable and powerful enough for seasoned cybersecurity experts to make the most use out of.
Threat Hunting
Your cybersecurity tools should be able to accurately identify threats to the network and show a clear path of priority levels, so your team can locate existing threats and handle them in the most efficient way possible. The sooner your team is able to identify and eliminate threats, the less exposed your operations will be.
Multiple Source Overlay (MSO)
Integrating your SecOps approach with a Multiple Source Overlay (MSO) program can quickly elevate your team’s effectiveness. MSO is the feed that an attack surface analysis platform interprets to easily visualize, detect, correlate, investigate and respond to attacks in real-time across your entire cyber battlefield. Using an MSO program can enable your team to comprehensively harness the power of your existing cybersecurity tools and consolidate multiple tools into one.
The Solution
If you’ve made it this far, you’ve identified a need within your organization for improvement in technology and/or processes.
You already know about the threats facing your organization. You already know there’s no room for failure and ignorance when there’s this much on the line.
And now, you know what to look for.
If you’re ready to level up your cybersecurity toolset, we’d love to talk through your existing programs, potential vulnerabilities, and goals with you. CLAW, our military-grade attack surface analysis program, was built for cybersecurity experts, by cybersecurity experts. Whatever your security concerns and goals are, we’ve been in your shoes, and we’re ready to help.
CLAW is a multidimensional cyberthreat-hunting platform for organizations that have complex networks & cybersecurity challenges. Particularly effective in visualizing and corroborating IT, IoT, and OT environments, CLAW allows security operations teams to quickly visualize, analyze and remediate external threats that are otherwise impossible to see with siloed point solutions.
How could your organization benefit from a holistic view of your entire security platform, team enablement, threat hunting, and MSO?
Request a demo to see how your organization can use CLAW to illuminate and eliminate gaps, make sense of the noise, and enable your team without adding to headcount.