Narrow the Attack Windows
The cost of cybersecurity is skyrocketing. By 2020, the annual cost of cyber crime is expected to top $5 trillion worldwide, with companies spending more than $2 million per malware attack and $10 billion in total costs and damages associated with 2019 ransomware attacks. Overall, cybersecurity expenditures are expected to top $1 trillion annually by 2024 according to Cyber Defense Magazine. With stakes this high, it is critical to get the most out of every dollar your company spends on cybersecurity. To accomplish this goal, develop a plan that focuses on good architecture and prevention before breach detection and recovery.
Prevention Starts With Identification
Start by gaining a strong understanding of the business itself — its mission and goals as well as which critical assets require the most protection. These assets can be identified through different methods like risk assessments, asset tracking through a service or hardware inventory, or network scanning and traffic monitoring that reveals the most frequently used network and system components.
Once your critical assets have been identified, apply appropriate protections to those assets and be sure to continually update them based on business goals, emerging protection technology, and threat capability. Your network architecture should have a small attack surface, allowing necessary communication while minimizing the threat of outside parties gaining visibility or access.
Your system should also allow for monitoring the status of cyber system baselines and protection tools while detecting human error, system malfunction, and malicious intent. Teams must be able to respond when malicious actions are detected and implement recovery steps — all within a maturity level framework.
Narrow the Attack Windows
Improve your cyber defense posture by structuring your network and protection capabilities to force intruders through choke points, which will allow you to focus detection and response investments on a narrower window. This lowers the overall detection and response cost and removes many false positive events that bog down security teams.
It is critical to employ a strong underlying architecture with passive defense that prevents attackers from easily accessing critical networks and data.
Legacy systems and flat networks make it easy for attackers to find critical targets. Vericlave provides a defensible network architecture via secure network segmentation/extension and access over legacy network infrastructure. Proper architecture can be forced on systems that lack it so that traffic only travels through specific channels and protection can be focused at those points. Because of Vericlave’s stealth communications and mutual simultaneous authentication on a dedicated platform, Vericlave shrinks the attack surface by 90%. This drastically reduces your cybersecurity risk and increases the efficiency of the rest of your security controls by concealing your network and isolating your data.
To learn more about how Vericlave prevents costly attacks on the critical assets of enterprise and government entities, check out our white paper, Vericlave Overview.