Proactive Security – Strengthening the First Line of Defense

There’s a good chance you are part of an IT or cybersecurity team that is struggling to keep up. Today’s business is dynamic, IT systems are complex, and threat surfaces are expanding incredibly fast. What worked in the past to protect you may not be an effective approach today and that includes a cybersecurity strategy based solely on reacting to events as they are detected.

Modern cyberattacks occur at the speed of business, and the moment of detection is likely too late to do much good. You’re already breached. Your data has been exfiltrated. And you’ve lost control of critical business systems. All there is to do is to wait for the ransom demand to arrive and then pay the threat actor or suffer additional consequences.

And while reducing your organization’s cyber risk, you must also help enable business agility and user productivity. An effective way of balancing this is to embrace a proactive cybersecurity strategy.

Stopping attacks before they successfully breach the network is a powerful way to mitigate risk in a world where nearly every asset is online or in the cloud. It’s time to rethink security and implement a layered approach so proactive cybersecurity is your first line of defense.

The Changing Anatomy of a Cyberattack

Cyberattacks used to be noisy. A hacker would break a network security control. Alarm bells would go off, and IT would deploy countermeasures to identify attackers inside the network, block their access and quarantine impacted systems. Once under control, security teams would restore systems, get operations back up and running and remediate the vulnerabilities that led to the attack.

Now, the anatomy of an attack has changed and become much more sophisticated. The brute force of hackers has given way to more subtle evasive and adaptive techniques. Whether it’s by stealing credentials, tricking users into downloading malicious files or taking advantage of weak password protections, these sophisticated threats evade traditional network security solutions by masquerading as legitimate business activity.

Once threat actors gain that initial access, they move laterally through the network in search of more enticing targets, often laying in wait until the time is right to deliver their final payload. By the time you are alerted to a suspicious event, the attack is well established.

Attackers can continue to go back to the same well, gaining access to critical business systems, shutting them down, exfiltrating data and demanding a ransom.

Drowning in Alerts

One of the most significant problems is that digital transformation, remote work, interconnected supply chains and cloud computing collectively give threat actors an almost unlimited opportunity to blend in. It may be obvious after the fact that a user or their credentials have been compromised, but determining legitimate business activity from an attack in the moment is extremely difficult.

Adding to the problem is that some solutions create hundreds, or even millions of alerts for a single potential incident. Teams are buried under an avalanche of false positives. The recent MitreATT&CK testing proved this point and you can read more in our blog,  Why Alert Volume Matters: Cutting Through the Noise.

A Lack of Awareness Is No Longer an Excuse

Many cybersecurity insurance companies have decided that they are no longer going to accept the excuse that an attack was undetectable because it was disguised as legitimate business activity. Columbia Casualty, Travelers and Massachusetts Bay have all recently denied coverage to clients for failing to take the necessary steps to prevent these types of attacks.

It’s no longer feasible to continue to rely solely on detect and respond strategies in the face of today’s increasingly sophisticated threats. A failure to prevent attacks that gain an initial access to endpoints by masquerading as legitimate business activity can lead to breaches, data exfiltration, business disruption and ransomware demands. A new approach is needed.

Adding Proactive Security as a First Line of Defense

It’s time to augment existing detection and response capabilities with a new proactive cybersecurity layer that acts as the first line of defense. This layer should work with legacy endpoint detection and response (EDR), extended detection and response (XDR) along with firewall and network security solutions to provide a complete, holistic cybersecurity strategy across prevention, detection, response and remediation efforts.

 Shifting security practices will take patience and effort from everyone in the organization. Here are three tips to help you implement a proactive security strategy:

1. Reduce your attack surface

One of the most impactful things a security team can do is to reduce the attack surface. If you eliminate Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) noise and reduce false positives, your team can focus attention and resources on high-risk infrastructure, users and assets. This happens by proactively assessing risk, identifying vulnerabilities, patching on a regular basis and implementing appropriate security policies.

It’s important to align proactive security controls to business objectives – hardening endpoint security because you have a hybrid workforce or implementing strict password requirements for a business-critical application, for example.

Spending resources up front to do these proactive tasks saves resources downstream, ensures a basic level of cyber hygiene and hardens the organization’s overall security posture.

Employee education is also an important proactive strategy. Training users how to spot phishing attacks, identify suspicious requests and avoid credential theft attempts can reduce risky behavior and help build a culture of cybersecurity readiness across the organization.

2. Follow a trusted cybersecurity standard that fits your business needs

National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) 27001 publish cybersecurity frameworks for implementing proactive security controls. These standards are extensively tested and provide easy-to-follow directors for implementing proactive security strategies. Other standards that have been designed with a specific region or industry in mind can help narrow your efforts, ensuring your security strategies meet basic guidelines and compliance requirements. These include the Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA), Network and Information Security Directive (NIS2), the IoT Cybersecurity Improvement Act of 2020, and the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA).

3. Look for tools and services that simplify security

Some cybersecurity solutions make things more complicated by piling on alerts and requiring you to shift consoles to gain even partial visibility into your environment. Instead, consider a unified platform that can help you consolidate and streamline security operations while reducing costs.

For many organizations, Bitdefender GravityZone is that platform, and based on verified reviews, it’s worth a look. Managed services, especially MDR (managed detection and response) also provide great value to teams with limited resources. MDR can rapidly increase your security posture and return time to the rest of your IT and security staff so they can work on priority projects while your MDR service provider monitors security incidents.

In conclusion: it is possible to create proactive security and strengthen your first line of defense.

Announcing the New Bitdefender Cybersecurity Podcast

Attacks are more sophisticated, and your strategy should be too. Go behind the scenes on cyberattacks to hear what’s happening in the threat landscape right now, through the new Bitdefender podcast, CYBERCRIME: From the Frontline. Watch the full episode or listen on your favorite podcast platforms including Amazon, Apple, Spotify, and more.