For most modern businesses, an online presence is vital. With it arises the Cybersecurity threats, where organizations face even the risk of losing confidential information for ransom. Therefore, you need to decide as an organization the approach you’ll take to curb or mitigate the risks.
Companies are not aware that their information has been compromised on most occasions until a third party notifies them.
So you have two options to confront the threats; reactively and proactively. In this article, you’ll gain insight into one of the most successful proactive methods known as continuous security validation.
Before that, let’s dive our attention into two approaches.
What are the different approaches to combat Cyber Threats?
Reactive approach
As mentioned previously, there are two approaches. The reactive approach focuses on waiting until something goes wrong before taking measures to rectify it. The disadvantage of this technique is that it is expensive, since most businesses cannot afford to deal with security breaches every six months or year.
Some even shut down, as with 60% of small businesses within six months of a data breach or cyberattack.
As a result, regardless of size, most businesses tend to neglect this approach. Even if you don’t notice any evidence of a vulnerability, it would be beneficial to anticipate and test for all security vulnerabilities in your business.
Proactive approach
Security audits are an example of a proactive strategy. This indicates that testing procedures like penetration testing, vulnerability assessments, security scanning, risk assessment, and so on are required. These strategies may assist you in determining where your shortcomings are and what you need to do to address them. However, they present you with a snapshot of your firm at the time.
As a result, these snapshots do not give a complete picture of vulnerabilities because the threat landscape is constantly changing. Cybercriminals are always looking for new methods to hack and breach an organization’s data.
So, to limit security dangers from security gaps, you need a continuous validation method.
What is continuous security validation?
Unlike conventional security methods, the continuous security validation method allows an organization to put itself in the shoes of a cyberattacker and simulate cyberattacks by exposing potential vulnerabilities in the company’s security arrangements.
As the name implies, continuous security validation is a thorough practice that looks for vulnerabilities that hostile actors might exploit rather than performing penetration testing once or twice a year.
MITRE ATT&CK Framework
To carry out continuous validation effectively, companies must use leading frameworks in the industry, such as the MITRE ATT&CK. This framework would outline the methods and procedures that an attacker would employ to penetrate your environment, as well as where they potentially go to destroy your system.
In 2013, a group of security specialists developed the MITRE ATTACK architecture, which gave standard classifications for describing adversarial operations against known platforms that malicious actors would target.
As a result, this framework made it easy for proactive and reactive security teams to describe specific behaviors and goals for protecting their systems.
Furthermore, the findings of the MITRE framework enabled security professionals to decide which aspects of their security system needed improvement or replacement and then develop baselines.
Developing baselines assisted the security experts in investigating the evolution of their security performance. You as a company should be able to get an in-depth overview of what the malicious actors are up against by performing continuous security validation. Then you could convey this information easily to upper management and those responsible for security in your organization to make wise, intelligent decisions.
It also provides organizations with data and assurance that your security posture will withstand the most heinous threats and zero-day assaults.
Then you might ask how businesses can correctly analyze security validation technologies. It is through The security posture evaluation, which we will look at in the next section.
What is a security posture assessment?
The term “security posture assessment” refers to the continual measurement, testing, and optimization of a company’s security controls, policy enforcement, and infrastructure configurations.
Its ultimate goal is to protect the organization totally from cybercriminals and enable continuous optimization of a company’s security stack by testing it and adopting immediate remedial actions.
Before you can determine the effectiveness of your cybersecurity posture, you must perform a cybersecurity risk assessment across all corporate assets to discover vulnerabilities.
Identifying possible vulnerabilities and threats assists firms in determining which steps to take first and which will have the most impact on improving their cybersecurity posture.
Their security threats reduce as their cybersecurity posture improves.
What are the benefits of continuous validation?
By now, you are aware that conventional security testing procedures are not sufficient to maintain the organization’s security posture. So in this section, we will look into the benefits of going beyond traditional methods and thus implementing continuous security validation.
Increased cyber resilience
Continuous validation allows recognizing potential threats and devising plans to eliminate them at early stages. Furthermore, it is more successful in avoiding recent attack vectors. Since you regularly test the weaknesses, attacks, and vulnerabilities, the most recent ones seldom go undetected.
Development of effective organizational Threat
Continuous security validation aids in the development of an organizational threat model that focuses on higher risk areas and the protection of critical security assets such as sensitive information. The rigorous examination of security observations facilitated by the methodology yields insights that help construct strong threat models and successful simulations.
Effective budget management strategies
When you carry out traditional testing methods such as penetration testing, you need multi-skill security specialists, which would most certainly incur hefty costs. In contrast, this cost is relatively minimal when automating continuous validation tests. In addition, when ransomware attacks occur regularly, the companies have to pay a hefty price to recover the data.
With continuous automated validation, you could save a fair amount of money since you identify ransomware attacks early.
Conclusion
Due to the escalating cybersecurity threats, organizations need some form of protection from them. Typically, most organizations no longer employ the conventional methods because they incur high costs and insufficiency to determine security threats at continuously changing landscapes.
Therefore, it is vital to implement continuous validation methods for your organization.