A Cybersecurity Guide on Learning from Major Incidents and Strengthening Defenses

Many businesses invest a lot of time and resources into strengthening their digital defenses and protecting their data. Unfortunately, though, until these defenses are tested, many organizations don’t really know how well they’ll perform until after they’ve either successfully or unsuccessfully mitigated an attack.

But what happens if the worst-case scenario takes place? You’ve implemented new cybersecurity solutions or hired a capable security team, but you still fall victim to some form of data breach. So what’s next?

Of course, patching those vulnerabilities and addressing the problem at hand is essential. However, it’s critical to learn from these incidents and use what you discover to help strengthen your defenses in the long term. Here are some practical strategies you can follow to do this.

Completing Root Cause Analysis and Fixing the Gap

When your business is experiencing a major security incident, there is no doubt that your top priority is identifying and resolving the issue. However, due to the complexity of many of today’s attacks, it’s vital that you also undergo a thorough root cause analysis of this situation to make sure you’re fixing the problems at their source.

Instead of just treating the symptoms, such as unencrypting data or recovering the system, trace the issues back to where the breach occurred. Consider whether it was due to a lack of proper configurations or simply human error. Reconstructing all events that led up to an attack will give you the perspective needed to fill essential security gaps along the way.

Re-evaluating Patch Management

One of the common problems that can lead to security incidents is not having a clear patch management process in place. Outdated hardware and software are often targeted by cybercriminals who look to exploit unpatched security flaws.

In the event an attack occurs, it’s essential to use this time to determine if outdated security patches were a contributing factor and reevaluate how you manage them moving forward.

If you don’t have a software patch policy in place already, it’s crucial that you take the time to create one for all your critical systems. While patching your software regularly won’t necessarily stop cybercriminals from trying to use other methods to breach security walls, it can help to reduce your attack surface moving forward.

Enforcing Least Privilege and Reclaiming Access Control

Access control is a critical security component for reducing the amount of traffic that can move in and out of sensitive systems and databases. Many organizations fail to recognize the inherent risks of granting excessive privileges to in-house or remote users on company networks, often becoming overly permissive with their access in an effort to minimize operational disruptions.

Assuming that, following an attack, you notice that user access hasn’t been properly configured or there are too many users accessing the same areas of a network simultaneously, it may be best to enforce the principle of “least privilege.”

Least privilege configurations work on the assumption that security breaches can occur at any time and from any source – whether from unknown external sources or trusted users. In response to these dangers, all users, regardless of their job title, should only ever have enough access to be able to perform their duties day-to-day. 

This ensures that even if one of these users has their credentials compromised, the likelihood of cybercriminals accessing highly sensitive data is significantly reduced.

Integrating and Mandating API Penetration Testing

With many organizations adopting various cloud services and applications to help scale their operations, it’s critical that you closely evaluate whether or not these could be a source of a breach. 

Today, a common occurrence with cloud deployments is the misconfiguration of security when integrating multiple cloud-native and third-party applications. Cybercriminals are keenly aware of this trend and regularly seek vulnerabilities in the security of API connections between these disparate data sources.

Investing in API penetration testing can be an effective way to validate whether or not these types of connections are creating new security vulnerabilities for the business. Outside security teams can stress-test all of your cloud configurations, looking for broken access controls or data leaks that can lead to a breach, while providing the necessary perspective to fill these critical security gaps.

Reevaluating Incident Response Plans

In the wake of a cyberattack, evaluating the effectiveness of your incident response plan is key. This gives you the opportunity to identify any gaps in your planning and assess how well your teams executed all pre-established recovery protocols.

In many cases, you may find a number of opportunities to introduce improvements to your response strategies. For example, if you identified areas where communication was inconsistent or where unknown roadblocks occurred, it’s important to address these areas with your response teams and design more efficient methods of addressing them going forward.

Once you’ve introduced new improvements to your plan, make sure to communicate them effectively to your teams. These plans should also be tested throughout the year to ensure they remain relevant to the current business’s scale and overall structure.

Accelerating Adherence to Compliance Regulations

Following a data breach, the spotlight from compliance regulators and legal teams can be quite intense. It’s important at this time that you’re able to clearly audit any and all of your industry requirements and ensure you’re meeting any requirements set out for your business when it comes to communication and transparency.

The controls mandated by various regulators, such as access policies and data encryption, are often the very things that could have stopped the attack. This is why it’s crucial that you use this opportunity to accelerate any and all compliance mandates across your business. This not only ensures you’re satisfying any auditor requests now and going forward, but that you’re creating a stronger security posture for your business.

Validating Network Micro-segmentation

Knowing how easy it is for malicious individuals to access and move throughout your networks is critical. In the event of a breach, it’s essential to validate any network micro-segmentation you implemented and ensure that all necessary boundaries remain intact and effective.

If your networks aren’t protected by some form of segmentation, prioritizing this initiative is crucial to supporting your threat management processes. Isolating critical systems and databases from various network access points severely limits a cybercriminal’s ability to move laterally across an infected system.

Network segmentation provides your security teams with the critical time they need to identify and quarantine threats before they impact other important parts of the network. This can be invaluable when dealing with major issues, such as ransomware, which can quickly take systems offline and destroy valuable business data.

Testing Backup and Disaster Recovery

Regular system backup generation can make or break your recovery efforts following a cyberattack. This is why it’s important to regularly test the integrity of your backups as well as improve any procedures you have in place for storing them effectively.

Ensure that during an active system recovery, you fine-tune any backup protocols in place, including creating multiple versions of your backups and storing them both on-site and off-premises. This will ensure that even if one of your backup sources becomes compromised during an attack, you have another version you can use.

Increase Your Organization’s Operational Resilience

When dealing with a security crisis, it can be difficult to view it as an opportunity to strengthen your operational resilience moving forward. However, by following the strategies discussed, you’ll help turn a stressful situation for your organization into helpful insights for creating a better cybersecurity posture long term.