Detecting attacks when they happen, rather than after they have exploited your business, is the foundation of an effective cyber defense. Vulnerability management services are vital to today’s corporate cyber programs.
Going on the offensive with your cyber security means using attack frameworks to understand attacker TTPs and stringing together seemingly random activity to identify an attack campaign early in the kill chain. This article will discuss proactive defense methods that can make this possible.
Asset Inventory
The first step in any cybersecurity program is to discover all the assets that need to be protected. This includes both hardware (e.g., servers, printers) and software. It’s a critical component of any cyber security program and a core CIS Control requirement.
Unfortunately, many organizations don’t have an accurate and current inventory of their technology estate, creating blind spots that attackers can exploit. This is often due to the inability to map their dynamic environments and separated solution silos that prevent full visibility of current assets, services, communications, and known vulnerabilities.
Adding to this challenge is the fact that modern attack surfaces are constantly evolving. New internet-facing assets emerge regularly, and it’s challenging for IT teams to track them all. This can lead to blind spots in securing support and impacts other risk assessment processes such as vulnerability scanning, penetration testing, and red team activity because the asset inventory is outdated.
Cyber Threat Discovery
A comprehensive cyber threat discovery and inventory management system is needed to address this issue. A solution like implementing operationalized vulnerability assessment activities automates this process and provides a complete and up-to-date cyber attack surface inventory accessible to the entire organization.
It delivers a single source of truth that accelerates incident response efforts by enabling analysts to quickly correlate alerts, understand relationships between devices and users, and view assets’ current and historical state.
Patch Management
With attacks becoming increasingly automated and threats evolving rapidly, patch management has become a key component of the MSP’s cybersecurity arsenal. However, with the growth of the enterprise attack surface and the growing number of devices that connect to the network, patching has become more complicated.
A successful patch management strategy will help minimize the risk of a data breach. This helps protect the firm from various threats and liabilities, including regulatory penalties, loss of reputation, and business continuity issues.
Creating An Inventory Of All Technical Security Controls
The first step in patch management involves creating an inventory of all technical security controls, such as firewalls, antivirus software, and VPNs. Once an accurate list has been created, a vulnerability assessment can be performed to identify and prioritize found vulnerabilities. This process will use data from vendor vulnerability announcements, asset management systems, and threat intelligence feeds to evaluate perceived security weaknesses in the infrastructure.
Once the vulnerability assessment results have been prioritized, it’s time to start the remediation process. This can involve promptly deploying patches to assets, considering the impact on users, business processes, and any other factors that may need to be considered.
It also includes documenting and analyzing the results of the patching process. This allows the MSP to keep track of the status of each patch and determine how it impacted its environment, helping the organization improve its overall security posture.
Network Monitoring
For years, the standard approach to enterprise cyber security has been establishing perimeter defenses and responding to breaches when they occur. The focus of these response activities is on perimeter adjustments, vulnerability remediation, and damage containment.
Deception technologies can support deploying a proactive defensive strategy as a post-compromise and mitigation measure against returning attackers by fortifying your defenses, exposing their tactics, slowing them down, and making it more difficult for them to return to your network.
Continuous cybersecurity monitoring enables you to detect anomalous behavior early on, allowing your team to take appropriate action before a breach becomes an incident and significantly reduces the potential for business disruption and data loss.
This monitoring will identify any unexpected activity, such as login storms, seasonal traffic spikes, or unauthorized devices entering the network, all indicators of a compromised system.
Visibility And Monitoring
In addition to visibility, monitoring will identify exposed credentials and system configuration issues that create entry points for attackers and proactively shut down those paths.
For example, Google-owned security provider Mandiant has Proactive Exposure Management, combining capabilities to effect exposure hunting, threat correlation, penetration testing, and real-time intrusion detection.
Threat Detection
As the incidents of cyberattacks and threats increase and their consequences become more severe, cybersecurity leaders are increasingly calling for a shift away from protective/reactive defense strategies to proactive, preemptive defense. In this context, a key component of this approach is threat detection, the ability to detect unauthorized activity and alert security teams promptly to potential attacks.
Threat detection methods can range from passive scanning tools that analyze network traffic and look for signatures of known attacks to automated analysis of network metadata to flag suspicious user behavior that may indicate a cyberattack is underway. Other advanced approaches, such as threat hunting, enable security teams to go into their networks, endpoints and systems to actively search for attackers or other anomalies that might be lurking as yet undetected.
Conclusion
In conclusion, deception technology can also be deployed to lure hackers out of the shadows and into a trap that exposes their activities or slows them down so they can be detected and repelled more quickly.
Further, leveraging the predictive power of AI and Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques can make it easier to spot and interpret patterns that might indicate an attack is in progress. Combined, these proactive defense approaches can effectively thwart an attack or at least limit its scope and the damage it causes.
