Why remediation in cyber security is key to limiting the damage a breach can cause
Remediation in cyber security refers to limiting the damage a breach can cause to your organisation. If you fail to notice and act upon a breach in a timely manner, it can move rapidly and becomes almost impossible to contain.
As organisations worldwide expand, they will encounter new risk factors that need immediate remediation and risk management – particularly in cybersecurity. Despite many large-scale organisations providing robust cybersecurity measures, new threats that affect services, products, networks, data, and systems are constantly discovered. Once identified, organisations must be prepared to mitigate risks and defend their network and systems at all costs.
Businesses regularly encounter a myriad of cybersecurity risks from a number of different threat vectors, ranging from environment-specific threats to common vulnerabilities. As cyber threats become more sophisticated, organisations must adapt their cybersecurity posture and bolster their security defences. Securing systems and safeguarding data is now as important as any other part of your business.
With the above in mind, let’s take a closer look at remediation in cyber security.
Risk prioritisation
Large corporations such as financial institutions, banks, utility companies, energy firms and communications are all aware that they should have a risk mitigation strategy in place. They all have a general understanding of the baseline needed to assess risk within their business or sector but utilising the correct risk assessment can prove somewhat of a challenge for businesses. They need to ensure that they are following the correct standards, policies, and procedures, as well as remediation in security.
The three key pointers:
- Define a hierarchy of rules
- Configure security assessment tools properly
- Re-evaluate and re-assess
Remediation in cyber security is a cost well spent. The key is to prioritise risk and mitigate accordingly. For both internal IT teams and external cybersecurity firms, the methods of identifying cybersecurity risks are growing by the day as part of a maturing enterprise risk remediation program.
The three key pointers:
- Simplify the risk scoring process
- Layer in company-specific factors
- Develop a framework that allows for success
Remediation in security processes
Risks are often identified as bugs in products, applications, or systems. The risk remediation process can also contain inherent bugs that can be roadblocks to a cybersecurity risk management program. Risk management strategies can vary from organisation to organisation, but the process can typically be generalised as Findings -> Remediation -> Completion. However, it can be the bugs in the intricacies within each step that can be inherently flawed but can be improved.
The three key pointers:
- Utilise a risk prioritisation framework
- Practice DevSecOps
- Embrace automation
Reliable and useful metrics
As your organisation streamlines its remediation in security processes, one challenge for many IT firms is to demonstrate to leadership that their actions have successfully reduced the risk profile of their business. Many IT teams nowadays just don’t know where to turn in terms of useful metrics that paint an accurate picture. It’s also important that security reporting delivers an outline for transformative and continuous improvement. Any reporting aims to promote clarity and transparency, and even bad results can help organisations understand where conflicting priorities or roadblocks are located and where they are impeding progress.
The three key pointers:
- Identify key metrics
- Separate reporting by role
- Mix in proactive reporting
How to improve your risk remediation capabilities
Internal IT teams and external cybersecurity firms across all sectors and industries face many similar challenges, and the first thought they have is about what can be done today. The answer is to develop a successful and sustainable risk remediation program which is a long-term initiative and requires inclusion from teams across the full risk management lifecycle. Meanwhile, there are four key steps that security teams can implement in the short term that can show measurable results for a business trying to reduce its overall risk profile.
The four key steps:
- Ensure any manual risk identification methods are baselined against the company’s security policy
- Ensure risk assessment methods and prioritisation methods are published and understood
- Ensure your security team is using an industry-standard risk scoring system
- Simplify reports to include only role-based metrics
Leveraging these key steps, as well as ensuring your IT or cybersecurity teams have the proper resources in place along with business alignment, will help streamline risk remediation and decrease the cybersecurity risks posed by a variety of malicious actors.
Get in touch with RiskXchange to find out more about remediation in cyber security.