Security Controls for Rapid Response

Your security controls are some of the most important tools you have in reducing your cybersecurity risk. Most will have a specific task in the continuum of preventing, detecting and responding to threats. Controls that restrict access will help put up barriers to threat actors entering your environment. If they do get through, other security controls are designed to slow down or stop threat actors while they are trying to move in and around your systems. And if you do become the victim of a breach, there are also security controls that will help you in one of the most important elements of responding to an incident: speed.

Ensuring your security team can act swiftly in the face of an incident first requires that they are able to work as efficiently as possible. Having a cybersecurity platform that maximizes their time for the most critical work is key to this. In addition, should the incident create a need to rebuild systems, you'll want a plan in place that gets you back up and running with minimum downtime. Here are two security controls that will help you with a rapid response to an incident.

Extended Detection and Response

Extended Detection and Response, or XDR, is the next evolution in cybersecurity. As attackers become smarter and the attack surface grows with more devices, more cloud applications and more complicated environments, XDR goes beyond endpoints to ingest data from network, cloud, email, and other business systems and pulls it together in a unified platform that offers a single view of your entire IT ecosystem. A complete XDR solution will provide centralized prevention, detection, and incident response capabilities to address unknown, sophisticated threats and will boost operational efficiencies and analyst productivity through AI, machine learning and automated responses.

A complete XDR will eliminate the need for analysts to swivel between disparate systems, giving them more time to focus on what's important to your organization. XDR can also help filter out the noise of false positives, reducing alert fatigue and ensuring analysts are spending time on real threats. All this will help create a security team that is ready and able to respond faster when an incident occurs.

Many organizations do not have the resources, budget, and talent to lead security operations in-house. Instead, there's benefit to working with a security partner who offers Managed Extended Detection and Response, or MDR - powered by an XDR platform - to receive a depth and breadth of security expertise that is not easily obtained in-house. With MDR, security teams get all the benefits of an XDR platform in addition to a team of security experts that can help them monitor, detect, prioritize, and respond to threats before any damage is done.

Backup and Business Continuity

A part of good cybersecurity hygiene is having a solid business continuity plan, and an essential element of that plan is having good backups to restore from. But what does it mean to have good backups? For starters, when was the last time they were validated and tested? You need to trust that the backups will restore what they are meant to restore. When it comes to a speedy recovery, nothing will slow you down more than to learn your backups are only restoring parts of your systems.

Good backups also need out-of-band authentication, which is a secondary verification method through a separate communication channel. That will keep your backups from getting into the hands of a threat actor if they gain control of your whole environment. A ransomware attack becomes much more serious when a threat actor has wiped out your backups as part of their attack and holds all the keys to your data.

Learn More

Focusing on strong security controls will help you reduce your overall cybersecurity risk as an organization, and it can also help you reduce financial risks by helping you achieve the most cyber insurance coverage at the least cost. Looking at the spectrum of prevention and impact reduction, we've identified 10 security controls that have the potential to reduce risk at every organization, regardless of industry. Read the white paper to find out more.

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