In part one, we discuss the current state of financial services cybersecurity, the challenges the industry faces, and opportunities for banks and other financial institutions to better protect their organizations.

In this part, we explore measurable and actionable metrics banks can track to craft a powerful cybersecurity story tailored to their regulators and leadership peers. We’ll also discuss opportunities to improve those metrics and address key challenges CISOs experience when building mature programs.

Let’s dive in.

Three Cybersecurity Metrics to Help Financial Institutions Tell Their Story to Regulators

The rise in cyberattacks against financial institutions means heightened scrutiny from bank regulators and more stringent compliance requirements. So, how can banks provide a thorough assessment of their security program to show regulators that they’re meeting regulatory requirements – and are keeping consumers and their data safe?

We can achieve that by identifying and keeping track of cybersecurity metrics that tell a powerful story.

These metrics are critical in two scenarios: to communicate your security program maturity and compliance to financial services industry regulators and to your leadership team/board to make the case for additional budget or resources.

When using metrics, keep in mind context over time is a key success factor for communication on trends. And consider the alignment with other metrics used to measure overall business success.

Cybersecurity metrics are historically challenging to determine as they don’t correlate directly to revenue or profit gain and are often proactive in nature. However, if you choose wisely they can help you benchmark your current cybersecurity program and show how your investments have impacted your organization over time.

To set a solid metric foundation, consider these three key cybersecurity metrics:

1. Asset footprint: Anything that gives an accurate depiction of all your assets may be considered your asset footprint. This includes ephemeral assets (e.g., auto scaling compute or containers) and the number of endpoints per dollar of assets under control. For example, in endpoint management, you’re managing the number of devices, servers, or systems that are trying to access your company’s network. Taking inventory of all endpoints provides you with a better view of your security posture and how much it costs to manage your assets. The caveat is that this method works now, but not ideal for measuring your assets moving forward.
2. Time to remediation: How long does it take to fix your critical vulnerabilities? What is the time it took to identify critical issues from discovery to vulnerability remediation? Being able to track this context over time provides an overall assessment of your risk profile. A scenario to consider: if your company doubles in size but the number of vulnerabilities remains the same or has increased, you need to investigate that.
3. Percentage of revenue that makes up your cybersecurity budget: What percentage of the overall organizational revenue is being spent on cybersecurity? Is that spend increasing, but the number of vulnerabilities, security incidents, fraud reports, etc. remaining the same? Keeping track of your budget relative to your security outcomes can indicate the health of your program and areas that may require reevaluation.

For metric number three, you’ll need to partner with your CFO and finance team to track your progress over time. But for metrics one and two, it will be critical to formulate a plan to capture and improve these metrics to prepare for your next audit or budget meeting. Here are three ways to accomplish this:

• To measure and improve your asset footprint, leverage Attack Surface Management (ASM): ASM identifies and detects all known, unknown, and potentially vulnerable assets across your attack surface whenever there is exposure – not just what’s internet facing but in B2B network connections or peered cloud services too. ASM enables a comprehensive view of your environment from the outside in.
• To measure and improve time to remediation, leverage Penetration Testing as a Service (PTaaS): PTaaS combines technology with human expertise to find critical vulnerabilities that tools and traditional pentesting processes miss. The key here will be to work with a partner that can orchestrate and manage your vulnerabilities in a dynamic platform that allows you to track your remediation progress over time (see: NetSPI Resolve).

Check out these case studies to learn how two banks leveraged penetration testing to address the unique challenges financial firms face:

• NetSPI Addressing Financial Services Security Challenges Head-On
• NetSPI Testing Highlights Security Flaws for Leading Financial Services Firm

How to Articulate the Need for Budget

One of the challenges that we personally experienced in our roles as in-house security leaders and CISOs is the need to articulate budgetary needs to the leadership team and the board.

You need money and resources to employ the right people and acquire the necessary tools to protect your organization, right? This is correct, but you also need to recognize that the metrics you’re currently sharing may not align with the priorities of the CEO or the board. This gets even more challenging when the CEO or board hasn’t funded these initiatives historically.

So, what are ways you can effectively approach this?

First, understand that it’s not about confronting the board or the CEO. It’s about empowering them to articulate the risks they’re willing to take (e.g., risk of a possible breach, exposing consumer PII, etc.)

It’s important to engage with your leadership team and spend the time building this relationship so you both are aligned with the security or control posture of the organization. Security leadership should never operate in a silo.

Second, don’t tell half the story, tell the whole story. Explain how your budget decisions align with the company’s priorities: generating revenue, achieving company goals, maintaining a positive public reputation, etc. Articulate your metrics in the terms and language they understand to effectively tell you cybersecurity maturity story and make the case for additional support.

For more on this topic, read How To Eliminate Friction Between Business and Cyber Security.

Strategic Cybersecurity for Financial Institutions

More than ever, it’s important to be strategic when improving cybersecurity in the financial industry. Here are two things to consider to set you on the right path toward security program maturity:

• Tool overload and alert fatigue. Be mindful of purchasing capabilities you can’t manage or extract the value from. Why? Because you’re going to have to find the people to address all the data you aggregate. This lack of alert coverage and response could result in hesitancy from your leadership team or regulators.
• Technical leaders vs. security leaders. When you hire, ensure that your technical team also understands security and why it matters to your business. Someone with a technical background may not truly grasp security concepts and strategy. Ensure you have a balanced team that can help you articulate your metrics as outlined above.

If there is one thing we want you to take away from this blog post, it is this: financial cybersecurity is an ongoing effort – it is a not a point-in-time commitment. Continuous improvement is essential to telling your cybersecurity story – and the metrics you choose to measure and the way you communicate them will be the backbone of that story.

NetSPI is the industry leader in pentesting and currently partners with 9/10 top US banks in the nation. Connect with us today. for your bank pentesting solutions and needs.

The post Cybersecurity for Financial Institutions—Part 2: Metrics appeared first on NetSPI.

The critical assets that financial institutions store – customer personal data and money – make them a lucrative target for cybercriminals. In recent years, we saw a steady inclination towards digitization in the financial industry, and the onset of COVID-19 only accelerated this momentum. Employees transitioning to remote work and customers relying on online transactions mean an ever-expanding attack surface.   

Although cybercrime is attempted frequently, the financial industry is known to implement some of the most mature cybersecurity programs.  

According to consulting firm McKinsey & Company, the banking sector is one of the most advanced in cybersecurity maturity, due to the regulatory environment, consumer expectations, and competitive pressures. These nuances alone create a unique threat landscape for banks across the globe.  

In this two-part blog series, we will dive into cybersecurity for financial institutions. This first blog will explore the current state of financial services cybersecurity, the challenges the industry faces, and opportunities for banks and other financial institutions to better protect their organizations – and in turn, their customers.  

In part two, we explore measurable and actionable metrics banks can track to craft a powerful cybersecurity story tailored to their unique threat landscape.    

For additional reading on financial industry cybersecurity, check out these resources: 

• Penetration Testing for Financial Institutions
• West Monroe Financial Institution Case Study 
• How Secure are ATM Machines? An ATM Penetration Testing Expert Explains
• Leading Financial Institution Leveraged NetSPI Red Team Service to Improve
  Their Security Posture 
• NetSPI Testing Highlights Security Flaws for Leading Financial Services Firm 

The Current State of Financial Cybersecurity 

Cybersecurity decisions are driven by security professionals, technology leaders, business executives, vendors/partners, board of directors, auditors, and regulators. The groups work in partnership to provide some of the most mature security programs.  

Banks must comply with established regulators – often run by agencies such as the FDIC, OCC, NYDFS, and FRB in the US; the FCA in the UK; and OSFI in Canada – to oversee banking operations. Regulators ensure that banks comply with industry standards and consumer protection laws, and they oversee the soundness of the financial institution.  

Banks that undergo a cybersecurity breach suffer from financial, reputational, and regulatory impacts. In addition to that, banks that receive a MRA (Matter Requiring Attention), or worse a MRIA (Matter Requiring Immediate Attention) from a previous examination or inspection will find themselves under intense scrutiny. This drives up operating costs and distracts resources away from other initiatives.  

A medium-sized bank with smaller and less mature cyber functions is more likely to suffer a more impactful impairment. Larger banks that have had significant investments are not immune to compromise. But, because they’ve had the necessary investment to develop robust programs over the last two decades, they are less likely to experience a substantial impact.  

This highlights that the current state of cybersecurity is situational and truly depends on various organizational factors and the accompanying unique cybersecurity considerations. For example, the size of your organization, type of banking services provided, who your examiners are, and location, among other factors.  

Keeping that in mind, here are five things we know to be true today regarding today’s financial cybersecurity landscape: 

• Large banks invest more resources and money into their cybersecurity programs to accommodate for the complex and costly processes needed to avoid risks.   
• The larger your organization, the more complex your environment is to secure. 
• Evolving regulatory frameworks account for the size and systemic risk a given institution has on the entire financial system.
• Banks with an international presence face the increased complexity of dealing with regulatory requirements globally. 
• There is a significant investment in cybersecurity for financial institutions. 

To understand these concepts in depth, let’s look at four key cybersecurity challenges the banking industry faces today. 

Keeping up with Banking Cybersecurity Regulations 

Different banks have different regulatory imperatives based on where they operate. For instance, in the US, the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) operates at the multinational level, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) at the national level, and the New York State Department of Financial Services (NYDFS) at the state level.  

To keep up with the regulatory requirements domestically and internationally, security leaders must work closely with their risk and governance leadership to establish an effective compliance strategy to ensure security protects the enterprise while meeting the expectations of regulators. A strategy that maps regulatory requirements back to the business’ reporting processes is essential since banks work with different countries that implements their own compliance laws.  

Furthermore, evolving privacy standards, such as General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), have a tone of security built into their compliance requirements. It’s important to understand how your security practices can help you comply with privacy standards, although they do not explicitly evaluate cybersecurity. 

At the national level in the US, there is a mix of consumer privacy laws to regulate what financial institutions can do with specific types of consumer data, but there is no single legislation that all privacy laws fall under. In fact, only California, Virginia, and Colorado have comprehensive consumer privacy laws. Many states enact their own privacy laws, but they are either incompatible or the data overlaps. For instance, a state may define a breach and what constitutes as personal data differently from another state.   

Retaining Financial Industry Cybersecurity Talent 

Across the spectrum, financial institutions struggle to attract and retain cybersecurity talent. Although this changes from organization to organization. For instance, larger banks have the funding to attract talent compared to smaller banks that experience more difficulty in this arena. And non-traditional financial institutions may have better luck attracting talent if they have flexible work-from-home policies. As other sectors like healthcare improve their cyber posture, competition for talent is increasing. 

The COVID-19 pandemic has created significant demand for remote or hybrid roles. Unfortunately, many financial institutions are not opting to allow this given the traditional nature of the industry. This can deter security candidates from seeking roles in the industry especially since other industries offer competitive pay with the added benefit of being remote.  

For smaller banks that lack cybersecurity experts with the necessary background, third-party service providers can help solve hiring challenges and serve as an extension of their team. NetSPI specifically leverages its penetration testing experts and technologies to perform offensive security testing and help financial institutions discover, prioritize, manage, and remediate their security vulnerabilities.  

Providers that take a partnership approach can also help organizations meet their objectives and offer services with a bench strength that they are unable to attract or retain themselves. 

Regulators Are Your Partners, Not Your Enemy 

Regulations are put in place to protect financial institutions and their customers. In cybersecurity, you’re only able to safeguard your critical assets to an extent if you’re not keeping pace with the ever-changing threat landscape. 

The independent nature of regulators is a resource many other industries don’t have. They’re able to provide unique perspectives based on the independence and years of experience an organization has. Having the ability to bridge the gap through the market and within the organization makes them an ideal partner to protect your organization and customers. Transparency and actively reaching out to your assigned auditors will be key in this process.  

Start by engaging with them in conversations about the future of your organization. Engaging in conversations early in the pipeline and gauging their opinion will open opportunities for more discussion and insights that will help you with compliance.  

You also want to work in tandem with your regulator to leverage regulatory requirements against existing controls and efforts to address control gaps in the organization. This enables the regulator to gain a better understanding of the company’s risk culture to effectively map the regulatory requirements back to the business’ operating systems. Then, the board and executive leadership team can make sound decisions relating to budget and risks.    

Ultimately, your cybersecurity team and the regulator share the same goal – to protect your customer – so it is important to realize that your regulator is not your enemy, but your partner in maturing your organization.     

Prioritizing Investments Within Financial Industry Cybersecurity 

We predict that the banking community will continue to invest more in its cybersecurity programs compared to any other industry. Estimates forecast this industry will account for more than 30% of all security spending worldwide.  

But how should financial organizations prioritize that spending? By focusing on risk. 

What vulnerabilities, if exploited, would cause the most harm to your organization and customers? Fix those first.  

What part of your business is responsible for most of your revenue? Increase your investments in securing this portion of your business.  

Implementing new technologies or architectures (see: blockchain security)? Understand the cybersecurity implications before deployment.  

Just because you are compliant, does not mean you are secure. That’s worth repeating: just because you are compliant, does not mean you are secure. Shifting to a risk-based mindset will set financial institutions up for future success and elevate your program maturity. 

NetSPI is the industry leader in pentesting and currently partners with 9/10 top US banks in the nation. Connect with us today for your bank pentesting solutions and needs.

The post Cybersecurity for Financial Institutions—Part 1: An Overview appeared first on NetSPI.

New things pop up on the external network all the time, often without IT awareness. And it’s up to security leaders to keep track of all assets AND understand the risk of every exposure. In other words, keeping up with the rapidly evolving external attack surface is not for the faint of heart.

To help, NetSPI launched Attack Surface Management, a platform-driven, human delivered offering that mitigates attack surface risks. Pulling from lessons learned during the R&D of Attack Surface Management (ASM), I want to share some advice on how you can adjust your cyber attack surface management strategy to ultimately keep pace with the rate of change security leaders are experiencing today.

What is Attack Surface Management?

First, it’s important to understand what the attack surface is.

An attack surface is an accumulation of all the different points of entry on the internet that stores your organization’s data (external-facing assets). This includes your hardware, software, your digital assets uploaded to the cloud, and much more.

Attack surface management provides continuous observability and risk assessment of your organization’s entire attack surface. When coupled effectively with continuous penetration testing, it helps organizations improve their attack surface visibility, asset inventory, and understanding of their assets and exposures.

Attack Surface Management Use-Cases

Through the attack surface, adversaries can exploit exposures to identify vulnerabilities that will give them access to your organization. If the threat actors are successful, the outcomes may vary, but are undoubtably negative. Those outcomes could include:

• Deployment of malware on your network for the purposes or ransomware, or even worse killware.
• Extraction of employee data such as social security numbers, healthcare data, and personal contact information, which could become a nightmare for privacy teams as privacy legislation across the globe continues to grow.
• Threaten to block access to your financial records with ransomware, then hold you hostage for more not to publicly disclose that data.

You can incorporate an attack surface management solution to detect known, unknown, and potentially vulnerable public-facing assets, as well as changes to your network. Effective asset management and change control processes are challenging, and even the most well-intentioned organizations often see this as an area of opportunity for improvement. Common reasons organizations invest in attack surface management include:

• Continuous observability and risk management
• Identification of external gaps in visibility
• Discovery of known and unknown assets and Shadow IT
• Risk-based vulnerability prioritization
• Assessment of M&A and subsidiary risk

Explore additional attack surface management use-cases: Download our data sheet.

3 Ways to Improve Your Attack Surface Management Strategy

As I noted earlier, attack surface management is not for the faint of heart. The volume of data many technology-based external attack surface management (EASM) solutions generate can be hard to consume and even harder to make actionable. But there are three ways you can improve your strategy to minimize risk and better secure your organization.

Incorporate Human Expertise

Most of today’s attack surface management solutions are heavily reliant on technology. But what’s missing in the market are comprehensive solutions that intersect innovative technology with human intuition. Humans find vulnerabilities that tools miss and can provide business context to each exposure. There’s no replacement for human talent.

Additionally, many organizations rely solely on technology, but the reports scanners sent over generate noise for clients and contain many false positives. By adding manual exposure triaging to your attack surface management workflow, you can limit the noise and only focus on the exposures that matter most to your business.

At NetSPI, our ASM Operations Team pulls from its 20+ years of manual penetration testing expertise to provide the intuition and insight needed to help you prioritize the areas of weakness on your attack surface. We can provide you with additional context to determine next steps, help you triage exposure, evaluate the risk it poses to your business, advise your team on remediation strategies, and prioritize manual testing techniques to find business-critical vulnerabilities tools often miss.

Enable Always-on, Continuous Penetration Testing

An attack surface monitoring solution needs to manage risks to your attack surface via ongoing, continuous monitoring. If your current attack surface management solution is not truly continuous, or if you’re unable to effectively reason about the data the solution is generating, you’re giving adversaries ample time to find risky exposures before you do.

NetSPI helps your security teams stay on top of changes to your attack surface by providing a 24/7/365 ongoing assessment of your organization’s external-facing assets. This is achieved through our automated scan orchestration technology, Scan Monster.

We use a multitude of automated and manual methods including open source intelligence (OSINT) to identify data sources such as business entities, IP addresses, domains, employee information, and sensitive company data. 

Coupling this technology with our human expertise provides a robust, around-the-clock attack surface management strategy gives you comprehensive visibility that enables you to effectively manage risk.

Prioritize Exposures Based on Risk

Many organizations today scan for external-facing assets and then send reports and alerts over without any context. This creates noise, and wastes time, money, and resources to parse through the data.

Attack surface management isn’t your day job. Cybersecurity leaders have an entire portfolio of controls to consider and solutions that just feed a torrent of data distracts you and your teams from focusing on the real threats to your business.

What are the critical risk factors that will affect the business? Who are the potential threat actors? Which vulnerabilities should I remediate first? Which exposures are most likely to be exploited?

NetSPI’s ASM Operations Team and our ASM platform will help you identify the answer to these questions. In the Attack Surface Management technology platform you can group assets based on risk using the tagging function to create a risk-based view of your attack surface.

You can also view your results over time to measure your ability to reduce risk. We deliver results to clients that are meaningful, validated, and help organizations understand the true risks on their attack surface. This way, you can prioritize your time and effort on critical exposures that matter.

NetSPI’s Attack Surface Management

So, how do you minimize risk and ensure full visibility of your attack surface? By integrating an attack surface management strategy that is human delivered, continuous, and risk-based.

We created our Attack Surface Management offering based on these three pillars – and we’re thrilled to formally launch it to the public today. Ready to learn more about our service and technology platform? Visit www.netspi.com/attack-surface-management.

The post How to Improve Your Attack Surface Management Strategy appeared first on NetSPI.

There are three cybersecurity threats that, in my opinion, are the most frightening of them all: ransomware, work from home attacks, and software as a service (SaaS). Have no fear, not only will this article reveal the spookiest threats, but I’ll also share tips and best practices for prevention – no spell book required!

Beware of ransomware

By now, we can all generally define ransomware. It’s making national headlines due to its widespread impact in both the cyber and physical world. One of the more frightening aspects of ransomware is the uncertainty of the attack, specifically the varying attacker motivations.

Killware is an emerging ransomware threat in which the motivation is to impact critical infrastructure with the intent to do harm. In the case of Killware, they are not after money. It’s ransomware with no decryption keys. They want you to be down and stay down. For more, this USA Today article explains possible Killware scenarios and motivations.

It’s also a fluid and uncertain legislative and regulatory space. As it becomes more challenging to recover from a ransomware attack, payment is often the fastest way to get back to business. So, what happens if ransom payments become illegal? 

Ransomware attack outcomes can also vary significantly. For example, just because you pay, doesn’t mean you will get the decryption keys or access to all your data. Often, ransomware families blackmail organizations with stolen data to increase their financial gain. 

Ransom payments also fluctuate. Just this year it was reported that CNA Financial paid $40 million in ransom. And Palo Alto Networks found that the average ransomware payment climbed 82% since 2020 to a record-high $570,000 in the first half of 2021. 

Ransomware is a financial loss event and should be treated as such. It’s no longer the sole responsibility of cybersecurity and technology teams, finance, and others responsible for managing business and financial risk have a critical role to play.

Ransomware simulation assessments can remove some of the uncertainty surrounding these adversarial attacks. An attack simulation can benchmark how well an organization is positioned to detect, prevent, and defend against ransomware. Are your controls sufficient? Are your response teams effective? If there is a detection or response failure… can you recover? These are questions NetSPI’s Ransomware Attack Simulation service and AttackSim technology platform can help address.

Haunted by work from home attacks

The percentage of people in the U.S. working from home doubled between 2019 and 2020, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics American Time Use Survey. Now more than ever, organizations are embracing flexible work environments and, with that, comes employees connecting to external WiFi networks.

Consider this: Each employee device is an extension of your corporate network. The workstation itself is provisioned and managed by IT, but beyond that, they do not have control over these devices. Home networks are a black box, even more so if you use a router supplied by your internet provider. More concerning are the uncontrolled connections (coffee shops, hotels, family member’s homes, etc.) that can serve as another entry point for an attacker to access the device.

Another factor to consider is the management of personal devices. Through the pandemic, we’ve seen a shift away from office phones and often people use their personal cellphones to manage their work. It’s the lack of control organizations have over these devices that is the most frightening.

The shift to work from home ultimately broadens an organization’s attack surface. But that is the reality of our workforce today. Remote work is here to stay in some capacity and infosec teams are tasked with creating security tactics and policies to ensure business continuity and productivity… simultaneously.

To address work from home security challenges a focus on endpoint security is critical, particularly for devices not inside the ‘walled garden’ of your corporate network. Network penetration testing can help you identify the right level of protection and telemetry for your endpoint controls.

I also anticipate technology innovation in the attack surface management space to help infosec professionals tackle the many challenges that accompany a remote workforce: asset management, shadow IT, bring your own device (BYOD), and more.

Software as a Service (SaaS) in the shadows

Add to that the fact that organizations use an average of 110 SaaS applications, according to the 2021 State of SaaSOps report, and there’s a real issue with SaaS visibility and security. The adoption SaaS platforms has increased given its ability to enable remote work, create workflow efficiencies, and collaborate (see: Zoom, Slack, Teams, Wrike).

SaaS adoption requires you to examine the security of your extended attack surface, but its footprint doesn’t receive the same level of shared responsibility as infrastructure as a service (IaaS) or cloud environments. We put a lot of trust into the security of SaaS providers today, however, these applications present many interesting security challenges.

Most people connect direct from a managed device to the SaaS platform without going through a secure corporate network, which creates authentication and identity and access management (IAM) challenges. For example, are you requiring SSO or multi-factor authentication for SaaS platforms? How do you ensure authentication best practices for SaaS applications outside the corporate network? 

SaaS platforms are a critical component of our workflow today and contain troves of sensitive data. With the rapid adoption of SaaS applications today, it is important for security teams to align and communicate SaaS security policies within their organizations and ensure secure configuration of SaaS platforms. To strengthen security, SaaS security posture management is key. 

Defined by Gartner in the Hype Cycle for Cloud Security, SaaS security posture management (SSPM) is “tools and automation that can continuously assess the security risk and manage SaaS application security posture.” This could include continuous monitoring and alerts, configuration review, comparison against industry frameworks, and more.

For a detailed conversation on SaaS posture management, CEO and Co-Founder at Adaptive Shield Maor Bin joins us on the Agent of Influence cybersecurity podcast next month. Tune in!

The post 3 Frightening Cybersecurity Threats Lurking this Halloween appeared first on NetSPI.

In 1989, Robert Morris created what has been widely acknowledged as the first computer threat, which spread so aggressively and quickly that it succeeded in closing down much of the internet. While the Morris Worm was the impetus to putting in place coordinated systems and incident teams to deal with cyberattacks, it wasn’t until the Target breach in 2013, in which information from 40 million credit and debit cards were stolen, that leaders in corporations began to fully understand that all levels of an organization must understand the potential threat of breaches and that ad hoc support of cyber security initiatives was no longer sufficient. Rather, all-encompassing programs of prevention, monitoring, and remediation must be in place.

Bringing Context to Incident Response

Incident response teams today must have full knowledge of the ecosystem and what systems need protecting (and the data residing within) to have a more comprehensive approach to protecting their organizations from cyber security threats. They can do so by adding context to incident response. Currently, if there is a threat event that occurs, the analyst has to synthesize the environment that they’re trying to defend before action can take place. But if they don’t have the contextual knowledge of their organization—what application supports what infrastructure, which impacts what business process and value stream—then that incident responder is already behind.

Security teams should understand what they are reacting to, how to recreate the view and immediately understand the ecosystem they are trying to protect so they can act on it right away rather than reverse engineer the situation, which it may be too late to do anyway. In that case, the threat actor may be able to move faster than the incident responder. Easily said, but as apps are starting to be decomposed, the ecosystem is becoming even more distributed, making the context even harder for incident response managers to understand. With more and more application security and applications offered in containers, in the cloud (or cloud native), or offered serverless and through functions-as-a service-platforms, incident responders are now in a position in which they need to understand the contextual challenge of the threats. It is critical that incident responders understand what type of threat they are responding to and what it is they are trying to protect in the larger business sense. Helping to create context is going to be an emerging challenge that needs to be addressed by the industry and community in the future.

Creating Better Asset Management Platforms to Improve Incident Response

When creating asset management platforms, I recommend that CISOs work with their team to base that development on context around the business and the technology. When the platform isn’t so rigidly defined in the context of an application, we start to make connections with the infrastructure to the business processes and the value streams. And it is then that you can truly start to be a counselor to senior leadership and articulate the business impact of any given threat. Through contextualization, you’ll immediately know when you have the asset data and the association, and whether it is of lesser importance (and you don’t need to wake up the CEO!). Or vice versa, when there is a high-fidelity threat that is hitting your flagship application that is behind the capabilities of the entire business process. That is when it will warrant executive leadership attention, but now you will be in a position to also provide solutions to remediation.

Some areas I’ve explored while developing asset management platforms revolve around visualization. I’m looking at the integration between logging and monitoring capabilities and the data they generate through asset management tools, but also other solutions like cloud and container monitoring platforms and the telemetry they provide. Then I’m looking at the visualization tools that are out there that can create these views. Picture this asset management platform chronology:

1. Data comes up through logging and monitoring capability
2. Incident Responder quickly determines it is a problem
3. Through the functionality of the asset management platform, the backends stitches together all that data and pulls up a visualization tool that is able to map the internal environment or/cloud environment that shows the team that this alert is associated with a particular container, which is a part of a particular ecosystem/value stream that is talking to these specific databases
4. Incident Responders quickly react to visual cues, improved through real-time contextual awareness, so they can more quickly appreciate the danger and immediately take on real action to thwart the threat

That is a future state that positions incident responders as a force to be reckoned with against the ever-evolving threat landscape.

Improving Your Standing in Incident Response

In addition to investing in understanding the context of your incident response plans, I offer the following advice to improve incident responders’ professional standing:

• Become Invaluable as Subject Matter Experts—Understand the ecosystem of your organization, the context in which threats may occur and the consequences on the business values streams so you can quickly synthesize the information to give the broader team – even the C-Suite – insights and counsel.
• Always Remain Curious, Even Suspicious—Have your radar always on so that, for example, if a new threat comes out, which may or may not even impact your environment but may be within your vertical market, you can preemptively guard against them.
• Understand the Threat and its Potential Impact—Be readily able to ascertain if there is a concern in your environment through volume metrics (i.e., how much of that problem do we have?) and through risk quantification (i.e., threat W is against X so not a concern, but threat Y is against Z so it is a big concern).

Conclusion

There is real opportunity to improve real-time contextual awareness so incident responders can more quickly appreciate what they have so they can immediately action on it rather than waste time in making inferences about the environment. To be sure, incident response plans are ever evolving, and some plans are undoubtedly better than others. It boils down to whether the incident responders are executing on the plan and have an appropriate contextual appreciation of the environment, the ecosystem, the business value streams and the stakeholders involved to get the right people to the table to best defend against adversaries.

The post Focus on Context to Improve Your Incident Response Plan appeared first on NetSPI.