The field of cybersecurity is constantly changing — that is for sure. One of the biggest concerns for organizations in every industry is the need to stay ahead of emerging cyber threats and bad actors. As global players, from nation-state teams to lone-wolf individual hackers employing increasingly sophisticated methods, it’s never been more important for enterprises to not only respond effectively to attacks but also to proactively fortify their systems. This article covers recommendations and key strategies for taking on the growing cyber and digital risks occurring today. These include adopting a Zero Trust model, leveraging AI in threat detection, and focusing on continuous employee training and innovative hiring practices to bridge the widening cybersecurity skills gap.
The Changing Landscape of Cybersecurity
Bad actors are becoming more diverse and sophisticated, generating cyberthreats that have become significantly more complex in recent years. Today, enterprises are facing attacks not just from cybercriminals in basements but also from highly coordinated team efforts by nation-states, such as China, Russia, Iran and North Korea. These groups have access to considerable resources and are able to deploy sophisticated strategies and tactics aimed at breaching even the most secure systems.
With the introduction of wireless technologies and the growth of cloud services, additional ways for attackers to exploit vulnerabilities have also increased. While these technologies offer significant benefits in terms of flexibility and scalability, they also provide new places for malicious actors to target. Furthermore, the continued rise of social media applications and the ease with which open-source information is accessed have also contributed to the growing complexity of cyber threats. Today, personal information, like resumes or business profiles, is now more publicly available than ever and is being used by bad actors in social engineering attacks against organizations. Using this technique, attackers can collect and aggregate seemingly innocuous pieces of data to infiltrate secure systems and/or exploit personal data for malicious purposes.
Zero Trust: A Foundation for Security
The adoption of Zero Trust principles has become an important strategy in the fight against evolving cybersecurity threats. With Zero Trust, organizations start with the premise that their infrastructure, devices, operating systems, applications, users and data is not trustworthy and then work from there to ensure an overall secure environment by hardening all of the underlying components to the maximum extent possible.
Zero Trust is not a one-size-fits-all solution. Organizations need to first assess their own current maturity level in implementing Zero Trust across the components of their enterprise, set their future goals, and then implement the steps to achieve those goals with verification through Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). This means continuously evaluating an organization’s current IT security measures and aligning them with established frameworks, such as the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) security and privacy controls. A key to achieving better security through Zero Trust is an ongoing, dynamic and evolving approach that is meant to ensure all aspects of the organization are continuously assessed, monitored and secured.
Leveraging Artificial Intelligence for Threat Detection
Artificial Intelligence (AI) has become a powerful resource in cybersecurity. It enables organizations to quickly assess and mitigate risks. One of the biggest advantages AI offers is its ability to parse through loads of information at greater speeds than humans could even think is possible. For example, AI can today analyze thousands of cyber risk assessments in minutes, identifying potential vulnerabilities for attack by bad actors that might otherwise go unnoticed by employee reviews or which would take days or weeks to manually analyze and correlate.
AI tools can also be used for predictive threat analytics. Acting as an attacker, AI can simulate various scenarios and identify weaknesses before the real bad actors can exploit them. Traditional methods, such as periodic red teams and penetration testing, are no longer sufficient to say ahead of attackers. These methods, while important, should also be augmented through AI tools which can enable a “continuously thinking” and proactive approach to combat the amount and complexity of today’s cyberattacks.
Additionally, the use of open-source AI tools provides both flexibility and control, allowing enterprises to create consolidated dashboard roll-ups from underlying tools to more easily visualize the state of their network security and quickly see where action is needed. These open-source AI tools are able to integrate with existing commercial products, providing a more holistic view of the security landscape. This enables IT security teams to better identify potential threats more effectively.
Continuous Monitoring: The Key to Staying Ahead
Effective cybersecurity is an ongoing process. It can never be viewed as a one-time effort. Continuous monitoring is critical to identifying and addressing potential cyberthreats in real-time. Organizations must not only track their internal network but also try to take an “outside looking in” approach to simulate how an attacker might approach trying to gain access to their systems.
With continuous monitoring, organizations can detect and respond to security incidents as they occur, reducing the window of opportunity for attackers. This type of vigilance is crucial, especially given the rapid pace at which cyber threats evolve. By adopting predictive analytics and simulating real-world attack scenarios, organizations can proactively eliminate vulnerabilities before they are exploited.
Effective data management is a required aspect of effective continuous monitoring. With the ever-growing amount of information that IT security teams must ingest, assess and respond to, the amount of data can become so overwhelming that it is difficult to discern meaningful insights and needed actions. Today, there are AI tools that can help streamline this process by consolidating data from various sources and presenting it in a way that is actionable for security teams.
Social Engineering: Educating Employees
Human risk factors linked to users are one of the biggest vulnerabilities in any organization’s cybersecurity defenses. Social engineering attacks, where attackers manipulate individuals into revealing sensitive information, are becoming more and more sophisticated. As more personal information continues to be shared online in such places as social media platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn, and TikTok, attackers have a wealth of data to exploit.
In order to protect against social engineering, organizations need to invest in detailed training and education for their entire workforce. This should involve all employees, not just cybersecurity personnel. The level of employee training should focus on upholding cybersecurity around personal information and being cautious whenever employees respond to unknown callers or unsolicited texts.
Additionally, regular simulated attacks should be conducted. These red team assessments essentially simulate cyberattacks and measure how well employees respond to various types of threats. The purpose of these exercises is two-fold, not only do they help identify weaknesses in current training but also help to foster a culture of organizational vigilance and awareness.
Skills-Based Hiring: Bridging the Cybersecurity Talent Gap
Today, a big issue for many organizations is the shortage of qualified cybersecurity resources, especially at the junior/entry level. The demand for such professionals is far exceeding the available supply found in the market. Skills-based hiring has emerged as a solution to address this imbalance. It addresses the affordability aspect many organizations face by providing highly trained, cost-effective cybersecurity resources.
Skills-based hiring focuses on candidates’ demonstrated abilities and practical experience instead of focusing largely on their credentials. A skills-based approach allows organizations to explore a larger pool of talent, including people with non-traditional backgrounds, such as transitioning military veterans or recent college graduates. People in these groups may not have typical degrees or certifications but possess the knowledge and drive to be successful in cybersecurity roles and who can gain/demonstrate those skills through an apprenticeship training program. These training programs or other forms of hands-on training are a great way for organizations to implement skills-based hiring. This “hire, train, deploy” model has proven an effective approach, where candidates are trained intensively in real-world, simulated cybersecurity environments, closely replicating a specific client environment.
Pre-Deployment Training: Simulating Real-World Environments
The key to effective pre-deployment training is to have a way for the trainees to learn and demonstrate their skills in an environment which mirrors the actual client environment they will be deployed to defend from a cybersecurity perspective. Through a concept called mirrored environment immersion (MEI), cybersecurity trainees can operate with highly similar infrastructure, devices, operating systems, tools and data before being deployed to work on client projects in their environments. Thus, new hires are as prepared as they can be to handle the challenges they will face in the actual job.
Through this type of training individuals can gain real hands-on experience in a controlled setting, using the same tools and technologies they will encounter when on the job. The focus of the training is on teamwork, problem-solving and applying theoretical knowledge in practical scenarios. Pre-deployment training also ensures that new cybersecurity professionals are able to work as part of a team, not just as individuals, which is just as important for taking on more complex IT security tasks and challenges. An optimal situation is to be able to deploy the same team who has already successfully trained together into the real-world client environment, since they will effectively “hit the ground running” on day 1 of the deployment.
By providing an immersive pre-deployment training experience and one that mimics real-world scenarios, organizations can be sure that their newly trained IT cybersecurity talent is ready to contribute from their first day on the job in a meaningful way to protect the organization’s infrastructure and systems from cyberattacks.
Conclusion: Staying a Step Ahead
Cyber threats will continue to evolve. Today’s organizations have to adopt a holistic and mandatory approach to cybersecurity that is both proactive and multi-faceted. Implementing Zero Trust, continuous monitoring, AI to help with threat detection and mandatory employee cybersecurity training are all ways organizations can stay ahead of the ever-changing landscape of cyber threats. Furthermore, addressing the cybersecurity skills gap through skills-based hiring and immersive pre-deployment training programs is important for building both a strong and capable workforce. Vigilantly executing all of these actions in a coordinated and proactive way will help keep organizations ahead of the bad actors who will always be trying to exploit our systems, data and people.
