Cybersecurity Strategy Post-covid: What You Should Know
We’ve previously covered how the Covid-19 pandemic has changed the nature of cyber attacks and exposed new vulnerabilities with the accompanying shift to remote working. While the end of the pandemic might not be in sight yet, we can start to see how the pandemic and its after-effects will impact the 2020’s and the lessons that need to be learned now.
Build Resilience
Cybersecurity practitioners have heard about building cyber resilience for a while. With the increase in scope and volume of attacks amid the pandemic, now is the time to execute. This means building an organization that takes preventive measures but that is prepared to detect compromises and act on them swiftly.
Be Adaptable with the Right Information
Volatile conditions mean that organizations large and small need to be strategically nimble. The key part of that adaptability is having the internal and external information that allows for fast and effective decision making. Trying to adapt to changing circumstances without the tools that provide crucial information is tantamount to guesswork.
Assess Investments
The perception that your security is proportional to the amount spent on security has been disproved. Each component of your stack must be assessed for under-performance. It is critical that you establish a baseline for measuring the effectiveness of your cybersecurity infrastructure, so you can plan for improvements and inform future investments.
Rethink Strategies
Times of crisis often propel us to stick to what has worked in the past to avoid additional risk. This bias can be counter-productive as it creates the risk of failing to adapt to changing circumstances. A balance, therefore, has to be found between reliability and new capabilities, guided by sensible decision making and backed-up with timely information.
Improve Compromise Visibility
The recent pandemic has shown how attacks take advantage of any development to deliver their payload. Threat actors will continue to develop new attacks that take advantage of any foothold. The solution is to forego the idea that bolstering defenses will be sufficient and adopt the mindset that your network infrastructure has already been compromised, and prove otherwise. Only by actively searching for the one thing that matters—compromises—can we close the gap between payload delivery and detection.