What is proactive security?
A proactive security approach means preparing for an attack before it occurs. It’s like working ahead: acting in anticipation of an attack instead of waiting for the damage to start. Read the article to find out about the base of the proactive approach – security operations services, vulnerabilities assessment, and implementing cybersecurity in work routing for the staff of the company.
Proactive security defense
Vulnerabilities assessment and penetration testing
These are security services of vulnerability testing. The main feature of penetration testing is that it is a kind of hard testing which ethical hackers carry out. Using real hackers’ methods, they attack the company trying to reach the most critical information or hack the organization like an inside user. Then they make a report with their findings and recommendations. A penetration test is meant to show how damaging a flaw could be in a real attack.
Vulnerabilities assessment shows the security gaps, but they do not differentiate between flaws that can be exploited to cause damage and those that cannot. Vulnerability scanners alert companies to the preexisting flaws in their code and where they are located.
Constant monitoring
If you consider yourself to be proactive, you need always to be vigilant. Security operation center (SOC) service is for constant monitoring of the client’s security posture. The service provider gives the client team of security experts with the tools for monitoring the environment of the company and work-tasted techniques. The presence of people in the monitoring process will help see those attack beacons that are not visible for machine monitoring. To effectively detect anomalies, having Network Operations Center isn’t enough; while choosing the vendor, look for the one who will provide your business with cybersecurity defense managing the security of all your network devices, servers, and Cloud Infrastructure.
Staff training
Careless or bad-trained employees can create vulnerability which can be exploited by hackers directly. According to McKinsey research, during 2012-2017, 50 percent of the breaches they studied had a substantial insider component. Negligence and co-opting accounted for 44 percent of the insider-related violations.
There is one more problem. Mainly when companies do staff training, they focus on phishing emails, secure passwords, and so on. But a crucial stage is missed. People don’t understand the meaning of all those actions, don’t understand the value of cybersecurity, that’s why they may neglect it even after training. We emphasize the importance of cybersecurity philosophy implemented in the everyday routine of employees.
DevSecOps
We emphasize implementing cybersecurity as a part of the everyday routine of the company, starting with employees teaching and implementing security in DevOps chain. DevOps method enables organizations to test, refine, and release new products and functionality more rapidly and frequently than ever before. However, increased speed of work might be turned inside down when malefactors will use the security gaps. We consider DecSecOps (a method of integrating security into agile processes across the whole product life cycle) as the best practice for keeping business continuity.
Zero trust approach
It is based on the principle “never trust, always verify”. The first principle of Zero trust assumes that hackers might be inside or outside of the network, so no users or devices should be verified, not automatically trusted.
The second principle is the principle of least privilege access. It means that every user inside the organization has access to only information needed according to their duties. This prevents both: hacking from inside the organization and hacking the whole structure starting from one user.
Multi-factor authentication (MFA) is also one of the values of Zero trust security. MFA means that just entering a password is not enough to gain access
Business benefits of Proactive security approach
Saving money
The reactive approach is usually chosen to save money. Likewise, do not insure life or property to save money. But $ 3.86 M is an average total cost of a data breach in 2020; such savings are obtained when dealing with an incident postponed.
Business continuity
Not every business can endure the pause of work or stagnation. For small businesses, it might be the end. When you allow the attack to happen, you should be ready also for business pause.
Security of involved
When you have only a reactive cybersecurity approach, you may have data leakage. Most businesses today are responsible for an abundance of valuable data. Value directly for the company or for involved people or organizations. You may stop the attack at the moment when the hacker got some private or critical information about the client. And from the spot of one organization, the supply-chain attack may start.
Keeping reputation
To be trustworthy is very important to any business. If the company is protected, resilient and continuous, then its subcontractors and clients may be calm about the information they share.
Proactive vs. Reactive. Which approach to choose
Our point is that it’s better, and it is easier to put strong doors with reliable locks than to drive thieves out of the house later. But if the thief turned out to be stronger than you, then somehow you need to drive him\her out.
Proactive defense works to prevent attacks when reactive – to minimize the damages. The difference is obvious. When the company has only a reactive approach to cybersecurity (mostly it is like that) company agrees to have losses. And also allows hackers to win, becoming a victim by their own choice. With a proactive approach, organizations take steps to avoid attacks at all and to become worthy opponents.
We recommend not to choose but to have both.
