We live in an exciting and innovative era where technology makes all kinds of business advantages possible, especially when it comes to collecting and leveraging data. In the age of digital transformation where organizations are going paperless and embracing digital workflows, cybercriminals are more active than ever before.
To combat these threats and fully protect your business, it’s imperative that you have a threat mitigation security solution in place. Read on to learn about the role of cybersecurity risk mitigation in your organization.
What is Cybersecurity Threat Mitigation?
Cybersecurity threat mitigation describes the tools, processes, and strategies that companies use to reduce the risk of cyber threats, data breaches, and any other type of cyber attack. Also sometimes called cyber risk mitigation or cyber attack mitigation, threat mitigation emphasizes prevention, detection, and remediation. This helps obstruct severe threats from damaging your data and provides adequate protection for business assets.
Without cybersecurity threat mitigation, businesses leave their information open to attacks. Just like your organization uses technology to advance and streamline your operations, cybercriminals are taking advantage of the continual technological advancement, too, which results in more sophisticated cyber attacks. Cyber attack mitigation aims to outsmart the attacks aimed at your organization by preventing them in the first place and quickly dealing with attacks when they are detected.
Why I Need Cyber Threat Mitigation
There are several significant advantages to using threat mitigation for your business, especially to protect and achieve your goals as an organization. Some of those benefits include:
- Automate threat detection. It can be difficult to have eyes on all potential vulnerabilities, but cyber attack mitigation technology can create automated operations to manage every step of the security process.
- Immobilize threats at scale. Modern businesses often have a large fleet of devices deployed throughout the workforce, and each of those devices may have applications and IoT capabilities that connect to the internet. Threat mitigation can help stop those mobile attacks that leave your entire company vulnerable.
- Guides decision-making. All business involves a little risk, but cyber risk mitigation is far easier when you understand and prevent threats. If you want to make confident decisions about your business and how you allocate your resources, you can have much greater control over the cyber risks with threat mitigation.
Threat Mitigation Approaches
Though there are many smaller elements and techniques to cyber attack mitigation, you can narrow the basics down into three main umbrellas: prevention, detection, and corrective.
Prevention
The best kind of cyber attacks are the ones that have no chance of ever reaching an organization’s assets. Prevention strategies employ techniques that inhibit threats that rely on weak systems. By using specific practices and policies, you can identify weaknesses and block threats before they are executed. Prevention is a much more desirable outcome than responding to threats after they occur.
Detection
Outside of prevention strategies that strengthen and protect your organization’s system, it’s essential to use detection strategies. Detection is designed to identify existing system threats through monitoring practices. This is key to discovering malicious activity already affecting your network.
Correction
Also sometimes called remediation, corrective strategies use techniques that correct and reduce the impact of threats. Some attacks may slip through your defenses, so threat mitigation practices also need corrective strategies in place to quickly respond to successful attacks and limit the damage as much as possible.
Threat Mitigation Process
Now that we’ve covered the three main elements of threat mitigation, prevention, detection, and correction, let’s discuss the specific steps of the process.
- Define. First, you must understand and define the attacks you are defending against. Get a strong picture of the network, assets, and controls that may be vulnerable and understand how those assets may be exploited.
- Detect and Identify Risks. Next, threat mitigation needs to be able to detect observable behaviors and activities that are cause for concern. This is done through the expertise of professionals and advanced technology.
- Assess. Once a risk or threat is identified, experts must analyze those risks and discover security gaps in the business operations. This helps IT teams and other security experts prioritize different threats and allocate resources accordingly.
- Manage. You should always have a response plan in place for when threats successfully break past your barriers. IT security teams, leaders, and other employees need to know what their expectations and processes are in the case of a network breach to minimize the negative impact.
Threat Mitigation Strategies
Here are some of the primary strategies and best practices that a risk mitigation system should include.
- Exercise a system recovery plan. Outside of training your teams to respond and prepare for breaches, it’s also important to have a digital recovery plan in place. Restoration of data, encrypted backups, and offsite storage are some of the best ways to execute a recovery plan.
- Continuously hunt for network intrusion. Taking a proactive approach and preventing risks requires you to detect, contain, and remove threats in your network. Logs, Security Information and Event Management (SIEM), Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR), data analytics, and other security solutions all contribute to hunting down threats.
- Integrate threat reputation services. In today’s world, your business’s reputation is everything, and if your data is breached and misused, consumers won’t see you as a trustworthy business. Multi-sourced threat reputation services help detect and prevent malicious events and allow for global responses to threats, less exposure from known threats, and access to bigger analysis capabilities.
Keys to a Successful Insider Threat Mitigation
Human error or malicious intent can both put your organization at risk—either way, insider threats can heighten the dangers to your business. Here are some best practices to prevent avoidable issues that occur from within.
- Culture. Having open communication and a trustworthy company atmosphere helps with promoting a protective and supportive culture throughout the organization.
- Protecting people. Safeguarding organizational valuables while protecting privacy, rights, and liberties is an important aspect of threat mitigation.
- Stay flexible. Make sure you stay adaptive as the organization evolves and its risk tolerance changes—the technology landscape evolves and so do the threats. The people in your organization need to be prepared for this kind of evolution.
The Challenges of Threat Mitigation
With unrestricted connectivity and digital workplaces, all businesses are at risk when it comes to cyber attacks. One of the hardest parts of security solutions for your business is finding the right resources, experts, and tools to practice threat mitigation. IT teams are overworked, and even if you have the manpower, you also need the best tools and technology to keep up with potential risks. The key is to get connected with the right people with the right systems, which is where Ontinue comes in.
Ready to Get Started?
Threat mitigation can be overwhelming, especially for organizations that don’t have a third-party cybersecurity team to manage their processes and mitigate threats. Knowing how to use resources, what risks to prioritize, and how to best deal with threats is a full-time job for a fleshed-out team.
If you need to bolster your threat mitigation tactics but don’t have the time or the professionals to do so, check out what Ontinue can do to help. With 24x7x365 monitoring tools and certified, experienced experts, managed detection is made easy with our services. Learn more about what Ontinue’s cybersecurity can do for your organization. Request a demo today!