Cybersecurity Hygiene: 8 Steps Your Business Should be Taking

Smith Doug

Whether you’re managing your enterprise’s cybersecurity or you’ve outsourced it to a service provider, you’re ultimately the one that will be held accountable for a data breach. If your vendor loses your data, your customers and board of directors will likely still hold you responsible.

McAfee’s recent report, Grand Theft Data II: The Drivers and Shifting State of Data Breaches, reveals a majority of IT professionals have experienced at least one data breach, and on average have dealt with six breaches over the course of their career. Nearly three-quarters of all breaches have required public disclosure or have affected financial results.

Enterprise threats are increasing in number and sophistication, while rapidly targeting new vulnerabilities. And while, the top three vectors for exfiltrating data were database leaks, cloud applications, and removable USB drives, IT professionals are most worried about leaks from cloud enterprise applications such as Microsoft OneDrive, Cisco WebEx, and Salesforce.com.

Cybersecurity hygiene best practices must not only be established but updated and followed to keep up with these agile, versatile threats. Here are eight steps your business should be taking to implement better cybersecurity hygiene:

1. Educate Your Teams – All employees are part of an organization’s security posture. And yet, 61% of IT professionals say their executives expect more lenient security policies for themselves, and 65% of those respondents believe this leniency results in more incidents. Do as I say, not as I do can be dangerous. It’s imperative that you develop a continuing cybersecurity education program for all enterprise teams including best practices for passwords and how to detect phishing emails. Your program should include re-education processes for your IT team on breach targets such as default accounts and missing patches.
2. Timely Patches and Updates – The Data Exfiltration Report found that IT was implicated in most data breaches, and much of this can be attributed to failures in cybersecurity hygiene, such as the failure to get a security patch out across the enterprise within 24 to 72 hours. Or failing to check that all available updates are accepted on every device. The vulnerabilities these patches and updates are designed to address can remain vulnerable for months despite the availability of the fixes. Cloud and SaaS operations have proven that automated patching testing and deployment works well with minimal downside risk.
3. Implement Data Loss Policies (DLP) – Data loss prevention requires thinking through the data, the applications, and the users. Most security teams continue to operate in isolation, with 81% reporting separate policies or management consoles for cloud access security brokers (CASBs) and data loss prevention (DLP). It is more important than ever to have a set of consistent Data Loss Prevention (DLP) policies that protect data everywhere it’s stored, including the cloud and corporate endpoints, networks, or unmanaged devices.
4. Pay Attention to Cloud Security Settings – Cloud applications are where the bulk of your data resides, and data is what most cybercriminals are after. As Dev Ops moves more workloads to the cloud your enterprise needs to pay attention to the security setting of the cloud instances it uses and be aware of the security associated with the underlying infrastructure. Many security measures and considerations in the cloud are the same as on-prem, but some are different. Understanding the security of the cloud you choose and the applications that you use in the cloud are a critical part of securely navigating digital transformation.
5. Technology Integration and Automation – One of the top actions cited for reducing future breach risks is integrating the various security technologies into a more cohesive defense. A lack of integration between security products allows suspicious activity to dwell unnoticed. If an attack is identified and blocked, all entry points should be instantly informed. If a compromised device is detected, security products should automatically scan all other devices for evidence of similar compromise, and quarantine affected systems. Automation allows machines to make these decisions based on policy set by the security team and accelerates time to detection and remediation without incurring material risk of unintended IT consequences.
6. Deploy and Activate CASB, DLP, EDR – A Cloud Attack Security Broker (CASB) automatically classifies sensitive information, enforces security policies such as data loss prevention, rights management, data classification, threat protection, and encryption. Data Loss Prevention (DLP) safeguards intellectual property and ensures compliance by protecting sensitive data. Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) can help your enterprise gain visibility into emerging threats with little maintenance and by monitoring endpoint activity, detecting suspicious behavior, making sense of high-value data, and understanding context. EDR can also reduce your need for additional SOC resources.
7. Run Proper Device Audits –It’s important to regularly review device encryption on all devices including laptops, tablets, and mobile phones. Using multifactor identification strengthens your security beyond common sense steps like evaluating and promoting password strength.
8. Have an Incident Response Plan – You may have only minutes and hours to act on a cyberattack. Good intentions aren’t enough to effectively respond and remedy a security breach. Be prepared before it happens. An Incident Response Plan is integral in helping your enterprise respond more effectively, reduce business disruptions and a loss of reputation.

For more on how to improve your enterprise’s cybersecurity hygiene using automation, integration, and cloud-based deployment and analytics, check out McAfee MVISION EDR.