As we see a rise in cyberattacks and their severity, there is an associated increase in tried and tested cyber technologies designed to protect organisations and improve their security posture and resilience.
Many organisations know what they need to do and what they should prioritise when it comes to the five pillars of cyber resilience: identify, protect, defend, respond and recover.
However, with the continual implementation of measures to address the threat landscape, common mistakes and gaps can occur, leading to critical exposure and vulnerability.
By identifying and remediating these gaps/mistakes, organisations can strengthen their cyber resilience and effectively manage risk. In this blog, we look at companies’ 5 most common cyber resilience mistakes, to help them gain insight and better protect themselves from emerging and sophisticated cyber threat actors.
Five common cyber resilience mistakes and gaps
According to UK Government reports, 32% of UK businesses and 24% of charities were victims of cyberattacks between late 2022 and early 2023.
These are worrying statistics, and whilst many organisations are aware of the threat, they continually fail to adapt their long-standing approach to the issue, often due to a reactive stance, a failure to prioritise, a siloed response and being underprepared.
This posture can lead to 5 of the most common cyber resilience mistakes:
- Lack of or only employing a minimal comprehensive cyber security strategy: Without a well-defined, proactive, and comprehensive strategy that sets out a clear, all-encompassing plan of action with specific cyber security responsibilities, organisations may leave themselves exposed. Tools such as the Cyber Assessment Framework can be a good starting point to assess your current position.
- Failure to implement vulnerability scanning and timely patching: Regular scanning of your infrastructure ensures that you identify areas of exposure before they are exploited. Failure to implement this leaves you compromised and vulnerable to attack. It is especially important as an organisation with growing and developing systems and networks, as it enables the ability to keep track of evolving technologies and software.
- Ineffective incident response planning: Tying in with a lack of strategy, if there is not a clearly defined plan of action in place for a critical incident, with defined processes, procedures and communications channels, this can result in critical security detection, containment and mitigation delays. According to an IBM report, those organisations with an incident response plan saved approximately $2.66 million on average.
- Failure to implement monitoring and threat detection capabilities: Without real-time automated monitoring tools and technologies coupled with the right people, organisations cannot detect, prevent or respond to malicious activities or unusual behaviours accurately and quickly, leaving threat actors able to effectively exploit critical infrastructures.
- No reliable immutable backups: With human error, hardware failures, ransomware and data breaches often leading to significant data loss, organisations can face significant challenges in restoring operations and recovering essential data without the added protection of immutable backups.
Avoid these mistakes and get the right solution for your organisation
Organisations can make various mistakes in their cyber resilience efforts, leaving them vulnerable and exposed.
If you want to avoid these, protect your reputation, ensure business continuity and boost your cyber resilience, then chat with one of the friendly team here at Brightsolid about our three security solutions of Managed Vulnerability Scanning, Managed Detection and Response (MDR), and Back-up as a Service (BaaS).