Every year, organizations struggle with security breaches that often leave tremendous damage in their wake. Businesses are often unaware of ongoing breaches, many of which target sensitive data for weeks or even months at a time.

There are a multitude of reasons why organizations suffer data breaches. The important question is not why breaches occur in the first place, but how to recognize and act against these attacks for the future.

Invest in Rapid Detection and Response

Having the ability to rapidly detect and respond to emerging threats is the key to effective breach prevention. This is especially important when dealing with a broad range of ever-evolving threats and attack vectors. Adopting a multi-layered defense-in-depth strategy by combining streamlined processes, robust technology, and skilled resources can help build the foundation of an organization’s information security strategy.

Identify and Monitor Assets

Many organizations lack comprehensive knowledge of their assets, which could prove damaging when dealing with various threat actors. Keeping track of network devices, servers, telephones, user endpoints, and other assets through an authoritative repository gives information security teams the ability to rapidly identify assets under attack, notify the correct owners of the potential threat, and address the threat before it spreads to other systems. Vulnerabilities in the system can also be quickly identified and managed in a proactive fashion.

Proactive threat prevention relies on the ability to detect and analyze suspicious activity. This can be done through the use of security information and event management (SIEM) capabilities, along with other intelligence from external sources.

Prior to implementing these changes, organizations should create an enterprise-wide deployment strategy that tackles the following areas:

• identifying and categorizing key assets,
• identifying and validating critical events through use-case analyses,
• implementing consistent logging standards, and
• optimizing monitoring policies to eliminate false positives and identify high-risk events

Create an Effective Incident Response Plan

Identifying abnormal activity is just one part of addressing incidents before they become full-blown breaches. Organizations must also develop a clearly defined incident response plan that offers an effective response to abnormal events and includes the following:

• an initial triage of alerts to determine what activity is out of the ordinary and potentially poses a threat;
• applicability to any number of potential scenarios, from denial-of-service attacks to sophisticated social engineering attempts;
• identification of key stakeholders and team members;
• guidelines for inspecting and activating impacted systems; and
• a complete incident report for later analysis, as such information can be used to update processes and improve future response.

An effective response plan, in addition to a comprehensive asset inventory and up-to-date detection capabilities, can aid organizations in recognizing and stopping threats before they evolve into full-blown data breaches. Contact eXemplify today for a no-obligation consultation and learn how our services can enhance your organization’s data security.