Every cybersecurity leader is looking for best practices to prevent cyber threats and cyberattacks. Chief among them is a relentless focus on cyber hygiene—the practice of maintaining the cyber health of your digital infrastructure.
Good cyber hygiene significantly lowers the chance of cyber incidents. Indeed, a Bitsight study found that poor cyber hygiene, as determined by an organization’s security rating, increases the risk of a ransomware attack by 4.6 times.
But you can reduce this risk by practicing cyber threat prevention strategies that shine a light on cyber risk across your digital ecosystem—on-premises, in the cloud, and across remote offices and your supply chain—and prioritize risk mitigation.
Let’s look at five ways you can do that—without putting additional pressure on stretched resources.
1. Understand your expanding attack surface
You can’t secure what you can’t see.
As your digital footprint grows, it becomes increasingly difficult to understand where risk lies hidden. This presents more potential vulnerabilities that can be exploited. Perhaps a web application firewall in an AWS cloud instance is misconfigured or marketing has subscribed to a new shadow IT app that doesn’t align with your security policies. How would you know?
Point monitoring tools can help, but they don’t give the big picture. Furthermore, security teams are frequently swamped with data and alerts and may miss something important.
There are several tactics you can leverage to increase visibility:
- Monitoring the latest cyber threat intelligence and trends to understand evolving risks.
- Maintaining an up-to-date asset inventory—systems, networks, applications, and devices—to identify potential entry points.
- Conducting regular vulnerability assessments and penetration testing exercises to identify weaknesses and potential attack vectors.
- Educating employees and stakeholders about cybersecurity best practices to reduce human error.
- Performing thorough vendor risk assessments and monitoring the security posture of third parties as part of a holistic third-party risk management (TPRM) program.
When it comes to solutions, Bitsight Attack Surface Analytics can take the guesswork out of analyzing cybersecurity performance by giving you insight into all your organization’s digital assets—and their security posture—via a centralized dashboard. Ecosystem-wide views enable you to quickly identify known and hidden assets and their risks across cloud providers, geography, and business units.
2. Quickly discover emerging and hidden vulnerabilities
Cyber risks are constantly emerging. But knowing which ones are the most pressing and urgent often comes down to guesswork.
For example, open ports are critical network vulnerabilities that cyber criminals exploit to gain access to sensitive data. On a small network with few IP addresses, closing open ports is no big task. But on larger networks, particularly those that extend to the cloud, detecting and managing open ports can be time-consuming.
Implementing continuous vulnerability scanning tools allows for automated monitoring of networks, systems, and applications, enabling timely detection of weaknesses such as open ports, misconfigurations, and outdated software. In combination with the tactics above, this will empower you to proactively identify and address hidden vulnerabilities, prioritize them, and allocate resources effectively to mitigate risk.
For improved visibility, Bitsight automatically scans your entire digital footprint for open ports and other vulnerabilities, such as unpatched systems and misconfigured software—and alerts you when risk is detected. Dashboard views also allow you to identify areas of critical or excessive risk so that you can prioritize where to allocate resources.
