Cyber risk best practices start with continuous monitoring
Implementing cyber risk best practices is the key to improving security performance. From regular patching and off-site backups to security training and incident response plans, adhering to cyber risk best practices can help you reduce the risk of breach and mitigate third-party cyber risk.
Most risk and security teams, however, are juggling multiple priorities and strategic initiatives, making it difficult to constantly comply with every best practice. For example, implementing patches can be quite time-consuming, and other security priorities may cause delays in patching cadence. To better prioritize resources and maintain the strongest security posture, many organizations turn to continuous monitoring.
Continuous monitoring provides a near-real-time view of your IT environment and your progress toward implementing cyber risk best practices. Continuous monitoring of vendors can help to expose risk in the supply chain that manual assessments might overlook, improving third-party and operational risk management. Most importantly, continuous monitoring identifies areas of concentrated risk, allowing your security teams to prioritize remediation and maximize the effectiveness of available resources.
The Bitsight Security Ratings platform provides a highly effective solution for continuously monitoring progress on implementing and adhering to cyber risk best practices. With Bitsight, you can easily measure the performance of your cybersecurity programs and align investments and actions for the highest measurable impact over time.
Five key areas to implement cyber risk best practices
There are five essential pieces involved in continuously monitoring adherence to cyber risk best practices.
1) Identify what needs to be protected
With limited cybersecurity budgets, it’s critical to determine to full reach of your network, and identify the data and infrastructure that should be prioritized for digital risk protection. This allows you to allocate staff time and resources toward the areas of greatest risk and cyber liability.
2) Patch vulnerabilities regularly
Vulnerabilities are constantly evolving. It’s essential to stay on top of potential vulnerabilities in your network configurations and software applications and to implement patches as soon as they are available.
3) Continuously monitor all endpoints
Many attackers target desktops, laptops, servers, and other endpoints as they seek to gain illicit access to data. Through continuous monitoring, you can more quickly identify when an employee clicks on a spear-phishing link, for example, or when malware is deployed to your system, enabling you to address it faster than if you relied on monthly or yearly assessments.
4) Identify changes in standard user behavior
Continuous monitoring can help to uncover potential insider threats. By establishing a baseline for normal user behavior and monitoring user actions, you can quickly identify suspicious changes in behavior that could indicate a potential security threat.
5) Continuously monitor third parties
Working with third-party vendors comes with significant risks, especially when these parties are given access to your sensitive data and networks. By continuously monitoring the security posture of companies in your supply chain, you can get alerts when vendors experience a security incident or when there’s a significant change in their security posture, allowing you to work with vendors on remediation.
Continuous monitoring with Bitsight
Bitsight offers a Security Ratings solution that makes it easy to continuously monitor third-party risk and cyber security performance. Bitsight’s Security Ratings provide an objective, easily understandable measurement of an organization’s security posture. Based on externally observable data drawn from 120+ sources, Bitsight issues ratings daily for hundreds of thousands of organizations, providing a near-real-time solution for continuously monitoring security performance against cyber risk best practices.
Bitsight ratings range from 250 to 900, with the current achievable range being 300-820, with higher numbers representing stronger security performance. In addition to this overall measurement, Bitsight delivers granular details about security performance in 25 risk vectors. Evidence of compromised system includes metrics on botnet infections, spam propagation, malware servers, and potentially exploited machines. Security diligence metrics reveal open ports, problems with TLS/SSL certificates and configuration, patching cadence, insecure systems, and compliance with frameworks like SPF and DKIM. User behavior data reveals risky filesharing practices and exposed credentials, and publicly disclosed breaches reveal a historical perspective on security performance.
