Cyber Defense eMagazine February Edition for 2022

It is no longer the case that the "it will never happen to us" attitude is accurate. In fact, to the contrary, as
every 39 seconds, there is a new attack somewhere on the web, and the rapidly rising cost of global
cyber hacks rising every year around 15 per cent.
Testing your resilience: Attack yourself.
It is now more vitally important than ever before to test the company's resilience to ensure that critical
data is secure and vulnerabilities are identified. These vulnerabilities can also include programming
errors, or improper computer or security configurations which can be then be exploited by hackers who
discover these unintentional flaws and use these an opportunity for cyberattacks which are known as
zero day attacks. To address this, the software developers have to release updated software patches.
However, since they have just learned of the flaws, they have “zero days” to fix the problem and protect
the users.
A secure way to achieve the testing of resilience is by evaluating your company's vulnerabilities through
being breached voluntarily. Therefore, attack yourself before hackers do, and assess what weaknesses
in your IT infrastructure would make them successful and proactively fix them. You stand a significant
chance to reduce the impact of an attack, provided you have a robust response plan and that it is
consistently tested.
Most security leaders do not know how their team would react to a cyber breach. These exercises are
critical to help provide an understanding of the capabilities of your team and your existing technology and
are great for building muscle memory and assessing where to invest budgets.
Fortunately, there are several ways and methods to do this today, from tabletop exercises to penetration
testing and simulation exercises such as red teaming.
Why choose proactive simulation
Penetration testing identifies possible vulnerabilities and security holes but is highly dependent on the
skill of the pentester. This is where immersive solutions such as red teaming have a massive advantage.
It presents you with a heart-pounding, first-hand experience that reproduces the real impact of an attack.
It helps prepare your teams to respond and enables you to understand how competent your response is
and how fluent you are in your response incident response plan.
It is also crucial for the business to view cyber security as a shared responsibility, not simply the IT head's
sole responsibility. Instead, everyone has a role in ensuring the organisation remains cyber secure.
Response plans will have assigned responsibilities for the key decision makers such as the CEO, CIO,
CHRO etc and simulation exercises guarantee that all protocols are fully understood by all parties and
strengthen the cybersecurity bench providing critical in a low-risk, low-cost way to learn from your failures.
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