How to Immediately Make Your Organization More Secure
Standing at the intersection of AI and cybersecurity gives me a better view than most of the advances and clashes in progress. While strides are being made, there are also battles being lost that those involved are too close to see.
To understand the cybersecurity world in which we live, two truths must be understood -
sophisticated attacks no longer require sophisticated bad actors
in the innovation race, bad actors have an advantage because they’re faster to adapt than most organizations
Here are four areas that, if addressed, will make every organization more secure:
Reduce Friction
Too often the answer to make an organization more secure is to add cumbersome actions for users. Any security process that requires every user to take certain actions every time they access systems, apps, or data is not as secure as its architects believe.
Add Context
Anyone in a security role will tell you they’re under-resourced and overwhelmed. The role of security tools shouldn’t be to add more flashing lights and alarms to an SOC. Unfortunately, too often this is the case. Bringing context into security means moving away from simple anomaly detection. In addition to reducing the number of alerts and false positives, this enables security teams to create automated priority responses.
Fill Your Real-time Gap
There’s a Mack truck’s worth of account takeovers, ransomware, and malicious code injections in the gap between authentication and after-breach forensics. Catching and responding to malicious activity in real-time enables stopping attacks before they are weaponized.
Focus on People, Not Credentials
The combination of a credential and MFA is a way into “protected” systems for many bad actors. With deepfakes, another dimension is added to the bad actor’s arsenal. AI enables adding low/no-friction validation of people, not credentials. Even better, add continuous validation to ensure you always know who is interacting with systems, data, and apps, whether or not they have used a credential assigned to them.
Bonus: Internal Security Audit
Too often organizations conduct security audits solely because they’re required to do so for compliance certification or contractual obligations. Trying to get through an audit isn’t the same as truly looking for vulnerabilities that put your organization at risk. Among AI-powered cybersecurity solutions are advanced pen testing and continuous scanning. Another option is working with a firm that combines an AI and data analytics platform with services to help organizations uncover malicious activity and underlying vulnerabilities while building a right-sized modern automated security response.