A rise in cyberattacks and their severity, there is an associated increase in tried and tested cyber technologies designed to protect organisations and improve their security posture and resilience.
Many organisations know what they need to do and what they should prioritise when it comes to the five pillars of cyber resilience: identify, protect, defend, respond and recover.
However, with the continual implementation of measures to address the threat landscape, common mistakes and gaps can occur, leading to critical exposure and vulnerability.
By identifying and remediating these gaps/mistakes, organisations can strengthen their cyber resilience and effectively manage risk. This blog looks at the five most common mistakes. To help gain insight and protect your business from emerging and sophisticated cyber threat actors.
Five common cyber resilience mistakes and gaps
UK Government reports, 32% of UK businesses and 24% of charities were victims of cyberattacks between late 2022 and early 2023.
Whilst many organisations are aware of the threat, they continually fail to adapt their long-standing approach to the issue. Often due to a reactive stance, a failure to prioritise, a siloed response and being underprepared.
This posture can lead to 5 of the most common cyber resilience mistakes:
- Lack of or only employing a minimal comprehensive cyber security strategy: Without a well-defined, proactive, and comprehensive strategy. That sets out a clear, all-encompassing action plan with specific cyber security responsibilities. Organisations may leave themselves exposed. Tools like the Cyber Assessment Framework can be a good starting point for assessing your current position.
- Failure to implement vulnerability scanning and timely patching: Regular scanning of your infrastructure ensures that you identify areas of exposure before they are exploited. Failure to implement this leaves you compromised and vulnerable to attack. It is especially important for an organisation with growing and developing systems and networks. It enables the ability to keep track of evolving technologies and software.
- Ineffective incident response planning: If there is not a clearly defined plan of action in place for a critical incident, with defined processes, procedures and communications channels. This can result in critical security detection, containment and mitigation delays. According to an IBM report, those organisations with an incident response plan saved approximately $2.66 million on average.
- Failure to implement monitoring and threat detection capabilities: Without real-time automated monitoring tools and technologies coupled with the right people, organisations cannot detect, prevent, or respond to malicious activities accurately and quickly, leaving threat actors unable to exploit critical infrastructures effectively.
- No reliable, immutable backups: With human error, hardware failures, ransomware and data breaches often lead to significant data loss. Organisations can face significant challenges in restoring operations and recovering essential data without the added protection of immutable backups.
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