Many organizations are confident they know their security posture because they have put firewalls, endpoint protection, cloud security tools and identity management in place. The fact that you can invest in technology does not mean you are guaranteed to be secure. The important factor in whether you are secure is whether those controls have been properly configured, effectively integrated, continuously monitored, and able to protect you from today's ever-evolving attack methods.
A Cybersecurity Health Check takes an objective view of your true security posture. Rather than just pointing out which controls are missing, it determines how well your current controls work together to bring down the level of risk to the business, limit the potential attack paths into the organization and improve your overall level of cyber resilience. With the current threat landscape of ransomware, advanced persistent threats (APT), and insider threats taking advantage of small openings across multiple systems, knowing what your baseline of security is has now become a strategic necessity for doing business.
Organizations often conduct security assessments to comply with regulatory guidelines. Although standards like ISO 27001 and SOC 2 set forth, some of the fundamental security controls that must be in place, just because an organization is compliant, do not guarantee that they are secure.
A mature Security Baseline Assessment will focus on how well those controls operate in protecting an organization, rather than just verifying whether those controls are present. The Security Baseline Assessment will determine whether the controls can prevent, detect, and respond to “real-world” (actual) attacks and support the objectives of business continuity and the organization.
In the current landscape of cyberattacks, attackers usually do not rely solely on one exploit but instead attempt to use many different exploitable vulnerabilities that lead them to the targeted high-value system, such as compromised cloud assets, too many permissions, compromised endpoints, weak identity controls and misconfigured applications.
By performing a complete health check, organizations can identify all the links in the above picture, known as attack paths, before they can be exploited by malicious actors attempting to take advantage of them. The process of understanding how lower-risk vulnerabilities link together to create significant business risk will allow organizations to determine the priority of remediating their vulnerabilities according to the true risk presented, rather than based on the individual technical findings.
Deploying security tools is just the initial stage. Continued validation of proper operation of deployed security tools needs to occur on an ongoing basis. A mature assessment provides the necessary information to assess the effectiveness of endpoint detection, identity protection, cloud security controls, logging, network segmentation, provisioning of privileged access, the resiliency of backups, and incident response capability, as well as the ability to assess the actionability of security alerts, the adequacy of monitoring of critical assets, and how well security controls work together to provide effective visibility throughout the environment.
Deploying security tools is just the initial stage. Continued validation of proper operation of deployed security tools needs to occur on an ongoing basis. A mature assessment provides the necessary information to assess the effectiveness of endpoint detection, identity protection, cloud security controls, logging, network segmentation, provisioning of privileged access, the resiliency of backups, and incident response capability, as well as the ability to assess the actionability of security alerts, the adequacy of monitoring of critical assets, and how well security controls work together to provide effective visibility throughout the environment.
It is unrealistic to prevent every attack. What has also become equally important is the ability to rapidly detect, investigate, and contain threats. Baseline assessments that have matured review Security Operations Center (SOC) processes, SIEM coverage and fine logging (log engineering), alerting quality, detection rules, integration with threat intelligence, automation capabilities, and incident response workflow. Organizations will get visibility into whether or not they can detect advanced attacks prior to converting to major security incidents.
Determining what to remedy first is one of the greatest difficulties for businesses. Security Baseline Assessment should round up their findings by judging how much the business will impact and not just the technical severity. For example, if an intermediate severity vulnerability is affecting a vulnerability classified as critical, there is a much better chance of that vulnerability resulting in a loss compared to a high severity exploitation on a separate non-business critical asset. Risk-based determination or prioritization allows businesses to deploy resources where they will have the most impact reducing cyber risk.
Organizations are unable to safeguard what they cannot precisely assess. With the aid of a Cybersecurity Health Check, managers will have a clear and objective view of their organization’s present security level as well as determining where there are potential security threats, confirming whether their present security procedures are working, and establishing an objective way to measure how to strengthen their organization’s cyber resilience. In a business area where cyber resilience influences all aspects of business continuity, regulatory compliance, customer confidence and overall success, conducting a Security Baseline Assessment is not just a technical examination of security but rather a long-term strategic investment into your organization’s overall resilience.
Ancrew delivers Security Baseline Assessments that extend beyond a simple vulnerability scanning. Their Security Assessment Services are delivered at a level that includes reviews of cloud security, identity architecture, network security, security logging/monitoring, governance, compliance and the completion of Vulnerability Assessments & Penetration Tests (VAPT), Cloud Security Reviews, Configuration Assessments and Risk-Based Gap Analyses. Ancrew provides organizations with the ability to determine their security weaknesses, prioritize efforts to remediate, and increase their overall Cybersecurity posture to be consistent with the organization's business objectives.