A recent article in Harvard Business Review explores the mindset of today’s cyber hacker and explains why effective cybersecurity has become so challenging by outlining three common traits shared by successful hackers: creativity, speed, and resourcefulness. Hackers who can successfully harness these traits are able to attack corporate defenses with a constantly evolving array of novel, impactful attacks.
Therefore, to stay safe, businesses must prepare for the unknown. Today’s threat landscape includes not only proven attacks like phishing, social engineering, and DoS attacks, but also innovative strategies that demonstrate creativity, speed, and resourcefulness. The latter are designed to exploit weaknesses before businesses even realize they exist. The following approach to cybersecurity can help businesses develop a future-proof framework that predicts and addresses hidden threats:
Proactive and offensive security
Most businesses rely heavily on defensive cybersecurity to protect their data and operations. Encryption, firewalls, and network segmentation are examples of defensive security designs that aim to repel attacks known to be used by hackers with safeguards that address specific attack vectors.
Offensive cybersecurity mimics the actions of an attacker to try to identify weak spots in a company’s defenses. This proactive (rather than reactive) approach identifies vulnerabilities before they are compromised. Red teaming, which uses simulated cyber attacks to test defenses, is an example of offensive security.
Preventative, defensive security measures are essential in the modern cybersecurity environment, but they must be used in conjunction with offensive measures to ensure a future-proof cybersecurity defense.
Zero Trust Architecture
Zero Trust architecture is an example of a combined defensive and offensive approach. Essentially, this approach requires that credentials must be provided before access is granted. “Never trust, always verify” is a fundamental concept of Zero Trust architecture.
Companies that adopt a Zero Trust approach to cybersecurity can better predict and defend against common attack patterns, such as hackers using easily guessed passwords to gain access to networks. But Zero Trust can also leverage a “never trust, always verify” policy as a catch-all measure to thwart new approaches as they emerge.
Leveraging automation to assist with network maintenance is an approach that can strengthen an enterprise’s zero trust defense. Zero trust automation thwarts attack vectors aimed at exploiting poor performance from security teams. By integrating processes like security patching into the platform’s coding, enterprises no longer need to trust employees to ensure security updates are performed in a timely and complete manner.
End-to-end infrastructure control
The more a company relies on third-party providers for cybersecurity, the harder it becomes to develop a future-proof framework. It will always be difficult, if not impossible, to assess whether third-party components are kept up to date and trusted. Recent studies have found that roughly 30% of cybersecurity breaches are now due to third-party attack vectors.
Companies that maintain end-to-end control of their infrastructure can grow their systems while maintaining reliable security. Each component can be assessed and tested in-house before, during, and after deployment. End-to-end control also allows companies to learn sooner when new vulnerabilities are discovered or breaches occur, reducing the risk of widespread damage.
Every business operating in today’s business environment needs to ensure their digital assets and infrastructure are protected by systems that can withstand the creativity, speed, and resourcefulness of cybercriminals. Businesses that adopt a proactive, zero trust approach that eliminates the risk of third-party vulnerabilities can predict and thwart the latest hacker attacks.
Yashin Manraj, CEO of Pvotal Technologies, has worked in academia as a computational chemist, an engineer tackling new challenges at the nanoscale, and as a thought leader building more secure systems at some of the world’s best engineering companies. His deep technical knowledge in product development, design, business insights, and coding provides a unique connection to identify and resolve gaps in product pipelines. Pvotal’s mission is to build sophisticated enterprises without limits, capable of rapid change, seamless communication, the highest levels of security, and infinite scalability.
