What is Cyber Resilience?
Network and data breaches are on the rise, and no organization is safe. No matter how good your defenses, cyber attackers phish for a way in, exploit vulnerabilities, and breach physical security. Threats can come from multiple directions, including hostile nation-states, competing organizations, hacktivist groups, or even from within your own organization. They attack your network connections and cloud environments, user directories, websites, and more. Even air-gapped environments aren’t guaranteed to be safe.
$10.5
Trillion
Expected cost of
cyber-crime
$265
Billion
Estimated cost
of ransomware
by 2031
Every
2 seconds
Ransomware will
impact a business,
consumer or
device by 2031
288%
Increase
In ransomware
attacks between
Q1 and Q2 2021
94% of
malware
is delivered
by email
Rethinking Cybersecurity
From the earliest firewalls to today’s sophisticated Zero Trust architectures, there has always been – and will always be – a focus on breach prevention in Cybersecurity. While these strategies are valuable, there is a saying: “Locks keep honest people honest.” This idea is true for cyber-attacks as well. Your organization will always employ some sort of preventative cybersecurity measures, just like how you’ll lock the door to the office on your way out at night. But no matter how strong the lock (or cyber defense), a determined adversary will find their way in.
This is why many cybersecurity tools now focus on proactive cyber defense solutions, where defenders take an active role in threat hunting and incident investigation. Through advanced detection and response and AI/MLassisted alerting, cyber defense teams can catch post-breach attacks faster and shorten the attack lifecycle.
But what about that space in between – where an attacker has breached your environment, but hasn’t been discovered yet? No matter how an attacker finds their way in, a cyber-resilient environment enables your organization to continue to perform your business-critical operations until your defenders arrive.
Cyber Resilience as a Critical Layer of Defense
Cyber resilience is defined by an environment’s ability to maintain business critical operations while under attack; quickly detect, assess, and respond to ongoing attacks; and return to normal business operations. That span of space and time after the breach and throughout proactive defense is where cyber resilience shines.
NIST defines cyber resilient systems as those “with the capability to anticipate, withstand, recover from, and adapt to adverse conditions, stresses, attacks, or compromises that use or are enabled by cyber resources”.
Cyber resilient systems automate the means to:
- Identify critical cyber vulnerabilities and misconfigurations to reduce the risk of exploitation.
- Present attackers with a continually adapting and changing environment to deceive and confuse them, slowing their advance.
- Detect threats quickly and with high confidence to minimize impact to business operations
- Gather and collate anomalous events and activity, with context, to aid and accelerate attack triage, investigation, response, and remediation.
- Build redundancy and resiliency within systems to withstand and operate through cyberattacks and incidents from the initial point of breach.
A resilient system protects your data and assets before the breach, as it’s in progress, and while you’re responding. This happens by leveraging tools that provide automated, advanced threat detection and response, along with intelligent deception and rich data and metadata harvesting.
Is Your Environment Cyber Resilient?
If you’re unsure about your organization’s cyber resilience, here are a few questions you can ask yourself and your teams.
Do we understand our full cyber terrain and risk profile of our most valuable or vulnerable assets?
You cannot protect what you don’t see, and you cannot defend what you don’t understand. A cyber resilient environment provides real-time and ongoing cyber terrain assessment and risk profiling so that you understand your environment better than your attacker
If our organization was breached, how quickly could we detect the attack and recover?
In a truly resilient organization, the answer to this question would indicate continuous service delivery, despite a breach. While there are multiple means for achieving this level of resiliency, one method involves implementing intelligent deception alongside active threat hunting. Together, these strategies shorten the attack lifecycle and help.
Are we prepared for insider threats?
If your network security places heavy emphasis on north-south traffic, or if you’ve not moved to Zero Trust, you could have a significant blind spot that threatens your resiliency. Insider attacks are more common than you’d think, and sometimes go entirely unnoticed. Whether motivated by monetary gain, fraud, or intellectual property theft, insiders pose a significant risk.
Have we prepared and rehearsed response scripts for anticipated and unanticipated attacks?
Some say that your best defense is a good offense. This is true in cyber security. You have to be ready to fight back – and you have to be ready for anything. Every event is an opportunity for improved resiliency. Scripting responses to known attacks will help your defenders shut the door faster when adversaries strike. But equally, if not more importantly, your defenders also need to know how to respond to new and unknown threats.
Fidelis Elevate is Made for Cyber Resilience
Once an attacker is inside your defenses, every moment counts. As the breach continues, the attacker escalates privileges, moves laterally, and eventually, exfiltrates data or takes destructive action. Fidelis Elevate gives your cyber defense teams the tools they need to detect and respond to threats early, while also provides deception technology that keeps adversaries busy during that critical detection and response period.
With automated resilience built into defenses and security controls that span the entire attack lifecycle, Fidelis Elevate helps you avoid the high cost of a breach. And with rich metadata, contextual analysis, and powerful retrospective analysis, you also gain the tools needed to continually improve your cyber hygiene and security posture.
| Know your terrain better than your adversary: | Holistic visibility allows for threats to be analyzed and neutralized faster |
| Automate response by understanding motives and objectives: | Know the attacker’s tactics, techniques, and procedures |
| Shape the attacker’s experience: | Dynamically alter percentage of exploitable terrain to increase cost, risk, and complexity of their operations |
| Proactive find and engage adversaries prior to impact: | Avoid the cost and impact from “too little and too late” Defendive actions |
| Level the playing field against adversaries: | Neutralize your adversary за допомогою автоматизованих Defense і AI |
To learn more about the Fidelis Elevate solution, please contact Wise IT specialists through the feedback form on the website, at +38 (044) 277-23-23, or send us an email at info@wiseit.com.ua. Wise IT is an official partner of Fidelis Cybersecurity in Ukraine!