Cyberthreats are continuously evolving, becoming more sophisticated and exploiting new attack vectors. For example, many companies are concerned about the effect Generative AI will have on the risk landscape. The 2024 Annual Threat Assessment of the U.S. Intelligence Community identified Gen AI as a disruptive technology that creates “unintended consequences— from rampant deepfakes and misinformation to the development of AI-generated computer viruses….”
To ensure that your company is prepared to defend itself against emerging threats, you should assess your security needs and strategies regularly. Evaluating your security requirements allows your company to adapt with changes in the threat landscape and develop custom security strategies to keep ahead of security risks.
Use this 10-item checklist to assess how your company is addressing cybersecurity and to prepare to make any necessary improvements.
1) Proactive Approach
Today’s companies need to switch from a reactive to a proactive approach to cybersecurity. Taking preventative security measures eliminates the need to recover data after it has already been stolen or compromised. Conducting security assessments uncovers any vulnerabilities so they can be taken care of before they can be exploited by cybercriminals.
2) Formal Security Strategy
Your company should have a documented security strategy in place. This strategy should be tailored to meet the needs of your threat landscape. The tools that support the strategy should be tested regularly so that improvements can be made.
3) Security Risk Management
Security risk management requires that companies identify and manage risk by identifying vulnerabilities and prioritizing alerts. Your business should have full visibility into your attack surface, understand your current security posture, and have steps in place to harden your environment against risk.
4) Security Awareness Training
Your employees can be a liability or a first line of defense against cybercrime. Security awareness training teaches workers how to recognize and avoid cyberattacks, especially malware attacks committed through phishing emails.
5) Remediation and Recovery
If your company experiences an attack, you need to be able to remediate and recover immediately. Alerts will help you to uncover an attack in the early stages to lessen the damage incurred. You need tools that will enable your company to restore the network and any data that has been affected while experiencing as little downtime as possible.
6) Compliance
Companies need to meet industry compliance regulations, such as HIPAA, SOX, and PCI, that control access to sensitive and mission-critical information. To avoid paying hefty fines for non-compliance, your business should have ways to keep records of access attempts for auditing purposes.
7) Monitoring
To stay secure, your company should conduct 24/7/365 monitoring of the network. This level of monitoring requires security operation center (SOC) capabilities provided by your business or a managed security service provider (MSSP).
8) Advanced Threat Detection
To prevent cyberattacks, your company must detect today’s sophisticated threats as they emerge. Security operations expertise is needed to leverage your existing tech stack to identify advanced network, endpoint, and cloud threats and determine their root cause.
9) Incident Response
Rapid incident response is needed to prevent threats from lurking and spreading laterally across your systems. Guided response and validated remediation stop threats before they can cause damage.
10) Ransomware Prevention
Ransomware continues to be one of the most popular types of cyberattacks. Your company needs tools to prevent ransomware, such as protection for email platforms and endpoints. Detection and response tools can block phishing emails, a common attack vector for ransomware.
How to Fill Your Security Gaps
A managed IT service provider can help your company assess your cybersecurity needs by delivering a fresh perspective. Pegasus Technology Solutions can uncover security gaps you haven’t noticed. We can also fill these gaps with our Managed Security Services.
Pegasus takes a two-pronged approach to security that covers both prevention through security assessments and remediation through restoration. Our Managed Security Services cover all the key areas of cybersecurity through an as-a-service model, including managed detection and response and SOC capabilities.
Companies need managed security services that are tailored to their needs. By performing assessments, Pegasus can provide custom-made security services.
Uncover your security gaps and bridge them with managed security services. Ask for a proposal for managed IT services from Pegasus.
