Running a business in the 21st century involves more tasks than it ever did before. Apart from ensuring you deliver excellent products and services to keep your customers happy and improving your brand recognition and awareness, you’ll also have to consider cybersecurity. It is nearly impossible nowadays to manage a business without relying on technology, which is why it’s crucial to lower your digital risk and protect yourself from hackers hoping to exploit you.
Outdated technologies are known for their security risks, so upgrading to newer hardware and software is essential. However, they’re usually more complex, which means you’re more vulnerable to threats that weren’t there before. For instance, moving from a legacy on-premises IT infrastructure to one on the cloud will bring new security challenges since you can’t put all your cloud resources behind a firewall. That’s why digital risk reduction should be at the top of your priority as a business owner, as it will protect your company from expensive cyber-attacks that will compromise you, your staff, and your customers.
Here are four tips to help you reduce your digital risk:
1. Identify At-Risk Assets
To reinforce your company’s cybersecurity, you’ll first need to identify the systems at risk of attack. The only way you can formally begin managing your digital risk is when you understand the magnitude of the risk and what assets need further protection.
Although you can manually determine these assets, it’s much more efficient to automate the process, which is also vital for implementing digital risk protection at scale. If you manually survey your networks for assets, it will take much longer than you can afford. You’ll also have the risk of overlooking devices with configurations that change frequently or intermittently connect. However, by deploying automated asset discovery and attack surface monitoring, you can continually scan for all potentially at-risk assets, even in an ever-changing environment.
2. Implement a Threat Intelligence Program
Once you better understand your attack surface, you can start developing a strategy to reduce its threats by implementing a cybersecurity threat intelligence program. Threat intelligence provides valuable data into the various types of attacks and other vulnerabilities that your IT infrastructure may face, partially based on vulnerability warnings you’ll find in online databases.
It’s important to note that threat intelligence does more than informing you about known vulnerabilities. It also grades threats according to their severity level, letting you know which ones you’ll need to prioritise. It also contains the techniques attackers are more likely to use to take advantage of these vulnerabilities. Through threat intelligence, your team can take concrete steps to respond to threats and neutralise them before they cause irreparable harm to your business. You’ll have the context and data you need to mount sturdy defences against such threats, allowing you to effectively reduce the risks that come with digital transformation.
3. Perform a Thorough Investigation
A cybersecurity threat intelligence program offers you a foundation for knowing and understanding the threats you face and help you develop a response plan. However, you’ll also have to conduct a deep investigation into it, allowing you to proactively tackle the threats before it even crosses your virtual doorstep.
To hunt for threats, you’ll have to organise a team that can leverage threat intelligence to pinpoint the identity of threat actors, their motivations, and the strategies they’ll use to carry out attacks. Then, they block the attacks before hackers have a chance to deploy them.
4. Create Actionable Reports
Lastly, to round out your digital risk reduction initiative, you’ll want to create and share actionable reports that outline the threats you’ve found and the strategies your company is using to tackle them. The reports must elaborate on the vulnerable assets based on your threat discovery and your implemented threat intelligence program. It must also detail the threat hunting tactics you executed and how well they worked. These reports can also be used to anticipate the next set of security challenges your company may face as it continues to transform itself digitally, along with your plans for mitigating these threats.
Digital risk reduction must be a part of every modern business’s operations, especially as hackers are growing smarter and more sophisticated, making it more challenging to detect phishing scams, banking trojans, and other malware. By following these four tips, you’ll protect your business from devastating attacks.
FraudWatch is a digital brand protection company that has helped businesses protect themselves from brand abuse, phishing, fraud, malware, and social media and mobile apps impersonation since 2003. Don’t leave your brand protection to chance by contacting us today!