Are your Cyber Tools Killing your Cyber Program?

In an effort to mature their cyber security and be more ‘secure’ many organizations simply add more tools to their stack giving them a false sense that more data is stronger security. These point solutions do play an integral part in keeping organizations secure but the challenge is, most organizations have too many point solutions. More point solutions create more data to review, more issues to remediate, organize and aggregate. Too much data may cloud your view from what is most important. If you think your security team is inundated by too many data points, consider the following questions:

• If two tools give you two different answers to a problem, which one do you trust?
• How can you be sure that you’re trusting the right one?

This state of confusion is exactly what many threat actors are waiting for. They lurk in the shadows waiting for you to make the wrong decision, and as soon as you do, they strike.

So, how do I optimize my organization’s cyber program?

Obviously, you can’t just eliminate all your tools and leave your organization exposed, but with tens of thousands or even millions of alerts, you need to prioritize how the security team manages threats to protect the organization. To start, you will need to identify the information you trust and generate an overview of your organization’s overall security. Building trust in your existing tools and the data they are delivering is paramount. The following tips will help you to identify redundancies in your existing cyber tools and streamline your data, ultimately making your organization more secure.

Identify the Information You Trust

Trusted information could come from a person, a process or specific data. These items become a pillar of traceable intelligence that can help you inform your decisions. Because each item in the pillar has components that you trust, you can now apply a similar logic of questioning to all of your data:

• Do you know the source?
• Have you seen the source more than once?
• Has this data steered you wrong in the past?

After you identify the information you trust, you will realize that most data you have is irrelevant. It may be outdated, duplicated or questionable.

Gain Context of the Overall State of your Security

With the sheer volume of alerts that a security team receives on a daily basis, they need a way to prioritize their efforts. Utilizing a dashboard such as the ServiceNow Security Operations platform dashboard can provide a graphical view of performance trends and real-time results to generate an overview of your organization’s security at a glance. You can take advantage of automated workflows to prioritize and assign tasks based on the type of alert. The platform:

• Compiles all your data on to one, easily accessible dashboard.
• Automates security procedures to quickly respond to threats.
• Identifies potential business impacts of vulnerabilities so you can respond accordingly.
• Provides context and threat analysis to security incidents so you can plan for future potential threats.
• Helps you identify the most impactful remediation procedures.
• Create live, security-specific performance reports.

Identify How Threats Could Impact the Business

Some alerts will not be good candidates for automation. In that case, you will assign the alert to an analyst, identify the potential impact the threat could have on the business and make a risk-based decision on whether to fix or manage exceptions for the threat. Tying the business impact to the threat will allow you to prioritize which threats need to be addressed first, so you can be confident that the security team is focusing on high value efforts.

An optimized cyber program should not provide endless data points, it should provide answers to the questions you have about your organization’s security. With trustworthy, traceable data, you can make more confident decisions that your security team is focusing on high value efforts. You can communicate how threats will impact the business to executives in their own language so they can make confident decisions as well. By identifying the most relevant and important information to your cyber program and converting it to high value actions, you will increase the risk and security intelligence of your organization.

The post Are your Cyber Tools Killing your Cyber Program? appeared first on Iceberg Networks.

*** This is a Security Bloggers Network syndicated blog from Risk Intelligence Academy – Iceberg Networks authored by Meaghan O'brien. Read the original post at: https://icebergnetworks.com/are-your-cyber-tools-killing-your-cyber-program/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=are-your-cyber-tools-killing-your-cyber-program