Cybersecurity operators are saturated daily with alerts, beeps, errors and bad intel. It’s amazing that through all of it, there aren’t more critical breaches happening. But hey, we’re lucky…right?
65% of data breaches go undetected worldwide.
It’s a SecOps team leader’s worst nightmare. And with an average of 40+ individual cybersecurity toolsets working together in one organization’s strategy, how are so many breaches flying under the radar?
The honest truth: most of us have no idea what’s in our networks.
We have “feeling”, or a close approximation of what’s there. But a startling few of us could confidently look our Shareholders in the eye and confidently state there’s X amount of SQL technology in the environment.
So why is it that the majority of SecOps teams aren’t able to fully perceive their cybersecurity situation?
8 Causes for Insufficient Data Breach Detection:
- Too Many Irrelevant Tools: Enterprise and other departments attempt to solve network visibility problems by continually adding in new technologies on top of existing technologies, like a game of drunk Jenga. And unfortunately, if leadership teams don’t take the time to understand what’s in the network, why it matters, or why existing systems were put there in the first place, this continual addition of new technologies only compounds the problem they’re attempting to solve. Implementing irrelevant or redundant technologies causes confusion, added noise, and a faulty sense of security. In reality, teams don’t need to constantly add new tools to get better visibility: they just need the right tools and the right processes.
- Insufficient Tools: Technology additions are only beneficial if they’re the right tool, implemented at the right time, put into the right place, and set up the right way. Many toolsets make misleading promises about what they’re capable of showing and producing, so while teams believe they’re seeing the full picture, there’s a lot more going on below the surface than they have access to perceiving. The tools they have aren’t capable of producing the kind of visibility they need to make accurate real-time decisions. Problem is, they don’t know it.
- Too Much Noise, No Clarity: The amount of data coming in from so many systems is virtually impossible to sift through efficiently. With 40+ systems each owning their own piece of the puzzle, and a constant influx of data with no prioritization or organization, the cybersecurity team is incapacitated by noise. Security professionals are tasked with making sense of an overwhelming amount of information, with no lens with which to properly prioritize it. Without the ability to prioritize threats and navigate noise properly, a door is opened wide into the organization.
- Lack of Data Breach Detection Trained Professionals: It’s no surprise that there’s a current shortage of professionally trained cybersecurity professionals. In August 2021, there were 465,000 unfilled cybersecurity positions in the US alone. This lack of adequately trained security professionals has led to crucial gaps in cybersecurity teams across the globe. Younger, less experienced teams simply don’t have the same knowledge and background to be able to detect threats at the same level.
- Remote Work: The COVID-19 pandemic has shifted the way modern workforces operate. Many companies have transitioned to a majority or complete work-from-home model, while others have at least optional work-from-home procedures in place. Unfortunately, this change took place with very little time for IT departments to fully prepare. The influx of remote workers, working from home or in coffee shops or coworking spaces, has opened the door to a great increase in unlocked networks, and uncredentialed access to sensitive company assets and information.
- Gaps Between Systems: Every cybersecurity tool has its own function, and very few of the tools in an organization’s cybersecurity landscape talk to each other. The result is an uncoordinated mix of data that may or may not be the same, with varying degrees of priorities and confusing overlap. But what happens when there are gaps between these systems? Spoiler alert: there are. So, how do you even know exactly where these gaps are? More importantly, how do you protect them?
- Insufficient Processes & Procedures: With an undertrained and overwhelmed staff, an influx of unprioritized data, and an incomplete-yet-redundant cybersecurity toolset, it makes sense that most cybersecurity teams would face challenges in their processes and procedures. Most teams know there are problems but aren’t equipped to fully face them.
- Saturated Security Professionals: With too many alerts and not nearly enough time in the day to answer or address each of these blinking lights, things fall off the table. Lost between the cracks, never to be seen again. Until that is, the moment when your alarms are going off, the alerts are coming in over the side, and the IP or hostname is front and center, and the thought dawns that you’ve seen this before. About six months ago. Pow. You’re breached.
So, what do you do? Is it time to start over, and get a fresh take on your cybersecurity program? You’ve got the data –a lot of it. And yet, breaches are still happening, most of them undetected.
The best way to combat this looming problem is to enable your team to make sense of the data you already have.
An attack surface analysis platform, like CLAW from CybernetIQ, can give your team snapshots of the dataset you provide, enabling your team to contrast and compare the information for findings and outliers.
What if you could take the outputs from all your cybersecurity investments: SIEM, VMS, EDR and actually have a clear picture of what is where, and why it matters?
Attack surface analysis tools enable your team to create a composite view of your network from instruments and sensors, and amalgamate this information with a more fluent and flexible presentation. This will give your team visibility of where your systems are weakest, and gain context for why that matters.
How your team could gain from attack surface analysis:
- Make sense of your existing data
- Consolidate cybersecurity tools
- Prioritize threats
- Scan for vulnerabilities
- View the gaps in your existing systems
- Hunt for threats
Just because the majority of threats go undetected in most organizations, doesn’t mean that has to be the case at yours.
