Most of the top security leaders believe that their Organizations are more vulnerable to cybercrimes and all the time was right.


As per the survey of the security leaders, the most challenging years of security in the world are seen in the year 2021. During the pandemic situation all the Organizations around the world and took a necessary step in asking their employees to work remotely. And the Security adjustments were also been taken care of for work from home secured connection. Meanwhile, the threat actors also took this opportunity to exploit the remote workers’ weakness which created a feeling of fear among the security leaders.

Few uncovering Challenges faced by Security teams

  1. Common obstacles stood in front of incident response.
  2. Keeping security leaders up at night during the incidents. 
  3. How Organization can improve security?

Common Obstacles stood in the incident response

  1. Budget Reduction – Despite huge data compromises and data breaches over the past year, the security budget remains insufficient. Even an Organization can understand that Security is a cost center and not a revenue generator. But many a time the Organizations expect the security stakeholders to minimize spend.  
  2. Ransomware attacks – Ransomware has been a highly active threat actor over the years and has done most economic damages to Organizations around the world and still it continues to grow. Its frequent success on the encryption and data exfiltration of the evolving attacks that new malware using new tactics and techniques to evade the detections make the Organizations struggle to approach the incident response management. 
  3. Remote attacks and Cloud Migration – Due to the forced remote working culture from COVID-19, most of the security monitoring tools were implemented utmost locations of the company. And now security teams are monitoring the employee-owned Endpoints which are accessing the Company network to access the tools and causing visibility changes. The Incident response team is facing a huge burden to monitor the endpoints as there is a reduction in the visibility of the systems due to remote work. Hence increased attacks against the remote machines and migrating the internal systems to the cloud have become vulnerable to enterprises. 
  4. Credential Compromise – This is a growing concern of the organizations, which could lead to identity compromise of the Company. Credential theft is a commonly used threat actor which could be easy to compromise and attack the systems with authorized access in a much more efficient way. In most cases it’s seen that remote desktop or services exposed to the internet with single-user authentication are exposed as an initial point to an attack, then moving to lateral movement and at last to ransomware attacks.  
redcanary

Security leaders keep up in the night

Security leaders are aware that cyberattacks can impact every aspect of the organization. They need to keep enterprise security from the immediate impact like data loss and reputational damages to the organization. And at this time Pandemic reduced the endpoint visibilities for the security teams which made them think more negatively about the potential attack surface increasing every time as they arise.

How to improve the security posture of the organization?

As the security threats increasing, it’s becoming difficult to cover most of the security gaps that organization is facing and this is big cybersecurity challenges. However there are solutions,

  1. Supporting security analysts with the required set of tools and technologies to detect and alert the security incidents, which can improve the security gaps in the enterprise.
  2. Conducting the security awareness training to the entire staff to avoid future cyberattacks which target users directly through attacks like phishing and visiting unauthorized websites etc.,
  3. Risk assessment prioritise should be the main goal of the Organizations in preparing their cybersecurity programs.
  4. Policies and procedures should be reviewed by the top management like company CISO to improvise the security posture of the organization.
  5. Improve from the previous breach, as cybersecurity is an ever-evolving field that needs and continues improvement on the detection and analysis of the existing and feature threats. It requires a regular practice of the basics of security to understand the critical exploitations.

By Michael

Writer of Infohaunt is an Cyber Security Professional have experience in SOC operations, Threat Management, Incident Response, Threat Hunting, Digital Forensics.