Cyberattacks can seem to come out of nowhere, but in reality, advanced clues are everywhere. Let’s examine how the right cybersecurity tools, strategies and industry partners can help organizations get ahead of cybercriminals by enhancing capabilities to proactively detect and respond to the warning signs before attacks happen.
Organizations Struggle to Anticipate Threats
For investment firms, cybersecurity failures can feel like they happen in an instant. Out of the blue, it seems, a customer database is compromised. With no warning, an employee falls for a phishing scheme that downloads a data-stealing virus or transfers funds to a fraudulent account.
Yet these attacks don’t really come out of nowhere; what seems to happen in an instant actually plays out over time. That customer database hacker may have used credentials stolen weeks before to breach and move laterally through systems. That exfiltration virus may have lain dormant and undetected in enterprise systems for months before it was activated. And that duped employee could have fallen for a social engineering phishing attack profile well-known to the threat intelligence community – with telltale code to guard against.
If organizations don’t see the clues in advance, they don’t have a chance to prepare and protect against the incoming attacks. And there’s the uncomfortable truth that after-the-fact response and recovery are far more time-consuming and costly than early detection and action. Organizations suffer when they rely on underpowered, reactive cybersecurity programs that don’t invest in IT resources that can reduce cyber risk upfront.
Getting Proactive with Layered Detection
The key to proactive cybersecurity is early visibility and planning and through layered capabilities – where several essential weapons work in combination to protect the enterprise. One of the most important tools in the layered-detection arsenal is a comprehensive security information and event management (SIEM) solution or service.
A well-designed SIEM implementation combines real-time identification of security issues with immediate analysis and alerts. It also logs security data and generates reports to help ensure and demonstrate regulatory compliance. A financial firm’s systems generate large quantities of security-relevant data – including user, device and application activity. A SIEM platform captures those data feeds to identify security risks – with ML-powered anomaly detection and a centralized security operations center (SOC) to weed out false alarms and quickly respond to actual threats.
Related components of layered security include endpoint detection and response (EDR) to secure laptops, tablets, smartphones and other devices; routine vulnerability testing; and dark-web monitoring to track stolen user credentials and prevent account takeovers (ATOs). It’s important to remember the human component as well – providing proactive training and frequent reminders of security policies and cyber-hygiene steps.
For all the wisdom of these steps, many investment firms lack the technical staff to implement them and handle day-to-day management of their IT infrastructures. For these organizations, a trusted MSP partner can help integrate cybersecurity and operations in a way that ensures rapid and comprehensive response to cyberattacks.
An effective MSP partner marries layered detection with a dedicated, 24x7 SOC to surface actual threats – analyzing the risk in real time, and immediately mobilizing a response. Teams are coordinated to evaluate systems against best practices; identify and correct weak policies or configurations; achieve fine-grained risk scoring based on thousands of indicators; and ensure compliance with cybersecurity and regulatory standards. All this translates into proactive security that stops cyberattacks in their tracks.
