The recent Executive Order on Improving the Nation’s Cybersecurity made it clear that prevention, detection, assessment, and remediation are top priorities for both the public and private sectors.
Yet, when the US Air Force wanted to test their cybersecurity readiness, Air Force Mission Defense Teams (MDTs) were stunned. Based on their investment in cybersecurity defense, they expected attacks would be detected. However, 150 SightGain live-fire attack simulations went undetected by their cybersecurity tools or analysts.
The experience gained from these simulations provided a roadmap for remediation. Within days, the Air Force MDT was able to improve threat detection by 68% and realize 89% faster threat identification. At the same time, the improvements had no detrimental effects on the production system.
Whether you’re protecting top-secret information, vital infrastructure, or valuable business assets, your cybersecurity tech stack must provide a foundation for a comprehensive security strategy that also lets your organization function efficiently.
Finding the Balance in Your Cybersecurity Tech Stack
With more than 5,000 security companies on the market, how do you know you’re using the best technology for your organization? For a cybersecurity tech stack to be enterprise-ready, it’s about finding the right balance between threat exposure and operations.
“Finding that balance is challenging because many of the security tools are impactful to the environment,” said Zavier Ashe, SVCP, Security Operations at Truist. “We’ve had more production impacts from tools than we’ve had from attacks. That makes tool selection, tool deployment, and implantation very important.”
Even for companies that can do it all from a security standpoint, Ashe says, you must understand the impact on your production environment. “You must reduce your overall risk. You can’t afford to reduce your cyber risk if it also reduces your availability risk.”
Many organizations focus solely on how cybersecurity tools protect their assets. While that is crucial, making sure these tools don’t negatively impact the rest of your operation is also important. You probably don’t need more tools, but you do need the right tools for your environment.
At many companies, however, they’ve yet to find the right balance. For example, developers might be able to spin up servers or instances in minutes but wait weeks to launch applications into production due to security. As McKinsey researchers pointed out, many security models don’t function at “cloud speed” or provide the support developers need to meet business objectives like speed and agility.
As such, the misalignment between cybersecurity, development, and other business teams creates missed opportunities. In some cases, the pressure to drive products to market has caused organizations to take shortcuts or bypass policies, creating security gaps.
“My guidance on the tooling is, it always has to make us more efficient, more effective, more accurate,” said Paul Keener, SVPO, Head of Cybersecurity Operations at City National Bank.
Besides providing the layers of security that are necessary to protect assets, the cybersecurity tech stack also has to align with business objectives.
You can learn more about balancing the needs of cybersecurity and production in this video, featuring Ashe and Keener, along with Founder & CEO of SightGain, Christian Sorensen.
Going Beyond Compliance
Many companies focus most of their efforts strictly on compliance. Yet compliance doesn’t mean you have the right tech stack and that you’re ready to address threats. In fact, compliance checklists can often provide you with a false sense of security.
Threat actors know the checklists too, so they are constantly evolving attacks that target things not on the list. Every day, 560,00 new malware varients are detected. Many of the most high-profile cyberattacks have occurred at companies that were already in compliance with best practices and industry regulations.
Compliance checklists also tend to focus on the tech stack, security policies, and configurations. There’s less emphasis on how employee behavior impacts security and how security teams respond to incidents. Yet, most breaches occur because of human error. According to analysts at Forrester Research, it takes quantifying the human risks based on actual user behavior to effectively manage risk.
Going beyond compliance means taking a proactive approach to testing and measuring your readiness, both from the tech stack and your personnel.
Giving Your Security Tools a Reality Check
“Leaders are spending a lot of their resources on tools that should keep you protected, but aren’t,” said Sorensen. “Leaders should know if their security systems will work against the latest techniques and where they are failing if they are not.”
SightGain goes beyond breach and attack simulations or traditional penetrating testing, by giving your security tools a reality check. SightGain is the first automation platform that allows you to continually measure, analyze, and improve how your team, processes, and technology can respond to actual attacks.
Measure
You can safely measure response to real techniques. By safely executing real-world attack simulations in your live environment, you can determine the likelihood of a successful breach, validate and test vendor claims, and automate table top exercises that test the effectiveness of your detection and response procedures.
Analyze
SightGain’s Risk Analysis Module quantifies your risk exposure and finds gaps in your security. Using real performance data against emerging threats, you can gain insight into your organizational risk posture.
Improve
On average, SightGain customers see an improvement in their threat detection by as much as 900% and reduce the spending on cyber tools by 20%. You also get remediation and improvement roadmaps to help you stay ahead of the game. This includes configuration updates, process improvement recommendations, and training assignments for analysts.
SightGain’s Live Fire Evaluation and Training Module finds gaps not just in your cybersecurity tools, but also in how your team responds to threats. Based on responses to simulations, SightGain will recommend the appropriate interactive training modules based on each analyst’s results in live-fire tests.
Measure Cybersecurity Effectiveness Against Real Threats
SightGain lets organizations evaluate and continuously assess risks, improve processes and responses, and improve their risk posture. This makes sure your Firewalls, SIEM, XDR, SOAR, automation, analytics, and ticketing systems are providing the enterprise-ready state you need while increasing confidence in your operations team. For more information, contact SightGain today for a demo.
