Christine With Secure.
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Pericles is quoted as saying, “Just because you are not interested in politics does not mean that they are not interested in you.” This may even apply to cybersecurity.
If you are part of an organization with any kind of digital presence, you cannot escape your responsibility to protect your systems, devices and data. And if criminals motivated to frequently operate with cyberweapons first developed by nation states don’t force your attention, regulators will.
Regulation can be both a crisis and an opportunity
Ultimately, all countries will adopt some form of data regulation to protect the public. Given their responsibility to protect the public from cyber threats, they have no choice. Even if the country in which your business is located is not currently under a data protection regime, there may still be countries in which you would like to do business.
Waiting until regulations force compliance puts your business under extreme pressure to deliver tons of work just to stay compliant. Anyone who has gone through the GDPR nightmare that many organizations have had in the process of becoming GDPR compliant can tell you that no one is having fun as the deadline approaches.
On the other hand, if you are already working consistently and iteratively towards improving your cybersecurity posture, every little thing you do will help you comply later. They build on each other so that you and your staff are not under extreme stress when enacted.
Let’s take a look at what every business can do to integrate cybersecurity into their operations. Let’s start with those of us who do business in the 21st century rely on software to thrive.
You are as safe as your supplier
Many companies today do not realize how closely we work with our suppliers. Most of the software and data we rely on today are no longer on our devices. They are on someone else’s server, data center, or cloud. And as we move toward a Software as a Service (SaaS) model, endpoint devices are like terminals to access data that resides outside of our control.
And as attacks on your supply chain become more and more common, it’s a constant reminder that you’re only as secure as your suppliers.
This means we need to differentiate when choosing suppliers. This can start by asking you to complete a cybersecurity survey or requesting an audit by a third-party expert. Depending on the impact, this process can be quick or very lengthy.It’s always worth your time.
Understand the impact of cyberattacks on your organization
Here are some questions you need to know the answers to. How might a cyber-attack affect your organization’s goals? What impact will it have on the results your organization desires? We have definite outcomes, but can cyberattacks change them? What are the risks posed by cyberattacks? And what are the assets at risk?
If your organization doesn’t understand the implications of a cyberattack, you may think that ticking a few boxes when it comes to cybersecurity will keep your organization safe. It may surprise you to discover a key factor in your organization that is critical to your results and your organization forgot about it.
Establish a cybersecurity training process
Building cybersecurity into all processes as early as possible is only half the road to a secure-designed organization. Cybersecurity training shouldn’t be a one-time thing. To integrate cybersecurity into the mindset of employees, security awareness training must be incorporated into their daily routines.
Cybersecurity is even more inevitable for companies that build software. Here are some additional steps companies can take to ensure that cybersecurity is a company asset and not a liability.
Identify potential product misuse
Most companies include customer needs in their development roadmap. But they rarely do the opposite or identify software that can be abused. Once we identify potential abuses, we take first steps to eliminate or mitigate them. Threat modeling can be a valuable tool in pointing out areas of misuse from the early stages of design.
Burn in cybersecurity
Despite the buzzword “shift left,” prioritizing cybersecurity as early in the product life cycle as possible will ultimately save time and money. If your developers are still adding code to your Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) platform, analyzing the issues introduced by your code and the third-party libraries used will help you avoid issues before they are baked in. help identify. What might be in the final piece of dynamic checking software in question eliminates the rest of the problem. It is also important that he, who is responsible for cybersecurity, has a DevSecOps team if issues are discovered. It must oversee not only the creation and maintenance of code, but also the remediation of cybersecurity issues.
Maintain a channel for security updates throughout the product’s lifetime
Even if an organization is designed for cybersecurity, it cannot be prepared for all potential problems in its products. Therefore, it is imperative to have a channel for software he security he updates when security issues arise. If possible, security updates should be performed as long as there are a significant number of users, even beyond the lifespan defined by the manufacturer. Otherwise, unpatched flaws will only cause problems for the rest of us.
Of course, you can ignore all these precautions and do your best. But at some point, either a cyberattack or a regulator will bother you.
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