Cyber Security – The past, present and future of the industry That Will Actually Make Your Life Better.

With hundreds to thousands of cyber vulnerabilities across the IT infrastructure, the security providers are left with an insurmountable disadvantage. This often leads to longer dwell times and non-coexistentrepetitions that curtail the efficacy of network security programs. So, this begs the question, what is preventing us from prevailing against cyber threats. Furthermore, what are the upcoming approaches that allow enterprises to evolve from a traditional domain expert model to something that is more iterative, communicable and collaborative.

What are the biggest problems in the Cyber security industry and why?

Businesses often make the mistake of executing a reactive- rather than a pro-active approach tocyber security. Most often they rely on blocking techniques which are proven to be ineffective.

One of the biggest issue in IT security is how to manage the velocity, volume, and complexity of the information generated by a number of IT securitytools in a normal enterprise.Feeds from this disconnected, isolated tools must be examined & normalized. Remediation efforts must be prioritized. The more tools, more difficult the challenge.

Eventually, this data accumulation and analysis requires multitudes of personnel to look through the enormous amounts of information to match up and find the required minute detail from the junk. These efforts can take time, while hackers can exploit susceptibilities and extract sensitive information.

Even if an enterprise can hire enough experts and resources to perform this examination, they often misalign remediation work by relying on the internal security intel that lacks context in relation to active threats and which particular vulnerabilities they are manipulating.

Without taking the external threat information and business criticality into consideration, the security teams can concentrate on extenuating the wrong gaps.

What are the factors that reduce the efficacy by cyber security programs?

·         One Dimensional View

Primarily, many business and vendors still give emphasis on network layer, while ignoring other areas of the attack surface, for e.g. application layer. A holistic view of the attack surface, is the need of the day, to match the tactics and competency of the rivals.

The Verizon data breach in 2016 report confirms this point. The network layer and end points are just one part of riddle. The attack platform has grown intensely and therefore security efforts in    Technology market must align as a result.

·         CVE Focus

Secondarily, most vulnerability management tools depend on CVE [ Common vulnerabilities and exposure], which can lead can lead to a misplacement of resources.

For e.g. the POODLE vulnerability which happened in 2014. At the time it was available, it got a 5.5 assessment by the National Vulnerability Database [ NVD]. It is common to sift susceptibilities and only concentrate on those with 7 point or higher CVD. Implementing this model, POODLE vulnerability would have been overlooked. Thus, recognizing the threat, many companies would have been able to adjust the remediation priorities and speak about the POODLE theat.

This incident portrays the necessity of contextualizing the internal security intel with external risk information.

To develop the odds of overcoming cyber threats, enterprises should implement the following three practices:

·         Escalate the frequency of security posture assessments as broadcasted   by the National Institute of Standard and technology’s – continuous observing and diagnostic guidelines

·         Given the shortage of qualified security personnel, influence technology to automate as many security operations tasks as conceivable.

·         Finally, companies can extend security measures to focus today’s growing attack surface. This consist of moving beyond the network layer and endpoints, to include databases, applications, IOT and cloud environments etc.

To conclude, it is no longer feasible to handle the threats individually, taking into account the steep volume of protection gaps that exist. Therefore, an all-inclusive method that reflects the business impact as well as security posture can curtail attack surfaces and then reduce the dwell period during which susceptibilities can be manipulated.