National Cybersecurity Month – Cybersecurity with a Tactical Mindset

Even though National Cybersecurity Month is ending, it’s more important now than ever to keep your organization safe and stay compliant with required industry regulations and standards. To do this, businesses should approach cybersecurity with a tactical and proactive mindset to defend themselves in a constantly evolving threat landscape.

Your network infrastructure is a battleground where constant protection against internal and external threats is crucial. To be proactive, anticipate future incidents while staying updated on the current threat landscape. This is important because threat actors alter their tactics to appear as new attacks, such as:

• Ransomware: With an 85% increase in attacks in 2022, this cyber threat is gaining popularity due to threat actors taking advantage of remote workers and hybrid infrastructure models.
• Phishing: Spearfishing and whaling attacks were popular a few years ago, but threat actors today target disgruntled employees to steal credentials to access insider information.
• Familiar attack vectors with new targets: Although threat actors continue to use the same attack vectors, they are changing targets, like SMBs instead of enterprises, or lower-level employees instead of leadership.
• Third parties: As partnerships between organizations become more prevalent, it's important to know that a cybersecurity incident affecting one company can have a ripple effect.

To avoid falling victim to these types of attacks, it’s important to pay close attention to your network and stay proactive. Here are some ways your business can approach cybersecurity in a more strategic way:

• Develop and implement a framework: Leverage an acceptable framework, like NIST, to establish strong cybersecurity controls to help manage and reduce cybersecurity risk.
• Hire ethical hackers and pen testers: Understand your organization’s vulnerabilities by hacking your own network with a professional who understands a variety of framework and architectures before a threat actor attacks.
• Check the logs: It is imperative to check for anomalies, small events, and user-experienced issues to identify a clandestine attack or other nefarious activity.
• Tighten up your cybersecurity: A tactical mindset requires an organization to always be alert. Know your infrastructure, the devices connected to the network, how they communicate, the characteristics of your data, and who has data access.

A-LIGN can help your organization build a culture of proactive cybersecurity, complete with set policies, best practices, and user security awareness training, positions your organization to be better prepared for when a cybersecurity incident occurs. Contact us to learn more.