Resilience is the ability to recover from disruptions and adapt to changing conditions. It is a crucial skill for information security professionals, as they face constant threats, incidents, and challenges in their work. How can you build resilience in your organization and enhance your security posture? Here are some tips to help you.
The first step to building resilience is to identify and prioritize your risks. You need to understand what are the most likely and impactful scenarios that could affect your security, such as cyberattacks, natural disasters, human errors, or supply chain issues. You can use frameworks such as NIST SP 800-30 or ISO 31000 to conduct a risk assessment and determine your risk appetite, tolerance, and response strategies.
Understanding risk is impossible until you know the value of your assets. That implies that you know what your assets are, and that you can assign a "business value" (not a cyber security value!) to them. CMDB, or something similar, is a critical step here.
To bolster organizational resilience in information security Risk Assessment: Regularly assess risks to identify threats and vulnerabilities. Proactively develop mitigation strategies. Comprehensive Policies: Enforce robust security policies covering data protection, access controls, encryption, incident response, and employee awareness. Incident Response Planning: Establish and update incident response plans with clear procedures. Conduct drills to test plan effectiveness. Regular Audits: Conduct periodic security audits to assess control and policy effectiveness. Implement necessary improvements. Cybersecurity Drills: Conduct cybersecurity drills to simulate real-world scenarios, enhancing employee and team preparedness.
To build resilience in your organisation, first focus on classifying systems and data. Identify critical assets and data, categorising them based on their importance to operations, sensitivity and compliance requirements. Implement layered security measures tailored to each category, ensuring more robust defenses for critical systems. You will need to regularly review and update classifications to adapt to changing threats and business needs.
The next step is to implement controls that can reduce your risks and mitigate their consequences. Controls can be technical, such as firewalls, encryption, backups, or antivirus software, or organizational, such as policies, procedures, training, or audits. You should follow best practices and standards such as NIST SP 800-53 or ISO 27001 to design and deploy your controls, and monitor and review their effectiveness regularly.
Even with the best controls in place, you cannot eliminate all risks. You need to be prepared for incidents that could compromise your security and disrupt your operations. You should have an incident response plan that defines the roles, responsibilities, processes, and tools for handling incidents, and a business continuity plan that outlines how you will resume your critical functions in the event of a disaster. You should also test and update your plans periodically and train your staff on how to execute them.
As you are planning here, your plans must address your risks. You must test these plans with table-top (role playing for work!) exercises and even some actual testing. Make sure your plans include communications with your vendors, customers, the authorities, and your partners who will support you through an incident.
To enhance your team's resilience against cyber attacks, focus on frequent and varied simulation exercises to test your incident response plans. Regularly conduct simulations that mimic real-world attack scenarios, ensuring they're updated to reflect current external threats. This practice enables your team to experience and learn from realistic situations, helping them to quickly identify and respond to actual threats. Also, incorporate a range of scenarios in simulations to ensure comprehensive preparedness. Review and learn from each simulation to continually refine strategies and response plans, adapting to evolving cybersecurity risks.
One of the key aspects of resilience is learning from experience. You should not only react to incidents, but also analyze them and learn from them. You should conduct a post-incident review that identifies the root causes, impacts, lessons learned, and recommendations for improvement. You should also document and share your findings and feedback, and implement the necessary changes to prevent or reduce the likelihood of similar incidents in the future.
Don't just learn from your own experiences, learn from your peers. Learn from what happened to Clorox, MGM, Colonial Pipeline...learn from them all in order to improve your posture.
Resilience is not only a technical or operational issue, but also a cultural one. You need to foster a culture of resilience in your organization that encourages collaboration, communication, innovation, and continuous improvement. You should promote a positive attitude towards change and challenge, and support your staff's well-being and development. You should also celebrate your successes and recognize your achievements, and reward your staff for their resilience.
Finally, resilience is not a one-time effort, but an ongoing process. You need to review and improve your resilience regularly, as your environment, threats, and objectives change. You should use metrics and indicators to measure your resilience performance, and benchmark it against your goals and industry standards. You should also seek feedback and input from your stakeholders, customers, partners, and peers, and incorporate their suggestions and best practices into your resilience strategy.
Remember that cyber resilience is intended to be a part of business resilience - it cannot exist without aligning to the business' goals and needs. Don't build in a vacuum, and if the business can't help define goals for your cyber resilience program, lead the business through that process!