What are the most effective cyber defense strategies for enterprises

To effectively improve cyber defense strategies for enterprises, it is essential to adopt a comprehensive approach that combines technical defenses with employee awareness campaigns. By implementing these strategies, enterprises can significantly enhance their cyber defense capabilities and effectively counteract the dynamic tactics employed by various threat actors, including nation-states, eCrime syndicates, insider threats, and politically motivated hacktivists. Here are some of the most effective cyber defense strategies for enterprises:

1. Establish a Security Operations Centre (SOC): Create a 24/7 SOC for continuous monitoring and analysis of the organization's security posture, focusing on networks, servers, endpoints, databases, applications, websites, and other systems for potential security incidents
2. Utilize Cyber Threat Intelligence: Develop an effective cyber threat intelligence function to systematically monitor specific external threats, providing vital intelligence on new and emerging threats, thereby allowing real-time security posture adjustments
3. Implement Endpoint Detection & Response (EDR), UBA and UEBA: EDR, UBA and UEBA tools enable security analyst and threat hunters to identify Indictors of compromises (IoCs) effectively an maintain historical process execution records. Deploy EDR tools to record all process-level activities in a system
4. Create Incident Response Plan and Procedures: Implement an incident response plan based on industry standards, supported by playbooks for a wide variety of scenarios including insider threats, ransomware, and phishing
5. Implement Threat Hunting Capability: Adopt proactive threat hunting processes to search networks for threats that bypass existing security solutions, using host, network, and appliance logs
6. Implement Regular Cybersecurity Audits and Compliance Checks: Conduct regular cybersecurity audits and compliance checks to ensure alignment with international standards and best practices, maintaining the integrity of critical infrastructure and essential services.
7. Implement the Usage of Multi Factor Authentication (MFA): Utilize MFA for authenticating exposed services, strengthen systems and password policies, deploy a Web Application Firewall where necessary, assess cloud security configurations, and review infrastructure and development tools
8. Create an Asset Inventory: Maintain comprehensive asset inventories to understand the architecture topology, applications, and active accounts in the environment, aiding in identifying network anomalies and threats missed by traditional defenses
9. Integrate with the threat feed systems : Collaborate with the Threat feed systems to leverage collective monitoring capabilities, share cyber threat intelligence, gain awareness on the latest vulnerabilities, and benefit from collective response strategies in case of significant cyber incidents