Every organization holds some kind of data. It could be the data of people who utilize the organizations’ services, internal documents, or staff data. It is critical to safeguard this data as leaks in internal documentation may jeopardize the company’s reputation. Moreover, if employee data is exposed, it may be misused in targeted phishing attempts.
Ways to Secure Your Data in the Remote World
It is not easy to safeguard data in the face of continuous advancements in ways to exploit vulnerabilities. This distracts companies from focusing on the continuous business development that lets them stay relevant in the market.
Therefore, in this article, we will discuss a few methods that organizations can implement to protect their data. An organization’s assets include online apps, network devices, and so on. These assets are significant. Many within the organization probably use them regularly and even simultaneously.
Since everything is done remotely nowadays, there is an added possibility of leaks—hackers can attack you from anywhere in the world. So, we can’t tell if the person connected to the network is a legitimate user or a malicious attacker. Attackers are constantly developing new approaches and hunting out vulnerabilities in old infrastructures to gain access to enterprise data.
Let’s look at a few strategies that businesses can use to protect their firm data while working remotely.
Prevent, Monitor, and Respond
Monitoring is the process by which organizations collect data from various devices—access logs, unsuccessful login attempts, and the IP addresses of people connected to the internal network—and filter that data using predefined rules. The data is then analyzed by the security team using SIEM tools.
This gives a clear picture of the organization’s accessibility and warns the security team if the system is being accessed by a malicious user attempting to gain access. Based on this information, it will create rules and add firewalls or other assets as needed.
Preventing refers to the policies and assets organizations put in place to prevent malicious intrusion efforts. These may include firewall rules, intrusion prevention systems (IPS) rules, open ports, and the number of assets exposed to the public. The team possesses all the necessary skills to put in place a sound data security policy.
In the case of a data breach, the company has to respond. The term responding refers to how organizations deal with a problem. When a breach occurs, many teams are involved—the development and security teams, for example. They all work together to reduce the risk of the breach and conduct internal investigations to learn how the breach occurred. To save your data in the remote world, the most important thing is to monitor, prevent, and respond.
Provide Security Training to Employees
Many attackers use social engineering techniques, such as phishing emails and spear phishing. If these types of cyberattacks are successful, the internal data of the business may be compromised. Employees, as we all know, are the weakest link in the security of an organization. Thus, businesses must train their staff to recognize phishing emails and social engineering attacks and alert security teams of suspected attacks. Such steps can work to minimize dangers.
In social engineering attacks, the hacker obtains knowledge about an employee by employing OSINT techniques, like going through their personal information on LinkedIn or Facebook and posing as a recognized individual. These training sessions teach employees about phishing, how to identify it, and what steps to take to protect themselves. These training sessions must take place regularly.
Updating Legacy or Outdated Platforms
A legacy system refers to a computer system that is still operating outdated software or hardware. These outdated versions may contain security flaws that an attacker can exploit to get access to the organization’s data and assets. As soon as vulnerabilities in open source systems are made public, any malevolent user will be able to take advantage of them.
It is always vital to upgrade legacy systems because they can constitute a threat to the organization’s overall security. The IT staff should look after those assets and regularly update them to ensure that they are protected from publicly known vulnerabilities.
These legacy systems might cause needless confusion and hinder the operation of the company. Upgrading a legacy system is a difficult undertaking for a corporation since it is incredibly expensive to implement new technology. Therefore, businesses are adopting them in such a way that they can keep and extend the legacy system when transitioning to a new system.
Data Security Measure within the Company
Organizations must first establish their requirements and the threats against which they wish to secure their information. For example, if security administrators want to limit undesired users and their connections, they can restrict them at the firewall level. But, if they want everyone to be able to access their website but not make too many connections, they can implement rules.
Organizations that wish to purchase security products shouldn’t rely on random reviews offered by other vendors or on Gartner reports. They should do proof of concept experiments using those products.
Additionally, just purchasing a product does not imply invulnerability. Security products are useless if they are not properly handled or installed with the appropriate security measures. Employees must first learn the requirements of the organization and then merge those requirements with data protection standards.
Using Cymulate— An Extended Security Posture Management Platform
We live in a world where we hear about a data breach or an incident almost every day. Protecting your organization’s sensitive data can be tough in such an environment. Cymulate is the first continuous security validation tool in the market that was designed specifically for this purpose. With the help of Cymulate, we can automate this process. It operationalizes the MITRE ATT&CK architecture to challenge and optimize the security posture of an organization’s system, thereby protecting it from threats and enhancing its resilience.
It includes several capabilities, including threat validation, attack surface management, phishing and awareness, and cloud and on-premises infrastructure setup and management. Hence, it can be used by the organization to shore up its system and security.
Conclusion
Please note that there are more techniques that you can implement to protect your enterprise data in the remote attack world, but the above measures are the most crucial. They can assist in protecting the vast number of employees’ data in any firm.
Following these guidelines, organizations become smarter and more conducive to growth—they make the organization’s system more streamlined and target oriented. Consequently, it is critical that enterprises use such countermeasures to ensure their data is safeguarded.
