5 Steps to Making Cyber Attack Pathways More Manageable

Effective cyber security can be reduced to a single idea: You must protect your most critical assets for your business or organization. Protecting your most critical assets can be reduced to a single action: you must effectively manage your cyber attack paths...

To understand whether an organization's most critical assets are secure, it is imperative to have visibility into how its operation has changed over time and how these changes affect risk. Modelling possible attack paths to estimate the probability of a breach is one way of doing this. This approach allows us to build a self-consistent predictive model that cuts through the noise of what can and cannot be bypassed and contextualizes that information around critical assets.

At this point, here are the 5 steps we need to take in order to better and correctly manage these attack paths:

1| Visibility across your hybrid cloud network

Continuous risk visibility and agility are required to keep your organization moving quickly so you better know at any time whether new risks in your hybrid cloud environment can create a successful attack path to your critical business assets. In this way, it becomes more possible to perceive the attacker's perspective more easily and to see how they can act in these environments to threaten your most critical assets.

2| Continuous and secure attack modelling

You can ensure continuous and secure awareness of attack paths by performing continuous attack modelling without the need to inject malicious code. Unlike traditional pen tests, there is no gap between test periods, so you can maintain visibility on a 24/7 basis. Continuous modelling enables the real-time discovery of threats and vulnerabilities without production risk.

3| Focus on choke points

It is extremely important to identify where the cyber attack paths converge toward critical assets and focus on that point. By continually uncovering hidden attack paths to your critical assets in the cloud networks and on-premises environments, you can cut them at key points and eliminate risk with little effort. It is essential to manage risk by eliminating bottlenecks and directing resources to address the most damaging attack paths first. Oftentimes, by eliminating the vulnerability of a single asset, it becomes possible to significantly reduce risk across the entire cloud network.

4| Step-by-step guided fix

You can increase your resource efficiency by improving operational processes against cyber attacks and improving your work such as creating red/blue teams or pen testing with automation and continuous monitoring. You can achieve this by creating a step-by-step improvement guide and following the steps that allow you to fix the most pressing issues first. By combining how attackers can exploit misconfigurations and vulnerabilities with your critical assets, you can disrupt the opportunity for lateral movement on the network and pinpoint the changes needed to quickly eliminate the risk of compromise. The ability to prioritize effectively is one of the most important aspects of good cyber attack path management.

5| Risk measurement

By quantifying risk through reporting and metrics, you must ensure you get the resources you need to continue managing attack paths. You can enable this through the detailed reporting and admin dashboard of the security firm you are serving. In this way, you can monitor your security posture on a daily basis and determine which changes are necessary.