Cyber Resilience

Diagram of the cyber resilience bell curve, showing basic security hygiene practices to implement to protect against 98% of attacks: Enable multifactor authentication, apply zero trust principles, use modern anti-malware, keep up to date, and protect data.

• Enable multifactor authentication (MFA) to protect against compromised user passwords and helps to provide extra resilience for identities.
• Apply Zero Trust principles, the cornerstone of any resilience plan limiting the impact on an organization. These principles are:
  • Explicitly verify—ensure users and devices are in a good state before allowing access to resources.
  • Use least privilege access—only allow the privilege that is needed for access to a resource and no more.
  • Assume breach—assume system defenses have been breached and systems might be compromised. This means constantly monitoring the environment for possible attack.
• Use extended detection and response anti-malware. Implement software to detect and automatically block attacks and provide insights to the security operations. Monitoring insights from threat detection systems is essential to being able to respond to threats in a timely fashion.
• Keep up to date. Unpatched and out of date systems are a key reason many organizations fall victim to an attack. Ensure all systems are kept up to date including firmware, the operating system and applications.
• Protect data. Knowing your important data, where it is located and whether the right systems are implemented is crucial to implementing the appropriate protection.