Every organization – regardless of industry or size – faces cyber threats daily. There are more security challenges present than ever, including rapidly expanding data sources, advanced persistent threats, and cloud-based vulnerabilities, to name a few.
Because of this, many businesses have begun prioritizing cyber threat management in their risk management strategy to proactively defend against the constantly evolving cyber threat landscape. This begs the question, what is threat management? Continue reading to learn everything you need to know.
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Explaining Cyber Threat Management
When explaining cyber threat management, an excellent place to begin is to point out the threat management definition. At a high level, threat management is a process used to prevent cyberattacks, detect cyber threats, and respond to security incidents to minimize cyber risk.
How Does Threat Management Work?
A comprehensive cyber threat management system should reflect the cybersecurity framework created by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). The NIST cybersecurity framework guide is comprised of standards for five primary functions – identify, protect, detect, respond, and recover – which are outlined below.
Identify
Organizations must understand their most important assets and resources. They should make a list of all equipment, software, and data, including laptops, smartphones, tablets, and point-of-sale devices.
Protect
The protect function includes practices such as setting security controls and permissions as to who can access your network, ensuring regular software and device updates, conducting cloud-based data backups, establishing formal security policies, and training users
Detect
Organizations should monitor their computers for unauthorized personnel access, software, and devices like USB drives, investigate any unusual or suspicious activity on their network or by their staff, and check their network for unauthorized users or connections.
Respond
Should a data breach or other security incident occur, it is important to have a plan to notify customers, employees, and other interested parties, keep operations up and running, and report the attack to law enforcement and other authorities.
It is also critical that once the threat is contained, it is thoroughly investigated. Using this threat intelligence, cybersecurity policies and plans should be updated to reflect the findings and ensure that the updated plan is tested regularly.
Recover
Recovery activities include repairing and restoring the infrastructure and parts of the network that were impacted as well as keeping employees and customers informed of the organization’s response and recovery activities.
Learn more about the NIST Cybersecurity Framework here.
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Common Threat Management Challenges
Security teams are finding it more and more difficult to protect their networks and other critical business infrastructure from emerging security threats, including:
- Lack of network visibility
- Misconfiguration
- Insider threats
- Ransomware
- Phishing
- Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks
In addition to the increasingly sophisticated nature of these threats, organizations today also face budgetary constraints and a shortage of cybersecurity professionals making it difficult to find qualified talent and equally hard to retain them.
Best Practices for Effective Cyber Threat Management
Effective threat management solutions are key in proactively defending against a cyber attack or other security incidents. There are a variety of best practices to address the full threat lifecycle, from threat detection and incident response.
As organizations continue to deal with attacks increasing in both volume and sophistication, it is essential to unite people, process, and technology to eliminate threats quicker and more efficiently.
The adoption of effective threat management solutions can help organizations identify and prioritize threats and investigate them more efficiently with artificial intelligence (AI) and advanced analytics for greater insight into the threat landscape. With this knowledge, organizations are able to remediate rapidly and ensure they are better protected from potential digital risks.
Threat management is beneficial to organizations of all sizes, from SMBs to enterprises. Depending on the size of the organization and the amount of mission-critical data, it may make sense to implement a self-service solution or outsource threat management to a third-party partner.
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Simplify Cyber Threat Management with Buchanan
Buchanan offers a full portfolio of managed services, including cyber security services, that can establish cyber resilience for your business through an effective threat management program.
Our team of security experts can help you identify and assess risks, establish priorities to mitigate risk, improve operational efficiencies when handling the cyber threat management process, and much more. Get in touch with us to begin strengthening your cybersecurity posture today.
