In today’s age of technology, organizations face an ever-increasing risk of cyberattacks. With each passing day, the methods of attack become more advanced, making it crucial for organizations to keep pace with the constantly evolving threat landscape. The need to understand who the adversaries are and how they operate against enterprise environments is critical. To this end, a well-designed cybersecurity testing program can go a long way in identifying and remediating vulnerabilities, continuously challenging detection and response capabilities, and refining threat intelligence gathering priorities.
According to the Cost of a Data Breach 2022 report from IBM, organizations that regularly test their incident response plans save an average of $2.66 million per breach. This highlights the importance of a robust cybersecurity testing program in today’s environment. In this article, we will discuss five critical considerations that organizations can focus on while developing a cybersecurity testing program.
The first key consideration is collaboration across teams. In today’s complex environment, collaboration is critical. In the context of cybersecurity testing, the security teams should focus on building out internal relationships with different groups, including the security operations center (SOC), risk / compliance, vulnerability management (VM), cyber threat intelligence (CTI), and security testing functions. By creating a governance framework that defines clear responsibilities and promotes transparent communication, teams can share findings quickly and make better decisions for faster incident response.
The second key consideration is to follow an intelligence-led and risk-based approach to scope definition. Organizations often have several assets in their environment, making it challenging to identify risk points and evaluate where to spend money on vulnerability identification and remediation. By continuously curating threat intelligence and creating a targeted subset of tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs), organizations can initially focus on the most critical areas while optimally using existing resources.
Performing continuous stress testing of cyber defense controls is the third key consideration. Using the scenarios and prioritized list of TTPs defined above, the organization can exercise its technical and business response continuously. By selecting targeted sub-scenarios, the organization can more granularly measure practical mitigations and identify high-priority areas for critical business services. This approach will help the organization improve its process in the event of a real attack.
The fourth key consideration is to set metrics for shared understanding and improvement tracking. Success criteria need to be defined, tracked, and analyzed to demonstrate overall risk reduction to organizational assets. By comparing previous and subsequent penetration tests, organizations can demonstrate improved risk reduction to their board.
The fifth and final key consideration is to establish feedback channels to drive process improvements. Break down test observations against executed TTPs along with actionable mitigations identified along the attack chain. Test results provide insight into previously unknown vulnerabilities and help prioritize areas for further research and analysis. Sharing these results in real-time with the CTI team allows the organization to monitor for potential threats that may exploit vulnerabilities.
In conclusion, cybersecurity testing through increased collaboration and improved risk management processes enhances resilience to cyberattacks. With the WEF Global Cybersecurity Outlook 2023 projecting that 43% of business leaders believe that their organization is likely to be hit by a major attack within the next two years, the need for an all-encompassing change to cybersecurity testing has never been greater. By focusing on the five key considerations discussed in this article, organizations can build and maintain a robust cybersecurity testing program, mitigate potential risks, and improve their overall incident preparedness.