As we mark two years of operating under the new normal of Work from Anywhere, Hybrid Work and increased Bring Your Own Device environments, it goes without saying that the cybersecurity attack surface has exponentially increased for most organisations.

This presents the obvious added pressure of more points to secure coupled with a sizeable increase in attacks as malicious players take advantage of the shift in ways of working. So what are the ways the organisations can protect themselves and their valuable data as they scramble to improve their cybersecurity systems?

Here are some simple steps to reducing your organisations attack surface:

Don’t put it on the internet if it doesn’t need to be there.

It goes without saying that the internet is a web of countless threats. As such, if there is no explicit need for your applications to be exposed to internet traffic, it’s likely best that they remain offline.

Having a firewall between your applications and the internet is one of the simplest ways to ensure attackers are unable to access your data. Furthermore, protecting your internal network is just as vital. Minimise lateral movement by reducing or even eliminating unnecessary access across the network.

Keep your system up to date

With new vulnerabilities emerging constantly, it is equally important that your applications remain up to date so as to reduce the probability of being a victim of an attack. Patching should be viewed as a mission critical exercise and conducted as regularly as needed in a proactive manner. Never leave running system updates to chance as a sporadic exercise.

Where possible, utilise the auto-update feature to ensure you don’t miss the latest version of software that could be critical to ensuring you have adequate protection.

Monitor the metrics

Self learning artificial intelligence is key to neutralising attacks as it has the ability to monitor and identify threats at a scale that is largely impossible for a human cybersecurity team to keep up with. However, this doesn’t completely remove the need for cybersecurity teams to maintain their own levels of monitoring activity and assessing for threats.

As highlighted by Exabeam, there are three main parts to good monitoring:

• Aggregating the data
• Alerting on abnormalities
• Responding

Organisations often fail to completely implement the first two and often times they also lack a comprehensive response plan or the appropriate automation tools to assist with the process.

And while these are only a handful of the ways you can reduce your attack surface, applying these along with other best practice methodologies aides your organisation to better protect essential data and assets.

Exabeam has a various product to assist organisations with the monitoring and protection of their attack surface that include Data Lake, Advanced Analytics and Incident Responder.

To find out more about these solutions and more, get in touch with the DataGroupIT team for a comprehensive discussion around your cybersecurity needs.

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