23 Mar Don’t Get Compliant: Dangers of False-Confidence in Cybersecurity

Building a Better Cybersecurity Picture

IT and cybersecurity involve many decisions that impact a business model. Therefore, it’s important to maintain confidence in these decisions, right? Naturally, because of how crucial and fragile the nature of strong network security is, ensuring you have data-backed decisions is important.

However, therein lies a dangerous poison that can greatly impact the integrity of said decisions. False confidence in IT and cybersecurity creates a series of problems, along with the methods to create false confidence.

How does false-confidence form?

An unchallenged belief that security infrastructure is totally foolproof arrives from a handful of sectors. Constant patching, updates, network monitoring and scans, and positive security report cards lead to the dangerous idea that your enterprise and its cybersecurity is without flaw. These sanitized, internally approved safety conditions only provide one small picture in a vast, dangerous IT landscape.

In fact, it can come from a single place: compliance. Whether regulatory or otherwise, compliance gives you a list to check off to ensure you are compliant with proper cybersecurity standards. But compliance does not equate to security. Compliance is all about theory. You suggest you are safe from ransomware attacks, data intrusions, and downtime because you’ve followed the right procedures.

However, nothing throws cold water on an idea of safety than reality.

Getting a realistic picture

Taking a realistic look at your overall security picture isn’t designed to be scary. On the contrary, knowing critical vulnerabilities lets you prioritize and focus on the risk factors that actually matter. Relying on sanitized reports to provide a false sense of protection proves disastrous in the long term. They work in theories, creating templates that should work. But pressed against real-world threats, the outcome can be very different.

Therefore, prioritizing an accurate image of your cybersecurity resources is critical. You can accomplish this in a variety of ways.

Reducing Report Clutter

One of the more intrusive obstacles hemorrhaging your overall cybersecurity infrastructure (and by proxy, false-confidence strategies) is reports. Or rather, cluttered reports. From false positives to data reports involving “less critical” aspects of your cybersecurity can overwhelm IT teams, leading to fatigue and lagging problem resolution. It also overwhelms them with the mentioned attack hypotheticals.

Not all hypothetical threat scenarios are a significant threat to your business, even if they carry a high-risk score. For instance, a high-risk attack exploit might only have a small percentage of actually impacting your enterprise. But mid-range risks, even low ones, can prove to be the threat issue cascading into wide-scale problems.

Incomplete Snapshots

Some companies hope to resolve internal security issues and flaws with penetration tests. This is a sound strategy but creates another problem. When pentests are not conducted with focused, routine efficiency, they only create a “snapshot.” The nature of IT security technology is rapid. Threats and dangers evolve on a near-daily basis. Therefore, a single pentest carried out over the course of several months creates a quickly decaying picture of your actual cybersecurity strengths and weaknesses.

Not to suggest penetration tests are bad or not worth conducting. They still provide valuable insight as to where your company stands. They do not, however, provide a proactive report on what’s happening right now. For instance, is your enterprise susceptible to ransomware attacks or phishing schemes? Did the pentest reveal that? You can’t form a complete idea with missing puzzle pieces.

Remove Noise and Clarify

To shift past false confidence and otherwise form strategies that ultimately fail to protect your business IT, you need to focus on mission-critical problems and clarify long-term cybersecurity strategies. That means eliminating guesswork and prioritizing legitimate threats, versus false-positive reports.

By doing so, you’ll inspire confidence in your IT teams and ensure your cybersecurity outlook is a healthy one. Focusing on what threatens your enterprise versus redundancies will yield healthier, long-term benefits.

For additional assistance and information, you can contact Bytagig today.