Are You Ready with Your Cybersecurity Checklist for the Holiday Season?

It’s that time of the year again when your streets and buildings are adorned with decorations and lights because it’s the holiday season.

What are your holiday plans? How are you celebrating this holiday season—outdoors or at home?

Are you traveling to a winter destination or escaping the winter chill to surf and sand?

While some of you may have travel plans, some prefer family gatherings to indulge in cookies, eggnog, wine, and other festive flavors.

If history has taught us anything, festive seasons are the opportunities that threat actors tend to exploit the most. But, we care for your cyber safety and that’s why we bring you a cybersecurity checklist that will help you evaluate your existing cybersecurity framework and build an effective cybersecurity program to defend against the emerging threats while you are celebrating with your loved ones.

For a Cyber Safe Holiday

Whether you choose to sip beer on a beach city or relish hot chocolate with your friends and family in the cozy comfort of your home, you must not turn a blind eye to your organization’s cybersecurity framework. Plan your family reunions and getaways to celebrate the holiday season but also consider preparing a checklist of the cybersecurity tools and solutions you need to keep your organization cyber safe and cyber ready. On your checklist, you can consider including the following items:

Celebrate with Next-Gen Cybersecurity Solutions

The first thing on your checklist should be to adopt innovative solutions in order to stay ahead of your adversaries. When threat actors are continuously upgrading their tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) to launch complex attacks, your security teams must focus on creating and leveraging innovative cybersecurity solutions. They need to think out-of-the-box and build technology-driven solutions that can assist them in streamlining their cybersecurity operations and postures.

It’s time you start leveraging next-gen technologies such as cyber fusion that amalgamate threat intelligence with security orchestration, automation, and response (SOAR). Consider building virtual cyber fusion centers (vCFCs) that eliminate siloization of security operations center (SOC) teams and drive collaboration and threat visibility across an organization’s security framework. Such robust technology can allow your security teams to continuously evaluate their strategies based on the current threat scenario.

If you want to accelerate threat visibility and incident response capabilities, you must move from a traditional SOC infrastructure to a vCFC. This approach brings different security functions under a single roof to strengthen collaboration between siloed security teams. Furthermore, it provides advanced SOAR capabilities that allow you to develop automated, cross-functional workflows across various deployment environments—cloud and on-premise. By using the advanced SOAR capability of a cyber fusion center, your security teams can quickly respond to threats and minimize the time spent on manual processes.

**Steps to a Happy Feast: Collaborate. Share. Alert. **

During the holiday season, cyberattacks burgeon, and to address them, your security teams need to collaborate and timely respond to the incidents. Modern-day organizations must build cyber fusion centers to fuel collective defense and make better decisions related to threat response in a collaborative environment.

An end-to-end threat intelligence platform (TIP) is an important element of a vCFC. Considering the rising incidents in mind, if one organization detects a threat, the peer organizations can proactively gather threat data and neutralize it even before it impacts them. Advanced TIPs enable threat intelligence sharing with industry peers, vendors, infosec community members, and other stakeholders with similar security interests. This drives contextual threat visibility, allowing every member organization of the trusted sharing community to share, receive, and access threat information in real-time. It enhances their ability to quickly detect, identify, and respond to threats, thereby minimizing the response time. Moreover, organizations must employ modern-day TIPs to enrich and contextualize threat information collected from multiple sources in real-time. Furthermore, threat intelligence sharing helps you build collective defense, fostering collaboration between your peer organizations.

With the help of an advanced TIP, you can share real-time threat alerts with your employees and security teams based on their roles and location. As an organization, you must look forward to ensuring situational awareness round the clock. This will enable you to understand the rising threats and improve your overall cybersecurity preparedness.

Threat Response Isn’t Seasonal but Year-Round

Lastly, you simply cannot overlook threat response. Instead of just containing incidents, your focus should be to neutralize the threats lurking in your environment by delivering proactive threat response at machine speed.

Organizations must leverage advanced threat response platforms that can help them connect the dots between different threats and incidents. Such platforms are capable of driving security operations via real-time threat intelligence sharing and security orchestration and automation processes. Moreover, such platforms can end-to-end manage the triage, investigation, and actioning of incidents in an automated response workflow with cyber fusion-enabled collaboration between your internal security teams. In a nutshell, automated proactive threat response should be forever on your checklist.

Accept Our Season’s Greetings!

As the commercial activities during the holiday season significantly increase, cybercriminals also become wildly active. However, organizations can protect themselves from attackers by adopting the Cyber Fusion-driven security strategy. To address complex threats and adversaries, the modern security teams must leverage cyber fusion to enhance situational awareness, share threat intelligence, speed up threat response, and automate security processes.

This holiday season, celebrate with your friends and family but don’t forget to be prepared against potential cyber threats. Cyware wishes everyone happy and cyber safe holidays!

To learn about our Virtual Cyber Fusion Center (vCFC) solutions, click here to request a demo.