Relish Your Thanksgiving Turkey But Don’t Let Attackers Roast Your Data and Networks

What’s your Thanksgiving dinner menu this year? Are you all set to roast a scrumptious turkey and devour on mashed potatoes, green beans, gravy, cranberry sauce, pumpkin pie, and other traditional delicacies?

While you wait for a year to celebrate the Thanksgiving holiday with your family and friends, cyber crooks look forward to the holiday season too. However, their holiday plans are not the same as yours. Attackers are making attempts to invade the critical networks and systems of businesses, organizations, and critical infrastructure. Taking action, the CISA and FBI are notifying all entities, specifically critical infrastructure partners, to scrutinize their existing cybersecurity posture and enforce best practices and mitigations to address the risk.

Here’s What the CISA and the FBI Have to Say

Both CISA and FBI are asking organizations to take the following measures:

• Recognize IT security employees who would be available to respond to incidents or attacks during holidays and weekends.

• For remote access and administrative accounts, effectuate multi-factor authentication.

• Mandate strong passwords and avoid reusing them across different accounts.

• Secure and monitor remote desktop protocol (RDP) or other risk-prone services.

• Alert employees about not opening suspicious links and conduct sessions to spread awareness.

Moreover, the CISA and FBI recommend staying vigilant against phishing scams, fraudulent sites, and unencrypted financial transactions. Cybercriminals leverage these techniques to gain access to networks. During the holiday season, attackers pose as charitable organizations and send unsolicited emails, targeting victims in a phishing scam. They also target people doing their holiday shopping online by creating fraudulent sites and spoofing reputable businesses. In order to be cyber safe, improve your cybersecurity posture.

Make Your Cybersecurity Posture Appealing, Just Like Your Turkey

You cannot ditch the authentic turkey recipe on Thanksgiving. Given the holiday, you must not ignore your organization’s cybersecurity posture. Nevertheless, you must not give it a cold shoulder on any given day. To cook the right recipe to cybersecurity posture, you must consider the following ingredients:

Virtual Cyber Fusion Centers Are the Need of the Hour

During the Thanksgiving holiday, scams, phishing attacks, and other cyber incidents burgeon. If one organization identifies an incident, its peers can learn from the incident and prevent themselves from getting affected. This is only possible with threat intelligence sharing. As an organization, you must leverage and promote threat intelligence sharing with your peers, vendors, information-sharing community members, and other stakeholders. This drives contextual threat visibility to share, receive, and access threat information in real-time, improving their ability to quickly identify and respond to threats.

As they say, sharing is caring. Sharing makes threat intelligence more accessible and operational, enhancing every participating organization’s knowledge about adversaries, assets, tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs), indicators of compromise (IOCs), and much more. It helps achieve situational awareness about threats and incidents as they take place. You must strive to establish 24x7 situational awareness by sharing threat alerts in real-time with your employees and security teams based on their role and location. This will aid them in better understanding the advanced threats, strengthening their day-to-day organizational decisions, and highlighting the significance of cybersecurity to the entire organization.

With the threat landscape becoming complex day by day, the traditional approach to cybersecurity falls short. Your security teams need to take a collective defense approach to foster collaboration with their peer organizations via threat intelligence sharing against emerging threats. It’s time for security teams to leverage next-gen technologies like Virtual Cyber Fusion Centers (vCFCs) that enable them to drive collective defense via an integrated and modular platform and assist them in making informed decisions related to incident response.

**Threat Response in Time Saves Nine **

While you must engage yourself in the holiday season, you cannot afford to overlook threat response. An incident can occur at any time and you must be prepared. Threat response is more than just incident response and covers significant elements of the threat domain such as malware, vulnerabilities, and threat actors.

Your security teams must employ advanced threat response platforms to connect the dots between different threats and incidents. Such platforms can steer security operations with the help of real-time security orchestration and automation processes and threat intelligence sharing. This will enable your security teams to tackle threats before they turn into cyberattacks.

Cyber Innovation Can Change Your Security Game

Attackers are constantly modifying their techniques and aiming at targets during the holiday season. While adversaries modify their tactics to launch sophisticated attacks, it is imperative for security teams to focus on cyber innovation. You must adopt innovative solutions to streamline your cybersecurity operations and strengthen your security postures.

Your security teams need to build cyber fusion centers that amalgamate threat intelligence with security orchestration, automation, and response (SOAR). This technology eliminates the siloization of security teams, fostering collaboration across their security environment. Even when security teams are out on holidays and an attack occurs in their absence, a vCFC enables them to coordinate and address threats remotely.

To improve threat visibility and incident response capabilities, you must upgrade your security infrastructure to a cyber fusion center. This approach brings different security functions under one roof to encourage collaboration between siloed security teams. Moreover, it renders SOAR capabilities that allow security teams to create automated, cross-functional workflows that can orchestrate security and response actions across multiple deployment environments. By leveraging the innovative SOAR capability of a vCFC, your security teams can rapidly respond to threats and minimize the time spent on manual security processes.

A Lot to Be Thankful For

Attackers will continue to invade your network but you have a lot to be thankful for—advanced security tools—that can help you improve your cybersecurity framework and safeguard your network from threats.

The modern-day cybersecurity teams have innovative tools at their disposal. With tools designed to improve situational awareness, promote threat intelligence, accelerate threat response, and automate and orchestrate security processes, security teams are empowered more than ever to tackle complex threats.

This Thanksgiving, enjoy your turkey and raise a toast to the robust solutions that can prevent cyber crooks from devouring your data. We wish everyone a happy, fun-filled, and cyber safe Thanksgiving!

To learn about the security tools that can strengthen your cybersecurity posture, request a demo.