A popular military maxim speaks to the need for redundancy and it goes like this: “Two is one and one is none.” Redundancy is also a key principle when it comes to cyber-resilience. A popular rule in data protection and disaster recovery is called the 3-2-1 backup rule. IT pros often borrow from military strategies when approaching cyber-resilience, including a strategy known as “defense in depth.”
Defense in depth is a useful framework for protecting IT environments. It acknowledges that hackers will often use evasive tactics or brute force to overrun the outer-most layer of defense. So, multiple layers of defense are necessary – or defense in depth – to anticipate and mitigate lost ground. Cyber-resilience is a very high priority for businesses. So, we put together these five tips for improving cyber-resilience based on a defense-in-depth approach.
Tip #1: Sharpen perimeter defenses
Cybercriminals are getting better at using evasive tactics to circumvent company firewalls and antivirus. Some of these evasive tactics include file-based, file-less, obfuscated and encrypted script attacks. To counter these tactics, we’re rolling out a new shield technology to detect, block and remediate evasive attacks much faster and more effectively than before. Webroot® Evasion Shield stops attacks that elude other endpoint protection solutions. Cloud-based threat intelligence further increases resilience at the perimeter.
Tip #2: Strengthen the first line of defense – people
The primary vector for malware distribution is phishing attacks. While cybercriminals find increasingly deceptive ways to trick employees into downloading malicious code, not enough businesses are countering by educating their workforces about identifying suspicious activity. With employees being the weakest link in the cyber-security chain, the solution is regular security awareness training, with phishing simulations and courses on best practices for identifying and reporting suspicious activity.
Tip #3: Secure your DNS connection
The domain name system (DNS) is what allows internet traffic to find your website. But DNS protocols were not designed for security. In fact, they’re highly vulnerable to cyberattacks, including cache poisoning, DDoS, DNS hijacking, botnets, Command-and-Control (C&C) and man-in-the-middle attacks. A cloud-based DNS security solution enables businesses to enforce web access policies and stop threats at the network’s edge before they ever hit the network or endpoints.
Tip #4: Create and deploy a backup strategy
Redundancy is essential for cyber-resilience. Businesses must consider a scenario where malware circumvents outer defenses. Since detecting and remediating malware infections can be time-consuming, it’s important to have copies of files and data for business continuity. Scheduled backup with file versioning is necessary for mitigating malware infections and other forms of data loss. The scheduling feature is crucial since leaving it up to users exposes backup policy to human error.
Tip #5: Test recovery strategy regularly
Backup and recovery go hand-in-hand. And backup is only effective if it enables rapid recovery with minimal disruption. It’s important to test disaster recovery practices and procedures before you experience a live disaster scenario. Disasters come in different shapes and sizes, so it’s important to test simple file and folder recovery as well as large-scale system restore. Also, some systems are more critical than others. Tier-one systems (the most critical) need high levels of uptime, approaching 100%. This traditionally requires a secondary data center that is very costly to acquire and maintain. This is no longer the case. Disaster recovery as a service reduces the cost of standing up a secondary environment. It also allows for frequent testing of disaster recovery protocols. Businesses should test once a quarter – or at least once a year – to ensure systems are cyber-resilient when necessary.
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