In today's environment, every organization needs a plan for responding to cybersecurity threats. Those that sit back and wait until they’re attacked before formulating a strategy, or those that believe they’re not at risk, may well find this is a very costly error.
For starters, businesses need to get used to the idea that it’s not a matter of if they come into the crosshairs of cybercriminals, but when. According to the UK Government, 75% of large enterprises reported an attack in 2019, while Verizon claims some 43% of cyberattacks are aimed at small firms.
No matter what company size or what industry you operate in, you're at risk. Therefore, you must take a proactive approach to defend yourself.
To do this effectively, you need a clear threat intelligence plan. This means proactively going out and hunting for threats, which involves closely monitoring your endpoints for intrusions and responding quickly and decisively to any unusual activity.
This matters because one of the biggest factors that separate the best threat responses from the rest is how quickly firms can respond. According to Verizon, more than half of breaches (56%) took longer than a month to uncover. This can lead to greatly increased costs overall, as hackers have more opportunities to dig deeper into a company's network and extract valuable data or do additional damage.
Having automation in place can make a large difference in response times, leading to significantly less damaging attacks. For instance, the average cost of a data breach for a large company with full automation in their defenses sits at $2.88 million.
While this is still a lot, it's significantly less than the $4.43 million in costs faced by firms with no such solutions in place. Automation, however, is just one part of an effective threat intelligence plan.
To respond quickly to threats, companies also need endpoint security measures that can spot suspicious activity as soon as it reaches the network, and high-quality investigation methods that can reduce the mean time to response.