Building Trust through Data Integrity
October is Cyber Security Awareness Month (CSAM). CSAM highlights the importance of staying vigilant against cyber threats and educating users on best practices and emerging risks.
Resiliency, as it relates to cyber security, is an interesting topic because CyberSec professionals typically leave the resiliency part up to their counterparts in storage and data protection. With that in mind, let's define security and resiliency:
Cybersecurity focuses on protecting systems, networks, and data from cyberattacks through preventive measures like firewalls, encryption, and access controls.
In contrast, cyber resiliency emphasizes the ability to continue operations and quickly recover from cyber incidents, ensuring minimal disruption.
While cybersecurity aims to prevent breaches, cyber resiliency mitigates the impact of inevitable attacks through a robust recovery strategy.
In the wake of recent breaches, threat actors are determined to find a way to get in. If anything, if a threat actor smells blood in the water, they are going to get in regardless of what CyberSec teams have in place to prevent intrusion. This is where they start causing havoc.
Once in, they tool around storage, databases, and backups - yes, your backups. Threat actors hang out in your business-critical storage and data protection backyards. At some point they make their way to your garage and start drinking your microbrew IPAs out of your beer fridge -- but you still don't really know they are there. Then suddenly, they are joyriding your dad's classic Ferrari at 110MPH all over Chicago (nod to Ferris Buellers Day Off).
How do you get the bad actors to leave?
to protect your company's data from bad actors. A proactive approach focused on protection, balanced with recovery, helps organizations not only respond quickly to cyberattacks and recover from them but also reduce downtime and disruptions. By putting in measures to ensure the data you are recovering can be trusted, you lessen an attack's impact, and customer trust and regulations during and after an attack. These are often overlooked after security breaches with traditional tools.
Ideally, the plan will keep you away from the headlines, but if not, you risk high costs to recover, data loss, and worst of all, a reputational beat down. You don't want to be one of these headlines next week!
- Loan Depot (2024) 3 weeks to recover customer portal, quarterly loss of ~$70M, $25M class action suit, cost of recovery $41M.
- Change Healthcare (2024) Mthe US, total cost of response – Up to $2.45 billion, still not fully recovered as of September 2024
- CDK (2024) – Backups compromised, $25M ransom, affected 15,000 customers, reintroduced ransomware when recovering (estimated $1B in total damages)
- MGM Resorts (2023) Global news, Data compromised, data loss, $110M in recovery costs
Let's Talk about Trust and Beer
While you may not be able to keep cyber threats at bay completely, a well-structured cyber resiliency plan enables you to swiftly address disruptions and resume standard operations seamlessly, much like tidying up a mess and restoring regular business functions as if the incident never occurred.
Do you trust your resiliency plan empowers you to effectively minimize data loss, downtime, and reputational damage, nurturing a sense of security and preparedness within your organization?
Cyber Security Awareness Month underlines the pivotal role of cyber resilience in combating evolving threats. Cutting-edge solutions like CyberSense bolster resiliency by verifying data integrity and assessing the impacts of cyberattacks, streamlining efficient recovery processes, and safeguarding assets with trusted cyber recovery measures that surpass standard data protection protocols.
In addressing cyber threats, much like unwanted guests in your backyard drinking your beer, you may not always fend them off entirely. However, with a resilient approach, you can swiftly mitigate the aftermath, tidy up the mess left behind, and seamlessly restore normal business operations as if the disruption never occurred.