5 Key Steps Involved in Threat Management Process Every Business Should Take

Put yourself in the shoes of a business owner who has started a new business. After months of hard work, your business starts to flourish. After a few years, your business has expanded beyond the borders of your country. As your business started making headlines, it also got the attention of hackers.

One fine morning, your business came under a cybersecurity attack. Unfortunately, you did not have a threat detection, management and mitigation plan at your disposal. Due to this, you did not know how to respond to the situation. Your business suffered huge financial losses along with earning a bad reputation in the press. Your business never recovered from that incident and ended up dying a slow death.

Don’t want your business to face the same fate? Implement an effective threat detection, management and mitigation process. In this article, AntiDos will learn about five key steps of the threat management process that every business should follow to stay safe.

What is Threat Management?

Threat management is a framework cybersecurity professionals use to manage the lifecycle of a threat. The focus is on identifying and responding to threats with speed and accuracy. People, technology and processes should be on the same page for threat management to work flawlessly.

Why is It Important?

According to a cost of data breach report 2019, businesses can save $1.2 million when breaches are detected sooner. As the complexity and number of cybersecurity attacks increase, businesses are struggling to keep their digital assets safe. By improving threat management, you can increase collaboration between people, process and technology. This facilitates businesses in detecting threats quickly and responding to these cybersecurity threats in an efficient manner.

Advantages of Implementing Threat Management Process

Here are some of the advantages of implementing a threat management process.

• Faster threat detection
• Lower risks
• Consistent investigations
• Quick response
• Continuous improvements
• Improves team skills and morale

A threat management process helps you reduce the overall risk by detecting threats quickly and responding to those threats in a fast and efficient manner. Moreover, it also allows you to stay consistent with your investigation and make incremental improvements to the threat management processes.

Challenges of Threat Management

There are three major challenges in threat management.

• Talent and Skill Gap
• Lack of Visibility
• Lack of insights

Cybersecurity teams lack visibility into the threat landscape. Even when they do have complete visibility, they lack relevant context. Lack of integration between different security solutions combined with inconsistent processes throughout the organizations give rise to numerous cybersecurity challenges.

One of the main reasons cybersecurity teams lack insights and out of the box reporting capabilities is because they track the wrong KPIs. They did not know which metrics they should focus on. Lack of a standard benchmark means that every cybersecurity team measures different KPIs which complicates matters even more.

The widening talent and skill gap in the industry is a big concern. According to Cybersecurity Ventures predictions, there will be 3.5 million unfilled cybersecurity jobs by 2021. Even if businesses succeed in finding the right cybersecurity talent, they usually lack the skills required to deal with emerging cybersecurity challenges. Burnout and work-related stress is also a major issue that is negatively affecting cybersecurity professionals.

Threat Management Process

Threat management process comprises five steps.

• Insight

The first step is to gain insight into current threat operations. For that, you can team up with global services but make sure to tailor their insights according to the unique business needs of your organization. Dig deeper and focus on things that can easily go unnoticed so you can make constant improvement to your threat management process and make it hacker proof.

• Visibility

Put your cybersecurity infrastructure to test and see how resilient it is. Evaluate how good your systems are at integrating security and non-security data sources. Once you gain complete visibility into the threat landscape, from both the inside and outside, you can easily detect issues.

“A modern cybersecurity program must have Board and Executive level visibility, funding, and support. The modern cybersecurity program also includes reporting on multiple topics: understanding how threats impact revenues and the company brand, sales enablement, brand protection, IP protection, and understanding cyber risk.” — Demitrios ‘Laz’ Lazarikos, Founder and CEO, Blue Lava.

• Detection

One of the most important steps in the threat management process is detecting threats. By integrating artificial intelligence with threat intelligence and effective attack models, businesses can detect cybersecurity threats. Instead of taking a generic and predefined approach to threat detection, focus on detecting threats that can harm your systems but not your DNS DDoS protection such as SQL injections, session management vulnerabilities and weak authentication. Put more emphasis on detecting areas which are prone to risk such as weak password policies, input validation, custom encryption and lack of auditing and logging. Create a system that alerts users when any of these errors occur by displaying the error message.

• Investigation

Powered by advanced analytics and artificial intelligence, you can investigate both structured and unstructured data sources even if they have multiple degrees of separation and correlation capabilities. This allows you to get a clear picture and identify threats more quickly and easily.

• Response

After investigating the threat, it is time to prepare a response. Your response should consist of a set of automated actions targeting most common threats. Create a dynamic cybersecurity playbook governing your organization. It should encourage integration between people, processes and technologies.

It is important that you invest time and money on developing an incident response plan so that you know how to react in a crisis situation and every member of your team knows their role. You don’t want to be in the situation where nobody knows what to do and you are caught by surprise. Test and enhance your incident response plan to test its effectiveness.

How do you manage cybersecurity threats that could impact your business? Share it with us in the comments section below.