Breach Alert! 6 Best Practices for Lowering Overall Breach Costs

Voluntary breach disclosures are at an all-time high, according to the Cisco 2020 CISO Benchmark Report. This demonstrates that, although a breach response plan takes considerable effort, the advance work pays off.

The study found that 61% of organizations voluntarily disclosed a breach that lasted more than 17 hours. “Respondents are now finding that their credibility rises when they voluntarily disclose a major breach, thus preserving their brand reputation,” the report states.

Yet, the work of breach preparation never ends. Cyberattacks will continue and evolve, as bad actors seek to exploit vulnerabilities wherever they exist.

To that end, organizations should continually work to build a strong security program. The first step is establishing a risk profile.

“That profile should include, for example, assessing risk around compliance requirements, partners, and customers,” said Steve Martino, CISO of Cisco. “It should also look at what kinds of risk the company is willing to accept — or not.”

6 Best Practices for a Strong Security Program

The CISO Benchmark Report identified areas where organizations can improve breach readiness.

Respondents who followed these six best practices were more likely to report lower breach costs.

1. Integrate security into your organization’s goals and business capabilities. That includes having risk assessment conversations across the organization to ensure that goals are aligned. It’s also a way to demonstrate that security is giving value back to the business.
2. Review and improve security practices regularly, formally, and strategically over time. The attack landscape constantly changes; your policies and procedures must keep up.
3. Regularly review activity on the network to ensure that security measures are working as intended. These connections can tell you a lot about the health of your security tools.
4. Routinely and systematically investigate every security incident, small and large. By getting to the root cause, you can understand weaknesses in your security technologies and processes, and improve them. “Finding your gaps or weaknesses is a gift, not something to dread,” Martino said.
5. Keep threat detection and blocking capabilities up to date. This makes it easier to determine the scope of a compromise, then contain and remediate it.
6. Integrate mock exercises into incident response planning processes. Build the relationships, processes, and memory into and across the organization — from operational to executive leadership. Well-practiced breach responses will equate to cooler heads prevailing when an incident occurs.

“Much of this is about ongoing basic security hygiene, which can be challenging,” Martino said. “But it must remain comprehensive with complete visibility of all network assets for any threat to be addressed and resolved with accuracy — for employees, customers and partners alike.”  

Read more about cybersecurity considerations and how CISOs are securing for what’s now and what’s next. Download the Cisco 2020 CISO Benchmark Report: https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/products/security/ciso-benchmark-report-2020.html

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