It’s our responsibility as cyber security experts to keep up with changing best practices to maintain a strong enterprise security posture while the corporate technological world continues to change at an astounding rate.
We’ve compiled five common cyber security myths we’ve come across that need extra attention when optimizing your organization’s security environment to provide some guidance on security areas you may have ignored.
Five common misconceptions about cyber security
1 – The solutions’ default configurations genuinely provide sufficient security
While it could be tempting to use the default settings offered by your security solutions up until the point at which you have the ability to accurately assess your needs and better understand your tools, you might be exposing yourself to unanticipated risks by doing so.
Pay particular attention to the privileges that your tools grant users, who, without the setup of your security settings, may be automatically granted questionable access rights. Make sure users can’t, for instance, grant important permissions to other apps, such their mail, contacts, calendars, and files.
2 – The Best Protection is Ensured by a Best of Breed Approach
In order to secure the greatest technology available, many organizations use a “best of breed” strategy. There are numerous solutions available for network security, endpoint protection, email, apps, and more.
This strategy makes sense if you want to maximize the effectiveness of your tools, but it frequently leads to a disjointed variety of solutions from several providers, which poses its own set of security issues.
Without the time or resources to adequately assess the applicability and connectivity potential of new technologies, security stacks have become more complex, but not always with more actionable intelligence.
Platform play could appear disturbingly straightforward to security consumers who want a best-of-breed strategy. However, optimization that lowers long-term complexity is what will improve your security posture.
3 – Multi-Factor Authentication Provides Enough Security
Authenticator tools like Microsoft Authenticator and SMS-based multi-factor authentication offer depth to your defenses and should unquestionably be included in your entire security strategy. It’s important to keep in mind, though, that various MFA techniques are regrettably still susceptible to phishing assaults.
Threat actors have the ability to intercept sensitive traffic, including passwords in plain text, and replicate tokens for their own use in Adversary-in-The-Middle (AiTM) attacks using Evilgynx (a readily available and free-to-use framework). FIDO2 keys, an industry standard for hardware-backed authentication, are a useful alternative to take into account.
4. Phishing attempts and email scams are both simple to recognize.
Threat actors have become more determined in their attempts to get past corporate email security filters, and the results look worrisomely legitimate. Where email cyber attacks were once thought to be largely recognizable (think flashing banners with urgent calls to action to WIN or receive FREE goods), threat actors have become more and more successful.
Modern credential and financial assault communications can now use legal sender credentials as proxies and frequently imitate the tone and style of internal or supplier emails because attackers are aware that blatant “spam” content would be detected by security systems. The risk of human error is increased as a result, with even the most tech-savvy users falling prey to threat actors’ requests for bogus password changes or fraudulent invoice payments in order to enter corporate environments.
While security providers are using artificial intelligence and machine learning to combat this contemporary method of email attacks, businesses are still catching up, so thorough user training and hands-on exercises in what to watch out for, what to do if an email seems suspicious, and tightening of existing tools and filters, are essential.
5 – Fixing “The Basics” Is Simple
There is a lot of talk in the cyber security community about following “the basics” and performing “the basics” correctly. And while it’s true that frequently your whole security posture will depend on the fundamental, or basic, components of your environment being in place and well maintained, ensuring that basic requirements are met in current security stacks is anything but simple. What may seem “basic” is frequently quite challenging to manage because to various agents on devices, the difficulties with patches and crucial updates, continual changes to infrastructure, and other factors. Consider the fundamentals of cyber security, but don’t undervalue the planning, organization, and time required to keep everything working properly.
