What is Cyber Resilience?

Business Insights

Dec 7

Cyber resilience is the ability of an organization to prepare for, respond to, and recover from cyberattacks while continuing with normal operations.

Legacy cybersecurity systems primarily focus on preventing and defending against cyber threats. Cyber resilience acknowledges that, despite your best efforts to prevent attacks, organizations will still be targeted, and incidents will occur. Therefore, it emphasizes the importance of maintaining business continuity and minimizing the impact.

Cyber resilience requires a proactive and holistic approach encompassing people, processes, and technology. It is not just about having solid firewalls and antivirus software but a comprehensive strategy that considers the entire business ecosystem. It involves not only preventing attacks but also minimizing the impact and recovering quickly when an attack does occur.

Why Is Cyber Resilience Important?

Beyond implementing an industry-standard lineup of cybersecurity tools, programs, and professionals, over the last few years, sophisticated organizations have recognized the need to improve their cyber resilience. One way that companies have done this is by creating business information security officer (BISO) positions that are tasked with rationalizing security strategy and business strategy.

The process of improving your cyber resilience involves identifying critical business functions, understanding the probable impact of breaches and outages on these functions, and identifying which individual IT assets support these functions. This helps you quantify risks and identify the owners and stakeholders responsible for avoiding them. The CISA Cyber Resilience Review (CRR) is an effective interview-based assessment tool for organizations maturing their operational resilience which many federal agencies use as guidance. One example is the US Postal Service, which partnered with the Software Engineering Institute to improve its cybersecurity and resilience.

However, at the end of the day, when a cyberattack happens, a pile of reference documents based on interviews from nine months ago won’t be much help. You'll need a system, one that’s continuously utilized and that ensures the sustained operations of your most critical business functions and all their communication pathways and dependencies. You need to have already discovered every asset in your environment so that you can identify those that now require urgent attention. Trying to figure this out after an attack has already started is too late.

For many large organizations, getting a critical business function back up and running involves implementing disaster recovery or mitigation efforts on tens of thousands of assets, from among millions of others, in an exact order, in just a few minutes. This is part of what makes cyber resilience so difficult.

What Makes Cyber Resilience Difficult?

Incomplete Asset Inventories

Organizations don't have a full list of assets, and IT asset inventory tools don’t help, as they compile existing lists instead of going out into the environment to discover them. Typical asset inventory tools miss assets for multiple reasons including shadow IT, siloed business functions that focus only on ‘their’ assets, incomplete endpoint agent installation, assets that aren’t able to have agents installed or for whom agents don’t exist, and assets that have just plain been forgotten over the years.

Lack of Prioritization of Asset Importance

Not only do most organizations not know what assets they have, they don’t know which assets are the most valuable. Even a CISA CRR or similar analysis process, as manual and time-consuming as it is, helps an organization perform valuable introspection work to identify which assets are vital for critical business functions. Ideally, you should maintain a continuous database of your most important assets ordered by priority or impact on the company if they fail.

Unknown Third-Party Exposure

Most of an organization's risk comes from interactions with third-party entities, where the organization’s security depends on the security of the vendor or partner. Organizations typically have little to no centralized understanding of their external third-party dependencies.

Unknown Dependencies

Even if organizations know which assets are their most important they don't have a real-time understanding of which assets depend on other assets in order to function correctly. This means that organizations may not realize that a relatively unimportant asset going down may render an important asset unusable, which in turn could impact the delivery of a critical business function.

Key Components of Cyber Resilience

Prioritization

Know what exists in your environment and understand what matters most to your company. This involves identifying your critical business functions, creating an accurate asset inventory, and mapping which assets support which critical business functions.

Preparedness

Develop and implement proactive measures to prevent and mitigate the impact of cyber threats. This involves risk assessments, security awareness training, and the implementation of security controls and best practices.

Response

Have a well-defined and tested incident response plan in place to detect, respond to, and contain cyber incidents. This includes communication plans, incident analysis, and coordination plans to minimize the impact of the incident.

Recovery

Implement strategies to recover from a cyber incident, restore normal operations, and learn from the experience to enhance future resilience. This may involve backup and recovery processes, system restoration, and improvements to security postures.

Adapt

Continuously improve and adapt cybersecurity measures based on the evolving threat landscape. This includes staying informed about new threats, vulnerabilities, and emerging technologies, and adjusting security strategies accordingly.

Monitor

Monitor assets on your network in real time. This continuous monitoring helps keep the asset inventory up to date by detecting any changes or additions. When new assets are discovered or existing ones change, this information can be used to update cyber resilience plans.

Business Continuity

Ensure that your organization's critical functions and services can continue even in the face of a cyber incident. This involves identifying essential services, implementing redundancy, and having contingency plans to minimize disruptions.

Collaboration

Engage in information sharing and collaboration with other organizations, government agencies, and cybersecurity communities to enhance collective cyber resilience. This can involve sharing threat intelligence, best practices, and lessons learned.

Crisis Communication

Develop effective communication plans to keep stakeholders, including employees, customers, and the public, informed during and after a cyber incident. Transparent and timely communication helps maintain trust and manage the impact of incidents.

Training and Awareness

Educate employees and stakeholders about cybersecurity risks, best practices, and their roles in maintaining a cyber-resilient environment. Well-informed individuals are more likely to positively contribute to your organization's overall security posture.

Essentially, cyber resilience requires a holistic approach that integrates technical measures, policies, processes, and a culture of security throughout the organization. Cyber resilience is especially crucial in the modern threat landscape where cyberattacks are diverse, sophisticated, and constantly evolving.

Steps to Becoming Cyber Resilient

Identify Your Critical Business Functions

Critical business functions (CBFs) are the core activities that keep an organization running smoothly and generate revenue. Understanding which functions are critical allows you to create effective cyber resiliency plans.

The process of identifying CBFs involves a thorough examination of your organization's operations and dependencies. The first step is to create a list of all the functions and processes within the organization. Once the list is complete, the next step is prioritizing the functions based on their criticality. Factors such as financial loss, reputational damage, regulatory compliance, and customer trust should be considered when determining a function's criticality.

For more information about the importance of critical business functions, read this blog.

Create & Maintain an Asset Inventory

Knowing which assets are necessary to provide critical functions is important when creating a cyber resilience plan. A modern way to compile an asset inventory is to place software sensors in your network that capture communications data and use it to create a map of your connected infrastructure, both internal and external. This gives you complete visibility into the true extent of your environment, including which assets are interrelated or interdependent as well as third-party connections. Your asset inventory also enables you to identify sources of risk, such as single points of failure, policy violations, shadow IT, third-party dependencies, and more.

Assess the Impact of Cyberattacks on CBFs

This assessment helps you prioritize your security efforts and allocate resources accordingly.

One way to assess the impact is through a business impact analysis (BIA). A BIA evaluates a cyberattack's potential financial, operational, and reputational consequences on critical functions. Risk assessments are also a valuable tool for assessing the impact of cyberattacks. These assessments identify potential threats and vulnerabilities, allowing your organization to prioritize security measures and allocate resources effectively.

While making these assessments, keep in mind the interdependencies between different functions. Often, an attack on one function can cascade effects on other business areas. By mapping out these dependencies, your organization can identify potential vulnerabilities and develop strategies to minimize the impact of such attacks. By considering internal and external risks, your organization can comprehensively understand the potential impact and develop targeted strategies to mitigate these risks.

Implement Cyber Resilience Measures

These measures should be comprehensive, encompassing technical and non-technical aspects of cybersecurity. Technical measures include implementing robust firewalls, intrusion detection systems, and encryption protocols. Non-technical measures include training employees on cybersecurity best practices, implementing strong access controls, and developing incident response plans.

It is important to remember that cyber resilience is an ongoing process. As technology evolves and cyber threats become more sophisticated, organizations must continuously update and adapt their resilience measures.

Cyber Resilience Best Practices

Cyber resilience is an ongoing process that evolves to address emerging threats and changes in the cybersecurity landscape. Regular assessments, testing, and updates are among the essential components of a robust cyber resilience strategy.

Risk Assessment and Management

Conduct regular risk assessments to identify and prioritize risks based on their potential impact on assets connected to critical business functions.
Develop and regularly update a risk management strategy that includes the mitigation, transfer, and acceptance of risks.

Cyber Hygiene

Enforce strong cybersecurity hygiene practices, such as regular software updates, patch management, and vulnerability assessments. Prioritize these updates based on asset risk as measured by their connection to critical business functions and the presence of mitigating security measures.
Implement robust access controls, least privilege principles, and regular user authentication reviews.

Incident Response

Develop and regularly update an incident response plan that outlines the steps to be taken in the event of a cyber incident.
Conduct regular tabletop exercises and simulations to test the effectiveness of the incident response plan.

Continuous Monitoring

Implement continuous monitoring solutions to detect and respond to security incidents in real time.

Data Protection and Encryption

Implement strong encryption mechanisms to protect sensitive data both in transit and at rest.
Create a cryptographic asset inventory so that you understand what encryption methods are currently used and will need to be updated in the future to address the rise of quantum computing.
Regularly review and update data protection policies to address evolving threats and compliance requirements.
For more information about the dangers of quantum computing to existing encryption and how to protect your organization, read the blog “Enhancing Your Cybersecurity While Preparing for Post-Quantum Cryptography.”

Supply Chain Security

Assess and monitor the cybersecurity posture of third-party suppliers and vendors.
Monitor your connections with all third parties, going beyond just known vendors and suppliers, so that you can identify potential security incidents, policy violations, and unauthorized shadow IT.
Establish security requirements for vendors, including contractual obligations for cybersecurity standards.

Employee Training and Awareness

Provide regular training to employees on cybersecurity best practices.
Foster a culture of cybersecurity awareness and responsibility among all personnel.

Redundancy and Resilience Measures

Implement redundancy and resilience measures for critical assets to ensure continued operation during cyber incidents or disruptions.
Regularly test backup and recovery procedures to verify their effectiveness.

Collaboration and Information Sharing

Collaborate with other organizations, government agencies, and industry partners to share threat intelligence and best practices.
Participate in information-sharing forums and initiatives to stay informed about emerging threats.

Regulatory Compliance

Ensure compliance with relevant cybersecurity regulations and standards.
Stay informed about changes in regulations and adjust cybersecurity practices accordingly.

Secure Configuration and Architecture

Implement secure configurations for hardware and software components, following industry best practices and guidelines.
Design and maintain a secure network architecture that minimizes attack surfaces and isolates critical systems.

Security Awareness for Leadership

Ensure that leadership at all levels understands the importance of cybersecurity and supports initiatives for cyber resilience.
Make sure that leadership agrees on what the organization’s critical business functions are and understands how this impacts cybersecurity planning and priorities.
Establish a cybersecurity governance framework that includes executive oversight and accountability.

Testing and Simulation

Conduct regular penetration testing and vulnerability assessments to identify and remediate potential weaknesses.
Simulate cyber incidents to assess the organization's response capabilities.

Adaptive Security Measures

Implement adaptive security measures that can adjust to changing threat landscapes and evolving attack techniques.
Use threat intelligence to inform security policies and update defenses accordingly.

Continuous Improvement

Establish a culture of continuous improvement by regularly reviewing and updating cybersecurity policies, procedures, and technologies.
Learn from security incidents and apply lessons learned to enhance cyber resilience strategies.

About Redjack

Tackling cyber resilience requires a comprehensive strategy. It requires an AI engine capable of not only giving you complete visibility into your connected infrastructure but also mapping how those assets connect to each other and to your critical business functions.

The Redjack solution has a significant impact on the effectiveness of both IT and business, making cyber resilience a valuable asset. This system has been successfully implemented in some of the world's largest corporations and government agencies for over five years.

Cyber Resilience