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PERFECTING THE PROACTIVE SECURITY PLAYBOOK

It's more important than ever for organizations to prepare themselves and their
cybersecurity postures against known and unknown threats.

Nabil Hannan, Field CISO, NetSPI

June 4, 2024

5 Min Read
Source: Ivelin Radkov via Alamy Stock Photo


COMMENTARY

Any good sports coach will tell you a playbook is a critical tool in ensuring a
team's continued success — and the same applies to cybersecurity. Without an
effective security playbook, organizations expose themselves to vulnerabilities
by not preparing for potential outcomes, ramifications, and remediations. To
stay ahead of bad actors and combat emerging attacks, security leaders must turn
the focus from being reactive to being proactive — which starts with creating a
comprehensive security playbook.



Consider these three things to get a proactive security playbook started,
ensuring long-term success:


CREATE AN INCIDENT RESPONSE PLAN

A key first step in creating any playbook is planning. Just as coaches have to
make customized playbooks for each new opponent, security leaders must have
plans in place for various crises and situations so that all involved parties —
from employees to customers to contractors — know what's expected of them in the
event of a breach.

Internal planning is essential, and activities such as tabletop exercises,
process panning, and product strategy can help assess the current security
landscape. Tabletop exercises are particularly effective in testing and
perfecting playbooks. In conducting these exercises, chief information security
officers (CISOs) lead their teams through a variety of scenarios, both typical
and atypical, to determine what red flags to be mindful of and when, as well as
to work through any backup strategies. Testing both normal and abnormal
incidents is an important point here. It's not enough to practice traditional
breaches that are common to remediate. Instead, challenge teams to think
critically in the event of unique, unknown vulnerabilities.



While playbooks prepare an organization for eventual breaches, they also prepare
teams to proactively identify them — especially since technology cannot serve as
the sole identifier for all threats. Instead, teams should know how to use
technology to recognize, report, and resolve threats when there's a deviation
from a standard alert. Overall, incident response planning is a critical step in
the planning process — just like a winning sports team needs to establish a game
plan before the big game, cybersecurity teams need to do the same to support the
organization's success.




ESTABLISH AN EFFECTIVE MEASUREMENT STRATEGY

In the world of sports, wins are determined by the score on game day. A team's
"win" is a bit more ambiguous in cybersecurity. No matter what success looks
like, teams must hold practices to assess strategy, pinpoint weak links, and
identify hurdles to success.

To do this, cybersecurity teams must identify what success means to them. In
most incident response cases, the less time it takes to respond to a breach
(i.e., report a deviation internally, determine the threat level, and
remediate), the better. The less time it takes, the more of a "win" it is. Once
teams can align on a target time for remediation, they can work together to
identify kinks in the process, technology constraints, or process issues that
prohibit them from improving with each breach simulation activity.



Furthermore, it's critical to understand your business needs and what adds value
to decision-making — in this case, reducing incident response times. Once
understood, leaders can effectively measure success beyond simply eliminating a
threat and shift their focus to helping their teams respond in the most timely,
efficient manner possible. By establishing a constructive metric strategy ahead
of a real-life breach, leaders can accurately measure the success and efficacy
of the playbook and team.




ASSESS STRENGTHS AND WEAKNESSES

The threat landscape continues to evolve and become more complex, largely due to
skyrocketing AI adoption. And while not everyone is an AI expert — and nor
should they be — security leaders need to understand where their team is at in
the AI journey. To address any skill gaps and ensure AI-based threats are
detected, leaders should ask themselves, "How do we deliver the best value to
our internal team, given their technical capabilities?" Knowing this at the
onset of the playbook's creation helps paint a complete picture of where the
team is starting from and where they need to grow in order to identify and
remediate evolving strains of malware and ransomware.

From there, leaders can lean on internal training and third-party vendors to
analyze mass amounts of data, allowing security teams to address and remediate
events more easily. The challenge with this is blending external experts with
knowledge in threat hunting and rapid response with internal teams who know the
organization's environment the best and can contextualize these issues. As a
rule of thumb, don't take things at first glance and assume they tell the full
story: Ask questions, dig deeper, and look at the bigger picture to figure out
when to take action.


THE EVOLVING PROACTIVE APPROACH

Cybersecurity is no longer an issue that concerns only IT departments; it's now
a business enabler. With generative AI adoption on the rise, it's more important
than ever for organizations to prepare themselves and their cybersecurity
postures against known and unknown threats. In addition to these three elements,
as a solid foundation, it's essential to have a reliable cyber-insurance company
engaged from the second an incident occurs. If or when a breach happens, having
a pre-planned retainer with a cyber agency ensures that issues concerning
privacy regulations and customer data are handled efficiently and appropriately.



A proactive security playbook is key to helping organizations maintain their
customers' data confidentiality amid rising ransomware threats. Without a
proactive security playbook and plan, teams will be ill-prepared to deal with
potential issues that threaten their security integrity and put customers at
risk. By prioritizing incident response planning and effective measurement
strategies, and understanding the team's skill levels, leaders can help put
their organization in the best position to combat all variations of threats.




ABOUT THE AUTHOR(S)

Nabil Hannan

Field CISO, NetSPI

Nabil Hannan is the field CISO at NetSPI. He leads the company's advisory
consulting practice, focusing on helping clients solve their cybersecurity
assessment and threat an vulnerability management needs. His background is
around building and improving effective software security initiatives, with deep
expertise in the financial services sector. Most notably, in his 13 years of
experience in cybersecurity consulting, he held a position at Cigital/Synopsys
Software Integrity Group, where he identified, scoped, and delivered on software
security projects, including architectural risk analysis, penetration testing,
secure code review, malicious code detection, vulnerability remediation, and
mobile security assessments.

See more from Nabil Hannan
Keep up with the latest cybersecurity threats, newly discovered vulnerabilities,
data breach information, and emerging trends. Delivered daily or weekly right to
your email inbox.

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