Cyber attacks are significantly affecting businesses. If a company is left unprotected, a single breach can result in service outages and loss of critical data and revenue.
Implementing robust cybersecurity measures safeguards an organization’s data—financial information and intellectual property— and builds business reputation.
However, a single layer of defense isn’t always ideal. Rather, a multi-layered cybersecurity approach is essential for defending against attacks and ensuring that even if one layer is compromised, others will remain intact.
For example, you can implement public key infrastructure to secure communication, use vulnerability management to identify and address weaknesses, and cyber threat intelligence to predict and respond to potential threats.
Understanding PKI (Public Key Infrastructure)
PKI uses digital certificates and public key cryptography to safeguard sensitive data and authenticate users and devices. Today, firms depend on PKI to manage security and protect the messages they transmit.
Here’s how the PKI encryption process works. First, you need to generate a pair of keys: a public key and a private key. The public key is shared with anyone who wants to send you a secure message, while the private key is kept secret and stored securely.
Next, you send your public key to a trusted Certificate Authority (CA). The CA is a recognized third party that verifies your identity. Once the CA confirms your identity, it issues a digital certificate. This certificate contains your public key, along with your identity details, and acts as proof that the key actually belongs to you.
When someone wants to send you a secure message, they send a request to initiate a handshake process where each party shares their public key via their issued certificate. Using your public key, they encrypt the message before sending it. The encryption ensures that only the intended recipient, who has the corresponding private key, can decrypt and read the message.
Once the message reaches you, you use your private key to decrypt it. The private key only works with the public key that was used to encrypt the message, ensuring that no one else can decrypt it.
Common applications of PKI include:
- SSL/TLS Certificates: They are commonly used to authenticate any information transmitted between web servers and clients.
- Email Protection: This is a technique of disguising email content to prevent unauthorized parties from viewing or altering it.
- Digital Signatures: They are used to confirm the integrity and authenticity of data to ensure the document is from the right sender and has not been tampered with.
Despite these security benefits, poor PKI management can cause different security risks. Some of them include data tampering, unauthorized access, identity spoofing, and man-in-the-middle (MITM) attacks. These challenges may result in loss of money and damage to your business’s reputation. Additionally, your firm may occasionally experience operational issues such as service disruption. This can impact productivity and reduce your company’s capacity to respond to changing market demands.
What Is Vulnerability Management?
Vulnerability Management is the ongoing process of identifying, evaluating, reporting, and remediating security weaknesses across systems, endpoints, and workloads. The task is often automated and done to keep IT assets safe from cyberattacks and information breaches.
Handling vulnerabilities effectively is an ongoing process that is carried out in different phases.
- Identification: This is the first step, and it involves pinpointing weaknesses in an application, server, or network. This can be achieved by using various methods, such as vulnerability assessment and penetration testing (VAPT), to gain insight into weaknesses that attackers can exploit.
- Evaluation: Once flaws have been identified, they are classified by types (for example, encryption issues, device misconfiguration, or sensitive data exposures) and prioritized by their level of severity. This process will give the security team an estimate of each flaw’s exploitability and the likelihood of an attack.
- Remediation: Here, the security team takes steps to fix vulnerabilities (by criticality) so they can no longer be exploited, which involves testing and applying security updates.
- Reassessment: At this stage, your cybersecurity team will conduct additional scanning and pentesting to verify the success of the remediation. This step is crucial as it re-evaluates all the work done so far, especially as new patches become available, and ensures that patches and mitigation work as intended.
- Reporting: Finally, the team documents all tasks, from identification to evaluation and remediation. This helps track progress, keeps all stakeholders involved and informed and ensures accountability.
Cyber Threat Intelligence (CTI): Staying Ahead of Attackers
CTI refers to the entire process of gathering, processing, and analyzing information to understand a cybercriminal’s intentions, targets, and techniques. It converts data into actionable insights and allows the security team to make informed, data-driven decisions. CTI sources are diverse and can include Open Source Intelligence (OSINT), Malware Information Sharing Platform (MISP), vulnerability databases, dark web monitoring, Digital Forensics and Incident Response (DFIR), and network traffic analysis.
CTI is typically classified into three main types—Strategic, Tactical, and Operational—each serving different purposes in responding to digital threats.
- Tactical Threat Intelligence: It focuses on the cutting-edge tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) used by threat actors, including IP addresses, domain names, and file hashes known to be malicious. Tactical threat intelligence is often automated and can be integrated into cybersecurity tools via API integration or data feeds.
- Strategic Threat Intelligence: This helps an organization understand long-term threats and trends. It focuses on high-level risks that could impact your organization’s goals and helps you make informed decisions and adjust your security strategy.
- Operational Threat Intelligence: This is the most technical aspect of CTI because it focuses on real-time monitoring and network and system evaluation to identify threats proactively. It gives a detailed understanding of the “who,” “why,” and “how” behind a cyber attack. Its main role is to provide context to assist the security team in comprehending how hackers plan and sustain campaigns.
Companies can use CTI to gain insights into threat actors, their techniques, and the intended vulnerabilities they want to exploit. This information will help them predict and prevent cyberattacks effectively.
With CTI, the digital defense team can gather and analyze data from various sources, including internal logs and threat feeds, and pinpoint patterns to get more information about the impact of threats. This allows teams to effectively devise strategies to mitigate those threats.
Aside from that, CTI facilitates cooperation by enabling businesses to share threat data with peers, government entities, and industry groups. This collaboration contributes to a collective defense effort to improve overall security posture and best practices in the long run.
Stay Protected with Multi-Layered Security
Public key infrastructure, vulnerability management, and cyber threat intelligence are various security techniques that, when combined, can ensure robust protection. This multi-layered approach to cybersecurity uses PKI to encrypt data, vulnerability management to prevent threat actors from taking advantage of security flaws, and CTI to predict and prevent attacks before they occur.
Therefore, adopting a multi-layered approach to online safety will not only bolster your digital defense but also ensure that you stay ahead of threats.