Cyber Situational Awareness: Vital Cog in Your Security Strategy

Worldwide, around 30,000 websites get hacked daily. In 2020, ransomware attacks grew by 150% and in March this year, the number of breached records reached 20 million. These are some of the startling figures that Techjury, a software testing community, published on their website recently. The data demonstrate the scale of cyber threats that loom large on enterprises.

What is Cyber Situational Awareness? 

In very simple terms, situational awareness is about gaining a better knowledge of the surrounding environment. The concept is referred to as Cyber Situational Awareness when the environment is cyberspace.

Cybersecurity Ventures estimates that cyberattacks will globally account for $10.5 trillion per year by 2025 while Forbes informed that data breaches exposed 4.1 billion records in the first six months of 2019.

It is, therefore, important for enterprises to have security solutions that enable Cyber Situational Awareness to better understand the network, applications, assets and, risks.

Dates back to World War I: 

The concept of situational awareness came into being through German flying ace Oswald Boelcke during World War I. Boelcke realized, “the importance of gaining an awareness of the enemy before the enemy gained a similar awareness, and devised methods for accomplishing it”.

Three steps to Cyber Situational Awareness: 

1. Perception of the elements in the environment: deals with evidence gathering of the cyber situation. Cyber Situational Awareness allows you to identify latent and oblivious threat vectors.
2. Comprehension of the situation: understanding the exact situation derived from analyzing the evidence gathered and perceived from the current cyber situation. Cyber Situational Awareness empowers you to comprehend the scope and nature of the threat meaningfully.
3. Projection of future status: deals with predictive measures to forecast future incidents and situations. Cyber Situational Awareness channelizes response by indicating the direction, making it impactful and effective.

Why CSA is essential  

What makes Cyber Situational Awareness a compelling case for enterprises?

1. Quicker identification of threats: There is an enormous amount of data and information available on the network. Complete visibility is achieved by setting a target state and probing the network telemetry data through Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. That ensures the real-time identification of risks and threats.
2. Informed decisions: Fast detection of threats is followed by sharing actionable intelligence with people in charge of security operations. Countermeasures are adopted instantly. This helps the security experts to make informed decisions and reduces the damage the attacks may otherwise cause to the company’s assets.
3. Improve security posture: With the ability to assess and be aware of the threat vectors in the cyber environment against the vulnerabilities, organizations have the knowledge and meaningful information to act against threats, formulate resolutions and devise cybersecurity strategies to protect the organization’s assets and resources better.
4. The weakest link: A network is said to be as secure as its weakest link. Human beings are often considered the weakest link. The damage caused by human errors gets minimized through AI-powered and automated Network Detection and Response solution, which is essential in achieving Cyber Situational Awareness.
5. Regulation and rules: A better understanding of the risks, effectively dealing with the threats and alleviating the losses helps correctly adhere to the rules.

Cyber Situational Awareness is an outcome and not a technology. This outcome is precisely to bridge the information gap that exists between what is and what should be. The information distinguishes an organization that is well-equipped to deal with cyber threats from one that is not. Cyber Situational Awareness provides complete control over the network, which forms the perfect second line of defence for any enterprise when dealing with risks and threats on the inside. It lends to a very commonplace, yet the most logical and fundamental principle of public health: Prevention is better than cure. 

Authored by:- Mr. Praveen Jaiswal, Founder & Director, Vehere

(The views expressed in this article are by – Mr. Praveen Jaiswal, Founder & Director, Vehere. Technuter.com doesn’t own any responsibility for it.)