How To Move From a Reactive to Proactive Cybersecurity Strategy

Businesses are witnessing more cyberattacks than ever before. Ashish Gupta, CEO & President, Bugcrowd, unpacks the flaws of reactive security and how proactive security measures such as active threat hunting can enable organizations to keep hackers at bay and safeguard their business. 

When it comes to cybersecurity, the best defense is now a good offense. Cybercrime is predicted to cost $6T globally this year, which alone would be the world’s third-largest GDP, and soar to over $10T by 2025.  With attacks and hacks on the rise, it’s time for security leaders and analysts to adopt a proactive approach that factors in evolving adversarial behavior.  In order to achieve this, organizations must act and think like the enemy. Implementing active threat hunting that incorporates the latest technology will better monitor, manage, and identify malicious activity over a network’s attack surface. 

The Flaws of Reactive Security

It is far too common for cyberattacks to go undetected by organizations until a catastrophe occurs. According to the World Economic Forum’s 2020 Global Risk Report, the rate of cyberattack detection (or prosecution) is as low as 0.05% in the U.S. Most companies don’t see the early warning signs of an attack until malicious actors have unauthorized access to sensitive information or have seized control of critical data and infrastructure, resulting in millions of dollars in damages that can derail an entire organization.

The average cost of a data breach in the U.S. averages $8.6M in damages, an incredibly costly figure particularly to small businesses, of which nearly half say their security postures are ineffective at mitigating attacks. This data is a clear indication that the old methods of defending IT systems such as network monitoring solutions, firewalls, anti-malware, and anti-spam aren’t getting the job done. While reactive security is still important to have in place to mitigate attacks and minimize damages, it’s abundantly clear that relying on this alone is an ineffective security strategy. 

See More: Maximizing Return On Investment With Your Security Budget

Getting Ahead With a Proactive Approach

Proactive security is a method of defending security networks from attacks before they happen. This can involve threat hunting, vulnerability detection, endpoint monitoring, and ethical hacking. All these various methods are designed to simulate attacks or identify possible security gaps that accurately assess, evaluate and ultimately improve defenses to adequately safeguard users, customers, and corporate information. This can be thought of as practicing attacks to better prepare the entire defense posture for real threats and malicious actors. Proactive security offers a unique advantage in that organizations can develop an understanding of their entire security infrastructure and continuously monitor for vulnerabilities.

Additionally, there are benefits from a cost perspective, with research that reveals that businesses that were proactive against cyberattacks saved an average of $2 million in data breach costs compared to companies that didn’t take basic proactive defense measures. To fully create a holistic, proactive security strategy,  the missing (and game-changing) piece of the puzzle is for security teams to integrate a crowdsourced model. 

See More: Zero-Trust Security: 4 Ways To Improve Security Posture

Power in the People: Public Security as the Proactive X-Factor

There is value in factoring in a human-based approach to risk reduction. Crowdsourced cybersecurity leverages a team of security experts (or ethical hackers)  to test an asset or assets for potential vulnerabilities, to reduce the risk of breach and asset exposures. This offers CIOs and CISOs a whole new dimension and angle to maintain a resilient security posture: with a host of adversarial-trained and savvy technicians who can perform ongoing inspections within a common platform.

Developing a program that allows external experts to be bug hunters and investigate and assess the security framework enables organizations to be better prepared and less susceptible to outside attacks. Ultimately, when planning for attacks, it is critical to think more and more like the enemy. Pairing security teams with hackers, technology, and resources gives enterprises a leg up on adversaries by deploying more experts to address potential gaps and access points. 

As cyberattacks continue to increase in numbers and adversaries advance the complexities of their attacks, a solely reactive security approach is an ineffective preparation plan. Organizations now need to rely much more heavily on proactive security measures and focus on actively preventing attacks by continuously monitoring existing attack surfaces. Utilizing threat hunting, vulnerability detection, endpoint monitoring, and crowdsourced ethical hackers are all techniques that can mitigate risk and strengthen security settings in the process. Speed is the enemy of security, and a game plan focused on proactive defense that thinks like the enemy will better thwart attackers and safeguard enterprises. 

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