Why Threat Detection is Only One Part of Maintaining Cybersecurity 

Cybersecurity is more than just threat detection.

In today’s digital age, major security breaches are becoming more common every day. Are you sure your company is actually secure?  

Many organizations unknowingly operate in a state of breach. In fact, 54% of data breaches go undetected for an average of 168 days. The longer a breach goes undetected, the more devastating the consequences will be. Beyond financial damage, your brand reputation can also suffer immensely.  That’s why detection is such an important part of maintaining cybersecurity. By remaining complacent in your defensive measures, you put your company assets and data in serious danger.  

But is threat detection all it takes to maintain cybersecurity? As you might expect, there’s a lot more to it.  

To stay ahead of cyber threats, companies must take a layered approach to security. Detection plays a crucial role, but it’s still just one part of your larger strategy. Attackers come from all angles, so taking a single approach to cybersecurity is simply not enough.  

Prevention is the first step in maintaining cybersecurity. Next, you need to develop a comprehensive threat detection and response strategy. Don’t consider if your company will be hacked, but when it will happen. After detecting the breach, it’s time to deploy your response team. Once everything has been done to repair a breach, you still need to analyze how your company fared during the crisis.  

Let’s delve deeper into the essential stages of a strong cybersecurity framework. 

1. Protect 

To reduce the chance of a cyber-attack, you first need to learn about your weak spots. Conduct vulnerability assessments to determine your company’s current security posture.  

A big part of prevention is improving your organization’s security culture. Employees often inadvertently open the door to hackers by clicking on links in phishing emails or downloading infected applications. Educate your employees on the basics of cybersecurity such as how to spot phishing emails and promote accountability.  

To prevent intruders from accessing your company data, you want reliable end-to-end security solutions. Unified threat management offers your organization comprehensive security. Further, improve your security by adding network segmentation firewalls. If a threat does pass through your network, you can try to contain the malicious activity to one segment, rather than it spreading to all systems.  

Threat actors love environments where vulnerabilities stay unpatched. Prioritize patch management to keep your networks secure. Get help from cybersecurity experts to determine when patches become available, understand what issues they correct, and ensure all your applications are updated. 

2. Threat Detection

You can’t prevent every cyber-attack. Operate under the assumption that threat actors will get through your defenses. When you are the victim of a data breach, early threat detection will increase the chances of a positive outcome—don’t leave attackers lurking in your network.  

What kinds of attacks are you being subjected to? Ensure you have the proper technologies and processes in place to continuously monitor your environment for malicious activity. You need to be able to spot new threats in progress and mitigate potential damage.  

Seeing what’s going on in your network is pointless if you don’t know what it means. You need people on your team who understand the context of all types of alerts and indicators. This can be an overwhelming task, which is why many companies choose to outsource cybersecurity services. 

3. Respond

When in breach, timing is of the utmost importance. You need to determine the full scope of the breach as fast as possible. Once detected, ensure to validate and contain all traces of the breach. Having an incident response plan in place is crucial to act quickly. While maintaining business operations, you need to secure your environment and mitigate any further threat activity.  

Since you’ll be racing against the clock, your team might have to work evenings and weekends to fully address the attack. Your employees will have to remain focused without burning out. This is why engaging security experts prior to the breach is beneficial. They can immediately deploy their team after receiving an alert and help you reduce business loss.  

Experienced incident commanders know what mistakes to avoid when responding to an attack. For example, turning off the breached system could clear critical information your forensics team needs. It’s also important to remove and make disk images of the infected hard drives before attempting to restore your system. You don’t want to put your original data at any more risk if your remediation efforts fail. Plus, the infected drive could be used as criminal evidence. 

Discover how Difenda’s cybersecurity experts can help your team better respond to cyber threats with a dynamic approach to deployment and response. Download our latest customer win!

4. Analyze  

Even when the cybersecurity incident is over, your job is far from done. Once you’ve identified, contained, and remediated a cybersecurity incident, it’s crucial to understand all the details of what happened. To prevent future incidents and improve your company’s resilience, you first need to analyze the incident that just occurred.  

Schedule a post-mortem meeting as soon as possible. To avoid making the same mistakes, consider the following questions:  

  • How long did the security incident go undetected? 
  • Could you have identified the incident sooner? 
  • Did you consult your incident response plan to ensure each step was taken in the correct order? 
  • Were the processes and procedures laid out in the incident response plan effective and appropriate? 
  • Did you have the necessary resources to handle the incident? 
  • Were the first responders promptly made aware of the incident? 
  • Were law enforcement and other industry-specific agencies alerted in a timely manner? 
  • Are there processes you could automate to better protect your company? 

Your team should ultimately be asking “What can we do better next time?” during a post-breach analysis. After this meeting, evaluate your incident response plan and update areas as needed. Remember to continue monitoring activities, as additional threats often arise soon after the initial threat has been contained.  

Ensure all staff are adequately trained and coach any employees who failed to successfully execute their tasks. While you’re likely to focus on what went wrong, remember to also recognize your staff who went above and beyond during the emergency. Doing so helps build a sense of community and lifts your employees’ spirits. 

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Ken Perkins

Biography coming soon.

Megan Miller

Megan Miller’s energy and passion for learning flow into all aspects of her work. As the Growth Manager, North America, she brings a background in sciences which she has transitioned to the tech sector in her role at Difenda.

With a Bachelors of Science in Geology, Megan is a lifelong learner who is voracious about learning anything she can get her hands on about cybersecurity. Her positive energy has built a sales strategy with a focus on expanding in the United States while nurturing the Canadian presence. She is responsible for recruiting and training the sales team. Together with the company’s leadership, she creates the sales process and the company’s product strategy in order to better serve the customer base. This ensures that our customers have a highly trained and highly motivated team to help them every step of the way, Megan has completed Microsoft SC-900 training and working towards mastering Microsoft.

Whether at work or play, Megan is fully committed. She took her love of hockey all the way to the semi-professional level as a competitive hockey player. Megan loves all things sports including water skiing, scuba diving, cycling, and snowboarding. She also enjoys time with family and reading about alternative energy, innovation, and cybersecurity.

Natasha Phanor

As the Microsoft Partner Manager at Difenda, Natasha Phanor is responsible for driving growth within our Microsoft Partnership. With six years in the industry, she offers a fresh, energetic approach, and the ability to focus on our customer’s needs throughout the entire process. Natasha has the innate ability to foresee customer needs and solve problems before they arise, which creates a smooth road for each customer she encounters.

As the recipient of the Outstanding Services Partner of the Year Award in 2018, it is clear that Natasha responds quickly to customer needs, creates a platform for understanding a customer’s business requirements, and walks them through the process to ensure their complete satisfaction.

In her spare time, Natasha is as energetic and passionate as she is on the job. A self-proclaimed foodie-extraordinaire, she enjoys dinner parties, traveling, downhill skiing, hiking, biking, and reading. Natasha has a Bachelor of Fine Arts, specializing in Dance, from Ryerson University.

Lisa Templeton

Lisa Templeton is the perfect combination of human empathy and technological prowess. In her role as People Services Manager, she takes care of our team members to support them in their daily work, as well as on their personal life paths. Happy employees make for happy customers, and Lisa excels in giving our employees the tools they need for success in order to become the best possible versions of themselves. Along with employee formation, she shines in the service delivery support domain to continuously improve the process. Her 24 years of experience in IT Operations and Service Management help her create quality and efficiency at Difenda.

Having attended the Information Systems Management certificate program at Ryerson University, and with various other certifications to her credit, Lisa is perceptive and innovative when it comes to information technology, but also sensitive to the needs of her human constituents. Responsible for achieving the first privately owned company HDI Support Center certification in Canada, she has also designed and implemented Service Management excellence programs and 24×7 IT Operations departments for multiple IT organizations, and has created corporate rewards and recognition programs to keep her employees engaged and motivated.

On the personal side, Lisa passionately supports the cause of breast cancer research, having lost her mother to the disease. She reads voraciously in her spare time, and enjoys the art of home renovation. The summer months also bring time on her boat and exploring new hiking trails.

Miranda McCurdy

Miranda McCurdy uses her myriad super powers in all aspects of her job and personal life. As the Marketing Director at Difenda, Miranda McCurdy brings over a decade of experience to the table, which includes expertise in all facets of operations, brand management, and content marketing, as well as a multitude of successful strategies for the ever-expanding digital world. She is an expert at simplifying the message the company is trying to send, filling in gaps in the information, and strengthening the content in order to create compelling narratives that strengthen the brand and developing programs that bring teams together.

With several Addy Awards issued by the American Advertising Federation Cleveland to her credit, and her never say die attitude, Miranda understands both the broader picture and the minute details that are needed to successfully market a product. With her abilities to harness both the talent needed to spread the message, as well as to create the message itself, she is an integral cog in the company’s ability to communicate with customers and other stakeholders.

When she is not building a brand, she shares her ability to fill the gaps in her community by volunteering with Habitat for Humanity, the Special Olympics, and the Charleston Food Bank. In her spare time, Miranda spends time with her family, enjoys fitness and health, paddle boarding, reading, and arts and crafts.

Juliana Zaremba

Connections are the name of the game for Juliana Zaremba. As Strategic Partnerships Director, she is responsible for Difenda’s channel partnerships and the development and ownership of the channel partner program. She is also responsible for the global Microsoft Partnership, including the creation of strategic plans with MSFT contacts that will facilitate the continued growth of the business and establish certification and training protocols in all security technologies. Her role is multifaceted, as she acquires partners, manages relationships with them, and develops strategies that will provide cutting edge security solutions to our customer base. Another integral aspect of her job is to facilitate growth.

With a Bachelor’s in Math from the University of Waterloo and 14 years of experience from her previous roles at Herjavec Group and CDW, her cutting edge focus and ability to develop long-lasting relationships and strategies provides world class security solutions to our customer base.

Juliana thrives on connections outside of work as well. She is a philanthropist and contributor with Women4Change based in Hamilton. This group of local women is passionate about supporting local causes, and she focuses her efforts around Women in STEM. She is also a member of Club Italia in Niagara Falls and supports their youth events throughout the year.

When not managing the Microsoft Global partnership, Juliana enjoys reading, often reading several books at once. Juliana enjoys exploring the Niagara Escarpment with her family, as well as sharing meals and experiences with her extended family. Juliana’s competitive nature has her always trying new things, like Whoop band challenges and Peloton.

Jeffry Jacob

Biography Coming Soon