Tag: Data Privacy

Cost-Effective Strategies for Log Monitoring and Response: How to Keep Your Company Safe from Cyber Threats

As the world becomes increasingly digitized and connected, the importance of regular security log monitoring and response cannot be overstated. In today’s digital age, cyber threats are a constant and growing concern:

It is essential to have a proactive and comprehensive approach to security. Regular security log monitoring and response is an essential part of any cybersecurity strategy.

One of the key benefits of regular security log monitoring and response is that it allows organizations to detect and respond to potential threats quickly and effectively. By constantly monitoring logs and identifying patterns and anomalies, security teams can quickly identify and respond to potential threats, preventing them from causing significant damage.

According to a study by the Ponemon Institute, organizations that have a strong security incident response plan are able to detect and contain breaches in an average of 46 days, compared to an average of 201 days for organizations without a plan.

Another key benefit of regular security log monitoring and response is that it helps organizations meet compliance requirements. Standards such as ISO 27001 and NIST SP 800-53 require organizations to have a comprehensive security management system that includes regular security log monitoring and response. By implementing these standards, organizations can demonstrate to customers, partners, and regulators that they have taken the necessary steps to protect sensitive data and prevent breaches.

Case studies also demonstrate the value of regular security log monitoring and response:

For example, in 2016, a major healthcare organization experienced a data breach that exposed the personal information of nearly 4 million patients. The cause of the breach was a failure to monitor security logs, which would have revealed suspicious activity and allowed the organization to take action before the breach occurred. This incident highlights the importance of regular security log monitoring and response and the potential consequences of not having it in place.

Companies can do log monitoring in a cost-effective manner by implementing the following strategies:

Automation: Automating log monitoring and analysis can significantly reduce the cost of manual monitoring and analysis. By using automated tools, companies can analyze and identify potential threats in real-time, without the need for manual intervention. This can significantly reduce labor costs and increase the effectiveness of monitoring.

Cloud-based solutions: Utilizing cloud-based log monitoring solutions can help companies reduce the costs associated with maintaining and scaling their own infrastructure. Cloud-based solutions also offer automatic updates, eliminating the need for additional costs to maintain software.

Prioritization: Companies can prioritize their log monitoring efforts by focusing on the most critical systems and applications. This can help them identify and address potential threats more efficiently, reducing costs and increasing the overall effectiveness of monitoring.

Regular testing: Regularly testing and evaluating log monitoring systems can help companies identify potential vulnerabilities and improve their overall security posture. By testing their systems, companies can also ensure that they are able to detect and respond to potential threats effectively.

Outsourcing: Companies can also consider outsourcing log monitoring and analysis to a third-party vendor. This can help them reduce costs associated with hiring and training employees, and also provide them access to specialized expertise and resources.

In addition, companies can also incorporate security ISO and NIST standards into their security log monitoring and response strategy to ensure they are doing it in a cost-effective manner while also staying compliant with the regulations. This will help them manage risks and remain protected from cyber threats.

Remember: regular security log monitoring and response is a critical component of any cybersecurity strategy. By detecting and responding to potential threats quickly and effectively, organizations can prevent significant damage and meet compliance requirements. With the increasing number of cyber threats and data breaches, it is essential for organizations to prioritize regular security log monitoring and response to protect their sensitive information and assets.

Whitepaper: Reducing Cyber Incidents by combatting hackers with Legal Revocation Strategy

Detering Hackers

Hacking is prevalent because of the asymmetrical relationship between cost and reward to the hacker. On average, a hacker reaps US$9.2 while expending little effort or resources. Meanwhile, the company suffers US$9.2M in total damages; this excludes IT and legal costs, ransoms, and reputation.

A company’s defense consists of patching known vulnerabilities while the IT Department focuses on ongoing business operations. Coupled with the prevalent business view that breaches are a cost of doing business rather than a critical threat, cyber breaches thrive in this organizational climate. 

Watchdog provides a systematic method to remove hackers’ internet access and compromised resources through legal means while preserving the evidence for legal actions. 

Data Security Matters:
With the average cyber breach costing $9.2 million dollars per incident, governments are increasingly holding corporations accountable for basic cyber security.  Fully 72% of network breaches are conducted by opportunistic hackers without a focused target. These involve lesser secured networks instead of attacking more secure networks.

By increasing network security and pushing back against hackers, an organization can decrease attacks, preserve forensic evidence, and automate government-mandated compliance reporting.

The data breach results from a multi-stage process known as a “cyber kill chain”. These may take weeks or months to complete and is dependent on the previous stages being uninterrupted.

Automated breach detection and revocation of a hacker’s resources lowers the attack’s frequency and reduces the chances of an attack becoming successful. Halting the process earlier in the kill chain generally results in lesser damages and liabilities. 

The Kill Chain (What Hackers Do)

A successful breach requires the sequentially dependent steps to be undetected and unremoved.

  1. Reconnaissance – gathering social or technical information to prepare for the attack
  1. Weaponization – creating malware to exploit the discovered backdoors
  1. Delivery – delivering the malware for future execution
  2. Exploitation – activating the previously delivered malware
  1. Installation – installing additional malware
  1. Command and Control – enabling remote control of discovered assets
  1. Action – extracting, encryption, or deleting of the critical assets

Watchdog Active Countermeasures

By imposing a noticeable cost to hackers, legal active countermeasures can deter most attempts to establish a kill chain in a network, thus preventing future breaches. Hackers avoid networks that are expensive to exploit.

Watchdog’s active countermeasures consist of:

  1. Analyzing network activity logs with our artificial intelligence to detect malicious activities. 
  2. Sending revocation requests to the ISP’s and companies where the threat activity originated from.
  3. Maintaining a database of threat activity records as time-stamped evidence for use by your legal department if it is ever needed.

Why are Active Countermeasures effective?

Implementing active countermeasures is an effective deterrent because of:

  • Decreased Breach Exposure. The majority of breach exposures are exploited because of misconfigured network settings, protocols, or unintentional interaction of different service services. Detecting low-level breaches and sending out revocation requests will undermine the hacker’s resources. This makes your network more secure and lessens a hacker’s inclination to attack a network that rapidly decreases known vulnerabilities.
  • Automated Mitigation. Alerting Internet Service Providers to possible compromises on their network will lead them to stop the rogue processes or suspend user accounts in most cases. They will effectively be assisting you in protecting your network from bad actors by denying them “safe harbor” on the networks where they launch their attacks from.
  • Focused Organizational Resources. Watchdog analyzes web activities and sends out alerts. This will allow your team to focus on the most critical attacks. Your team focuses on end-stage breaches to prevent a devastating hack.

Can’t do it? Let Watchdog do it for you!

While Offense gets the glory, it is DEFENSE that wins the Game! Beef up your defensive strategies with Watchdog.

Watchdog will take your router, firewall, and server weblogs, then analyze them with our artificial intelligence application that is monitored by a certified cybersecurity team housed in our Singapore-licensed security operations center (SOC). 

Watchdog will enhance your raw logs with other annotated data to create revocation requests that are automatically sent by e-mail to the ISP’s and companies where the threat activity originated from. 

Finally, Watchdog will archive all the log records as integrated, time-stamped evidence for your legal department.

Enroll in our free pilot to demonstrate the benefits (US$10,800 value)

For a limited time, we are offering qualified companies a FREE 30-day Trial of Watchdog cyber monitoring and alert service, valued at US$10,800 annually.

Click < HERE > to avail of this FREE Trial subscription.