Reducing Cyber Risk with SharkStriker’s Baseline Security Assessment

Reducing Cyber Risk with SharkStriker’s Baseline Security Assessment

In today’s digital age, IT security is one of the core pillars to protect an organization’s assets be it people, services, details, or any other. Attackers can breach your network via numerous methods and compromise your system at the worst times. So, organizations must aware of how well they are secured against cyber attacks and whether they are following the proper set of rules or not. Security Baseline Assessment gives you details of your organization’s security posture and helps you to secure from potential threats.

Let’s deep dive into Baseline Security Assessment and why your organization needs it.

What is the Baseline Security Assessment?

Baseline Security Assessment is a practice that reviews the state of infrastructure to determine where one’s organization stands in terms of security policies, best practices, and potential frail points.

Need Of Baseline Security Assessment?

In this technologically driven world, securing IT infrastructure is a severe and imperative issue for any organization. An increase in the access to data, information, and the evolving threat landscape has positioned even more emphasis on all organizations’ potential to diminish their risk profile and proactively count on dangers from both internal and external entities.

According to the US Telecom’s 2021 Cybersecurity Survey of Critical Infrastructure, Small and Medium-Sized Businesses are most vulnerable to cyber threat attacks in the form of cybercrime which frequently has financial or privacy consequences. SMBs are targeted by cyber threat actors in search of confidential and exclusive data about their customers, partners, and suppliers, as well as financial and payment system information and proprietary information. In addition to reputational damage, cyber security incidents can also result in productivity loss, intellectual property theft, operational disruptions, and recovery costs.

The majority of organizations are not at all sure of their overall cybersecurity posture or how well they are protected against cyber threats and security incidents. They don’t have a clear picture of how well-positioned they are, or how well they can connect their cybersecurity spending with their business goals to create a clear and well-defined cybersecurity roadmap.

We think that by raising awareness and implementing best practices in cyber security like Threat Hunting and business continuity, most cyber dangers can be mitigated. As a result, we believe we can successfully apply the 80/20 rule (i.e obtaining 80% of the benefit with 20% of the effort) to the realm of cyber security and generate tangible results. By adopting a cyber practice of Threat Hunting along with Baseline Security Assessment we can achieve this.

Imagine having a situation where you work towards finding the attacker before they find you? Wouldn’t that be convenient to protect the precious data you have at your disposal? There are often attackers that target your business’s networks, servers, applications, cloud platforms, etc., and get away with it. With the help of IOR detection, it gets easier for security professionals to learn about the system loopholes.

IOR is the process of becoming truly proactive in looking for potential vulnerabilities before an attack. Pre-breach data can be identified with the use of IORs.This helps predict the route an adversary can take to deploy an attack. With the pre-breach data available, cybersecurity experts can implement measures to prevent it and also create decoys to deceive attackers.

As a result, threat hunters don’t have to wait for an attack to put defensive measures in place. This will aid in bridging all security gaps and improving cybersecurity posture. The following are some of the IOR data to look for and monitor:

• The number of assets with known flaws
• Vulnerabilities both within and outside
• The number of times capacity requirements have been surpassed
• Availability of the system
• Detection and response time in the interim
• Availability of the network
• Dwell time

A baseline security assessment is a necessary practice that delivers data-driven insights to help steer one’s overall cybersecurity approach. It’s more about hardening the environment, teaching the organization best practices, and patching.

How does it work?

Baseline security controls are a minimum set of configurations that must be done to secure the systems. It is recommended to implement an industry-standard configuration that is broadly known and well-tested, such as CIS Benchmarks, as opposed to creating a baseline yourself. CIS benchmarks are configuration baselines and best practices for securely configuring a system. CIS controls map to many established standards and regulatory frameworks such as PCI DSS, HIPAA, ISO 27000, and NIST and help organizations improve their cyber defense capabilities.

A Baseline Security Assessment necessitates not just proven methodology, but also a thorough understanding of the security and information technology fields. When one IT and security teams lack the skills, resources, or bandwidth to manage their security assessment projects, SharkStriker’s security experts have the knowledge and expertise to fill the gaps.

Baseline Security Assessment is a part of a range of services we’ve developed to help you succeed in an ever-changing landscape.

Baseline Security Assessment from SharkStriker can help you to:

• Assess your present risk posture in comparison to industry best practices and regulatory requirements.
• Identify and quantify threats to your information assets.
• Recognize your present defense’s strengths and shortcomings.
• Provide weekly Baseline Security Summary Report as a part of service offering – It highlights the number of passed and failed checks out of total checks for each host.

Also, the top passed and failed checks are listed from CIS controls to identify the configuration weakness in hosts and the actions to fix them.

• Provide Host wise Compliance Information – It highlights the total number of hosts with their Status Check as Pass or Fail along with the Compliance percentage score.

• We also provide well-designed and highly customizable Dashboards for CIS Based Baseline Security Configurations and Host-wise Baseline Security.

The below Dashboard screenshot provides insights of compliant and noncompliant checks are present in endpoints.

The below screenshot is for the Host-wise Compliance Dashboard. It provides insights of Host-wise Baseline Security information.

What are the benefits?

• Presents your security posture.
• Focuses on the positives of your setup, not the negatives.
• Empowers you to make changes, securely.
• Delivers personalized recommendations.
• Provides peace of mind.

Conclusion

SharkStriker’s approach will guide you in achieving the best cyber security posture of your organization to ensure you are well secured. Every organization should adopt baseline security assessment as a practice to steer one’s cyber security posture.